Hidden camera video featuring a key proponent of Project 2025 and a former Trump administration official details how the project is still very much alive and running, despite insistence from others that it was winding down its work weeks ago.
Project 2025 is a manifesto organized by The Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative groups that is meant to provide a framework for how Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, should reshape the government and its agencies should he win office this fall.
Among its many “wish list” items, it calls for the rescinding of protections for LGBTQ people, the further deterioration of reproductive rights, the privatization of Medicare, the abolishment of the Department of Education and the removal of the federal civil service program in order to require employees to pledge their loyalty to the president rather than to the public institutions they serve.
The document also features ideals familiar to Christian nationalist and white supremacist movements, and at least five of its contributors have espoused the latter movement’s views in the past.
Trump himself has notable connections to the document — at least 140 individuals who helped craft Project 2025 have worked for him in the past, and in 2022, he appeared at a Heritage Foundation event where he lauded the group’s coordination of the formation of the project, stating that it was “lay[ing] the groundwork” for the future of conservatism in the U.S.
Amid negative news reports and polling showing the public’s dissatisfaction with the document, however, Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from it, claiming that they are unaffiliated with it and disavowing support for its ideas – despite the fact that Trump’s own Agenda 47 borrows many of its key points from Project 2025.
Late last month, Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, said the group would be slowing its work down ahead of the election.
New hidden camera evidence from a person deeply involved in Project 2025 suggests otherwise – the project’s work is ongoing but just not public.
Russell Vought, a former Trump administration official who served as head of the Office of Management and Budget and a co-author/contributor to Project 2025, recently sat with two men whom he thought were related to a conservative donor to speak with them about the document. The two men were really journalists for a British nonprofit called the Centre for Climate Reporting, secretly recording Vought during their discussion of Project 2025 in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. The reporters shared video of their interactions with Vought on YouTube.
In the video, Vought describes forming “shadow” agencies for a new Trump administration. He also states that, far from distancing himself from the project, Trump is “very supportive of what we do,” and that the former president has “blessed” Vought’s own organization, the far right Center for Renewing America, which is continuing Project 2025’s work behind closed doors.
Vought also explained to the journalists that his organization was drafting hundreds of executive orders and other plans of action for Trump to be ready for him in the White House right away, should he win the election and be sworn in as president on January 20.
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control” of government agencies when Trump takes office, Vought told the reporters. “We are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence from the president … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
“The relationship” with Trump “is great,” he assured the journalists later on.
Vought also said that Trump would be able to easily utilize his new powers and the reformation of the government in his image, even going so far as to suggest that he could use military force on Americans rising up against his doing so.
Trump would have the power to “maintain law and order with the military” throughout the U.S., Vought said, adding that it would be “important for him to remember and for his lawyers to affirm.”
Vought pushed Christian nationalism as an ideal he is proud to support during his meeting with the journalists, and suggested that a new Trump administration (and Republicans in general) should focus less on general “religious liberty” and “argue we are a Christian nation” more instead. Said Vought:
I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation. And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.
Vought also called for moving the country away from the idea of “multiculturalism,” stating that it would be necessary to do so in order to implement the largest deportation policy in the country’s history against immigrants currently living in the U.S.
Vought also expressed no worry about Trump trying to distance himself from Project 2025 or its ideals. Rather, he saw the moves as completely strategic for his campaign for president.
“I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious, distancing himself from a brand,” Vought said. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”
In response to Vought’s statements and views that were uncovered in the video, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Rapid Response director Alex Floyd said that it was further proof that Trump was still supportive of Project 2025.
“Behind closed doors, chief Project 2025 architect Russ Vought confirmed Donald Trump has ‘blessed’ the work of Project 2025 architects as they work on the ‘second phase’ of their dangerous MAGA blueprint,” Floyd said in a press release shared with Truthout. “Trump’s MAGA minion Russell Vought is saying out loud what Americans have seen all along: the Project 2025 agenda is the Trump-Vance ticket’s plan to gut checks and balances, ban abortion nationwide, and raise taxes for the middle class.”