On Friday, Donald Trump claimed that the Heritage Foundation’s radical Project 2025 plan—which lays out a course for uprooting American democracy as we know it, and has been elevated by Trump’s allies—has “nothing to do” with his run for president.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

How can Trump both know nothing about Project 2025 and “disagree” with it? He doesn’t say. But it’s clear that he recognizes that the plan is a growing political liability.

The public severance came two days after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts issued an ominous warning for leftists, ahead of what he called a “second American Revolution.”

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room, celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this week on presidential immunity.

“In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back,” Roberts said.

Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly frustrated by reporting on the affiliation between the campaign and Project 2025’s agenda, despite their apparent linkage, and the program’s intention of serving as the former president’s wish list if and when he returns to office next year.

Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy and has been boosted by key allies, including former advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. Trump’s own super PACs have run ads highlighting Project 2025’s policy goals. And as much as Trump wants to distance himself from the conservative apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November. But they may have more on the way—in November, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

“Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state,” Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, told Axios at the time.

Regardless, senior Trump advisers have warned news outlets against reporting on the connections. In statements to both Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita pointed to Agenda47 as the official platform of the Trump campaign, noting that “unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”

President Donald Trump is continuing to insist that he never called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” after a fact-checking site declared that his remarks from 2017 were misconstrued.

The presumptive Republican nominee posted on Truth Social Friday, sharing pieces of a report from the New York Post about Snopes, which had recently fact-checked Trump’s infamous defense of rallygoers at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Earlier this month, Snopes issued a controversial “false” rating to the claim that Trump called white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the rally “very fine people.” Afterward, Trump claimed he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis and white-supremacists, and said that they ought to be “condemned totally.”

Snopes deliberated that Trump’s full statement—“very fine people on both sides”—was referring to all of the attendees at the neo-Nazi rally, rather than a specific group of neo-Nazis at the rally. A small, but important difference, especially for Trump supporters who have been claiming for years that the former president was simply misunderstood.

During CNN’s first presidential debate last week, President Joe Biden referenced Trump’s infamous line as his rationale for running for president in 2020.

“I said I wasn’t going to run again until I saw it happen in Charlottesville, Virginia,” said Biden.

“People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torches, torches and singing the same antisemitic bile they sang when back in Germany.… And the young woman got killed. I spoke to the mother. And they asked him, what do you think of those people? … And he said I think there’s fine people on both sides.”

Trump rejected Biden’s story. “He didn’t run because of Charlottesville; he ran because it was his last chance,” Trump said. “He made up the Charlottesville story, and you’ll see it debunked all over the place.” Trump insisted that this was the consensus among “every reasonable anchor,” and added that “just the other day it came out it was fully debunked,” likely referencing the Snopes rating.

Still, Biden urged, “It happened.” And he’s right.

Many were horrified by Trump’s failure to adequately condemn the participants of the Unite the Right rally, which killed three people. Snopes’s determination, which has emerged seven years after Trump’s original statement, seems to be differentiating between neo-Nazi supremacists and people who simply chose to attend a neo-Nazi rally—a dubious fact-check at best. The updated Snopes rating also failed to acknowledge Trump’s penchant for doublespeak, and the power of his more nuanced rhetoric, which when combined with his fascistic rhetoric, has garnered him the support of white supremacists across the country.

During an appearance on Philadelphia-based WURD Radio broadcast Thursday morning, Biden appeared to refer to himself as the “first Black woman” to serve in the White House.

“By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president,........

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