When the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise in April 2023, the organization and its allies were fired up and optimistic. Feeling brash, even. Donald Trump was unbowed, and MAGA unrepentant. Indictments, trials, convictions rolled off him like a drop of water on a NASCAR hot rod windshield at Pocono Raceway in July. So when the foundation released the 920-page policy book for his next administration, a shocking road map to the Republic of Gilead, it was with a powerful sense of own-the-libs glee. Progressives could hardly believe their eyes at all the authoritarian and extremist Easter eggs. Mass deportations? Check. Shove a Christian God into schools and workplaces? Check. Weaponize the DOJ for Trump? Check. Fire civil servants en masse and replace them with vetted MAGAs? Check. Deregulate polluters, abandon worker safety rules, and drill baby drill? Check. Ban references to gender and rescind climate policies throughout the government? Check. Check, check, and check on every aspect of their worst nightmare about the coming autocracy.

In its audacity, the document should have appealed to the man they hoped would implement it. Surely the Big Guy would be enjoying his bath in libtard tears and fears. So at first, Heritage didn’t pay too much attention to the campaign’s initial claims that Trump had never authorized or signed off on the policy proposal to transform America into a quasi-autocracy built on Christian nationalism. That was just Trump being Trump, resenting anyone else taking credit for anything. Wink wink, sure Don, OK.

But then a funny thing happened, something Heritage president Kevin Roberts, who wears Lucchese cowboy boots and drives around in a black diesel Ford F-150 pickup truck (the vehicle of choice for “Y’all Qaeda” MAGA activists), surely didn’t anticipate. As progressive groups divided up the document, studied it, and mustered very specific warnings, the crazy neo-fascism that is the “brand” of Project 2025 memed its way into the national consciousness. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, people who had never read it, who would never read it, were aware of its malign intent. The very name “Project 2025” was turned into a communications death star, as snippets appeared on TikTok, and details emerged from movie stars’ mouths. The jokes and memes and tweets reached critical mass.

By mid-July, the Trump campaign was on the run. Campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita was saying it is “complete and utter bullshit” for “any reporter to suggest those individuals or policies will be appointed or adopted in a second Trump administration,” according to Politico.

Apparently no one bought that, so he and co-campaign manager Susie Wiles fired off a terse—and overtly threatening—message almost two weeks later: “President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way. Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.”

Shortly before that July 30 missive, things did not “end well” for project director Paul Dans, who resigned. Roberts announced that he would forthwith be handling the project.

The speed with which this multimillion-dollar policy project—backed by a gargantuan board of advisers from most of the biggest, richest right-wing activist groups—went from badge of honor and résumé plum for future administration job seekers to P.R. poison was astonishing and will surely be case-studied in political communications and marketing classes for years to come.

Trump has continued to distance himself from the project, on Truth Social and in interviews. But it’s going to be hard for him to convincingly erase the fact that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in drafting Project 2025, according to CNN. More than half of the people listed as authors, editors, and contributors to the document worked in Trumpworld.

To this end, Kamala HQ quickly unearthed and shared on X a video of Trump praising Heritage and its work in a Florida speech on April 21, 2022: “We have shown the power of our winning formula, working closely with many of the great people at Heritage.… We’ve worked with you a lot…. They’re gonna work on some other things that are going to be very exciting…. I think maybe the most exciting of all.”

Republicans and MAGA world activists rushed to ape Trump’s line and downplay Project 2025. “I love Kevin Roberts,” Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, a group that is a Project 2025 advisory board member, told NBC. “I love Heritage, I think they do phenomenal work. And it’s kind of like you have two siblings in a fight and you don’t know who to side with. But at the end of the day, Trump has to have his own platform, his own policy agenda.”

The risk here—and the movie rank-and-file liberals and Democrats have seen all too many times—is that, because of these disavowals, Democrats will just let the whole thing drop. But happily so far, that seems not to be the case. The progressive and civil society organizations that spent months poring over the threats to liberal democracy in the document are in wide agreement that tying Trump to Project 2025 will remain a powerful, winning strategy. “They can run but they can’t hide from the extremism in this plan, but also in what we saw in the prior administration,” said Skye Perryman, president of the legal consortium Democracy Forward, which took the Trump administration to court on many of the issues in the project, on MSNBC’s Deadline podcast. “I haven’t seen anyone in the MAGA base come out and distance themselves from those actual policy proposals even if they’re trying to run from the brand of Project 2025.”

Mike Zamore, national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “It doesn’t matter whose name is on the website; Project 2025 is the Trump-Vance agenda crafted by Trump administration officials as their playbook if they get back in power, and we’ll continue preparing to stop it at every turn.”

Colin Seeberger, senior adviser for communications at the Center for American Progress Fund, accused the Trump campaign of wanting to “Etch a Sketch Project 2025,” but “try as they may to put lipstick on a pig, they’re still stuck with one, and it stinks to high heaven.”

Whether these groups succeed in keeping attention on the extremism and unpopular policies in Project 2025—and lashing Trump to the document—could well be the difference between a President Trump or a President Kamala Harris for the next four years.

If the project shocked the left and Never Trumpers by its aggression and its insistence on notions longed for but previously off the table for discussion in Washington, that was very much by design. The entirety of Project 2025—which includes not only the 920-page Mandate for Leadership book, but also a personnel database and training for potential employees, and a still-secret “playbook” for the first 180 days of Trump transition—is a shock and awe strategy, intended to situate Heritage as a true MAGA player and to signal to the Big Man that it’s not a suspect hive of loafered lobbyists and D.C. insiders born and bred in the swamp.

Its 30 chapters propose to install a proto-fascist dystopia: concentrate power in the executive, weaponize the Department of Justice to go after Trump’s enemies, further........

© New Republic