Yes, Paul Dans, the architect of The Heritage Foundation’s far-right playbook for a new Trump administration, stepped down in July amid criticism from Donald Trump and his campaign about Project 2025. But make no mistake, it wasn’t because the Republican presidential nominee doesn’t agree with the goals laid out in the nearly 1,000-page document. Like most Trump strategies, this one is meant to deflect attention from other issues.
The Trump campaign recognized the bad press surrounding Project 2025 was alienating suburban women and independent voters. They also recognized that Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris was going to cite the conservative plan every chance she got.
These are all campaign strategies, and probably smart ones. But no one should confuse campaigning with governing.
Nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations from The Heritage Foundation’s “2016 Mandate for Leadership: A Comprehensive Policy Agenda for a New Administration” were instituted by the Trump administration. If past is prologue, a more experienced, more strategic 2025 Trump administration will wait until it secures electoral victory before publicly embracing the far-right policies laid out in Project 2025.
And what will those policies deliver? A MAGA America. Indeed, any conviction that Project 2025 will somehow fade into the background, either now or if Trump takes office in January, is tempered by the fact that the proposals represent Trump’s stated vision for America. So many of the contributors to Project 2025, after all, have enjoyed Trump’s ear for almost a decade.
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“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is garnering enormous attention, and for good reason: It’s the blueprint for the next Trump administration. It outlines an agenda centered on “restoring the American family,” “dismantling the administrative state,” “defending our nation’s sovereignty,” and “securing our God-given individual rights.” It envisions a president with unprecedented authority. It favors the controversial “unitary executive theory” where the president operates the levers of power, can remove civil servants at will, can require the loyalty of even independent regulatory agencies, and stands head and shoulders above the other branches of the federal government. America is in crisis, Heritage’s president Kevin Roberts insisted, and the path forward requires a clear road map to “institutionalize Trumpism.” Project 2025 is that road map.
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The problem is that Project 2025 ignores the Constitution. Yes, it’s chock-full of references to the text and platitudes to the Constitution’s many virtues. But it disregards the main feature of a constitutional republic, a government of limited authority empowered through the consent of the whole people. The very purpose of the Constitution is to protect those who find themselves with little or no voice in an increasingly noisy political world: to prevent a tyranny of the majority over the minority. But the MAGA America endorsed by Trump and reflected in Project 2025 imagines something very different: a white, Christian, heteronormative, paternalistic America. The Heritage Foundation and the more than 110 conservative groups that collaborated on Project 2025 wrote passionately of freedom, but it is freedom for some.
If actualized, Project 2025 envisions a nation where abortion is universally outlawed, free exercise of religion is enjoyed only by certain worshippers, procedural safeguards for the accused are relaxed, previously protected categories of speech are reconsidered, diversity initiatives are forbidden, environmentally conscious programs are shuttered, same-sex couples are threatened, drag shows are banned, and true stories of our racist past are ignored. It’s not a pretty place for the tens of millions of citizens whose identities are affected, or for the tens of millions more who align with these voiceless neighbors.
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In the end, Roberts wrote, “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like.”
Not quite. The Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do what we want as long as the doing doesn’t violate the law. It grants each of us the liberty to see ourselves as different from mainstream America, as unique in identity, conviction, and belief. It grants each of us the liberty to expect dignity and to be taken seriously no matter where our journey began. It grants each of us the liberty to speak freely and worship God in almost any way we choose — or not at all. And it grants each of us the liberty to live our lives authentically and not by the dictates of any liberal or conservative norm. That’s not wokeness; that’s embedded in the Constitution.
America’s Constitution is unique in human history. It is rightly revered because it supports a vision of America that is mostly tolerant, principally democratic, and ferociously pluralist. The country’s shared narrative has been one of expanding the definition of citizen. Our march toward broad inclusion and genuine equality has been slow and uneven. But it has been forward. Project 2025 endeavors to stall the progress of that march and to exclude so many from the promise of American freedom.
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If Trumpism has taught us anything, it is that Project 2025 is just the next phase of MAGA’s radical remaking of America.
Beau Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. chair in government at Skidmore College.
