This week, delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) officially voted to adopt their new platform. Looming large behind the formal adoption of the party’s platform is Project 2025, a “governing agenda” that, by its own description, seeks to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left.” Press coverage of Project 2025 has ramped up considerably over the last few months, as has anxiety outside of the Republican Party about what the agenda could mean for the future of the country. Media attention has grown to such a fever pitch in recent weeks that Donald Trump felt obligated to distance himself, professing to have “no idea” who was behind the initiative. While a cursory look at the authors behind the policy guide easily gives the lie to Trump’s claim, it is less clear at first glance what the relationship between Project 2025 and the official RNC platform is. A closer examination reveals that whatever daylight once existed between the more clinical, stuffy conservatism of the inside-the-Beltway class and Trump’s red meat populism has all but evaporated in the 2024 Republican Party platform.

The tenets of Project 2025 are concretized in the Heritage Foundation’s current version of the Mandate for Leadership, now in its ninth edition. The Mandate has been published by the Heritage Foundation — arguably the most prominent conservative think tank in the U.S. — since the early days of the Reagan administration. These books, which often run for hundreds of pages, are essentially right-wing policy wish lists, fleshed out with statistics, talking points and history lessons. The books have a long track record of providing the basis for policy in various Republican administrations. As far back as the Reagan presidency, in fact, authors who had worked to craft the first edition of the Mandate for Leadership were subsequently hired to work directly under Reagan, establishing a trend that continues in Republican politics to this day. The Mandate for Leadership series is also noted for its extreme specificity and for providing an extraordinarily detailed playbook that incoming Republican administrations can begin to use immediately to execute right-wing policy objectives.

In this sense, Trump’s adoption of the recommendations in the Project 2025 book would not represent much of a departure from decades of Republican policy making. What is different, though, is the extent to which Trump’s particular brand of politics has informed the text of Project 2025, which has in turn refined and operationalized Trump’s nativist, autocratic and........

© Truthout