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      Why Trump Can’t Shake Project 2025

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      In 2024, the deep state that defeats Donald Trump might be his own.That, after all, is what Project 2025 was actually meant to be. The 900-page tome that Democrats hoist in front of the cameras is a festival of policy options, detailed down to the sub-agency level. But options for whom? Not for Trump himself. Even the most wonkish of presidents can only engage on a small fraction of what the executive branch does. And Donald Trump was not the most wonkish of presidents. When he said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and has no intention of doing so, I believed him.But Project 2025 — and much else like it that has gotten less press — is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own. The presidency is not one man, Diet Coke in hand, Fox & Friends on TV, barking orders. It’s 4,000-or-so political appointees — nearer to 50,000 if Trump again uses Schedule F powers to strip civil-service protections from vast swaths of the federal government — trying to do what they think the president wants them to do or what they think needs to be done. They do that by setting policy for the more than two million civilian employees of the federal government and by writing regulations that the rest of society must follow.Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem. They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled. Part of this reflected Trump’s erratic leadership style and the constant conflict between the warring factions inside his White House: the traditional Republicans clustered around Mike Pence and Reince Priebus; the MAGA types led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller; the foreign policy establishment that spoke through H.R. McMaster and Nikki Haley; the corporatists led by Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. Read any book on the Trump presidency, and you will be buried in examples of Trump’s top appointees trying to foil each other — and him.But some of it reflected a federal bureaucracy that resisted Trump and the people he appointed. In a presentation at the 2024 National Conservatism conference in Washington, Katy Talento, who oversaw health care policy on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, described the obstacles she faced:There’s like a handful of political appointees at an agency with hundreds of thousands of employees and maybe one or two of those appointees is sufficiently experienced to write regulations. They can’t seek any help from experienced but hostile bureaucrats that surround them, or those drafts get leaked, or bad advice gets provided, and poison pills get put into regs, drafts get slowed down or scuttled all together. So this dramatically limits the productivity potential of a Republican administration.This is the problem groups like Project 2025 set out to solve. Behind the policy playbook sits a database of around 20,000 applicants ready to be part of the next Trump administration. And that database is still growing. There is an online portal that, even now, invites applicants to apply for inclusion in “the Presidential Personnel Database.” It goes on to say that “with the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done.“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” writes Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, in one of its chapters. Victory will require the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance to Appear With Tucker Carlson, Who Amplified False Holocaust Claims

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      Not long ago, candidates running for national office spent much of the general election distancing themselves from the fringes of their parties.But on Saturday, Senator JD Vance of Ohio will share a stage with someone on the fringes of his.Mr. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is scheduled to appear in Hershey, Pa., as the special guest of the “Tucker Carlson Live” show, just weeks after Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, praised and aired the views of Darryl Cooper, who falsely claimed that the Holocaust was not an intentional act of genocide.Mr. Carlson described Mr. Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” In Mr. Carlson’s interview with him, which was posted on social media this month, Mr. Cooper falsely claimed that the Nazis’ systematic killing of European Jews was an accident of history carried out by a German military overwhelmed with prisoners of war — not an act of premeditated genocide. In fact, the Nazis’ killing of almost six million Jews was meticulously planned and documented.Mr. Cooper also called Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, “the chief villain of the Second World War” for declaring war on Germany after the Nazis invaded Poland.Mr. Carlson’s promotion of Mr. Cooper drew criticism from the Biden White House and from some conservatives.A Vance campaign spokesman said this month that Mr. Vance did not share the views of Mr. Cooper but “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.”Mr. Vance has defended his decision to keep his interview with Mr. Carlson, saying that Republicans believe in free speech and debate. “Tucker Carlson is not affiliated with the campaign, so I don’t think what Tucker Carlson does is a distraction or is not,” Mr. Vance said this month. “He’s going to do what he wants to do, and we can disagree or agree with the viewpoints.”Tickets for the events ranged from $35 for upper-level seats to $1,600 for a “V.I.P. Meet and Greet Experience” that included access to a reception with Mr. Vance, a photo with Mr. Carlson and a seat in the first five rows.Mr. Carlson is in the midst of his first live tour, a national, monthlong run of shows with some of the most well-known and controversial figures in conservative politics. His guests have included Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point Action, and media personalities such as Glenn Beck and Dan Bongino.Later this month, Mr. Carlson will be joined by Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who has been ordered to pay over $1.4 billion in defamation damages to the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012; Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; and Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest child and the host of the podcast “Triggered.” More

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      With Robinson Candidacy, North Carolina Republicans Fear Damage to Years of Gains

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      Explosive posts by the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, are sending waves of anxiety through a state party that has long been tactical and disciplined.The great Republican wave that swept the South starting in the late 20th Century — the very wave that Lyndon Johnson predicted after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 — came relatively late to North Carolina. But when it finally hit in 2013, with Republicans controlling both the legislature and the governor’s mansion for the first time since Reconstruction, it did so with breathtaking force. Led by a group of savvy, tactically skilled state lawmakers, North Carolina Republicans set out to undo decades of center-left policy enshrined by Democrats, and to remake the rules of the political game in their favor.They engaged in gerrymandering that ensured the party a near-lock on the state legislature and lopsided control of the state’s House delegation in Congress. They paved the way for a conservative state Supreme Court that upheld a strict voter ID law. And after gaining a veto-proof majority last year, they banned most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.And while Republicans lost the governorship in 2016, they had harbored hope of winning full control of state government again this year, bringing North Carolina in alignment with most other Southern states.Then came Mark Robinson.Long before this week, when CNN reported that Mr. Robinson had called himself a “black NAZI!,” discussed his pornography habits and praised slavery in an adult online forum, the bellicose Republican nominee for governor (and current lieutenant governor) was polling poorly against his Democratic rival, Josh Stein.But now more than ever, Mr. Robinson, with his antisemitic and anti-gay rhetoric and performative, polarizing brand of politics, is sending waves of anxiety through the state party.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At a Key Moment in Trump’s Campaign, a Social-Media Instigator Is at His Side

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      The former president’s decision to elevate Laura Loomer, a far-right activist known for racist and homophobic posts online, has stunned even some Trump allies.Before Donald J. Trump traveled to Philadelphia for this week’s debate, he invited one of the internet’s most polarizing figures along for the ride.Laura Loomer was backstage with the Trump entourage while Mr. Trump squared off against Vice President Kamala Harris. She was in the spin room with the former president immediately afterward. And the next day, she flew with him to New York City and Shanksville, Pa., to commemorate the anniversary of Sept. 11.A far-right activist known for her endless stream of sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Muslim and occasionally antisemitic social media posts and public stunts, Ms. Loomer has made a name for herself over the past decade by unabashedly claiming 9/11 was “an inside job,” calling Islam “a cancer,” accusing Ron DeSantis’s wife of exaggerating breast cancer and claiming that President Biden was behind the attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump in July.Just two days before the debate, Ms. Loomer, 31, posted a racist joke about the vice president, whose mother was Indian American. Ms. Loomer wrote on X that if Ms. Harris won the election, the White House would “smell like curry.”For many observers, including some of Mr. Trump’s most important allies, the Republican presidential nominee’s choice at a critical moment of the campaign to platform a social-media instigator, albeit one with 1.3 million followers on X, was stunning.“The history of this person is just really toxic,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally, told a reporter for HuffPost on Thursday. “I don’t think it’s helpful at all.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      MAGA Is Nothing Without Trump

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      I spent the Labor Day weekend in Chicago, America’s greatest summer city. Sunday afternoon in particular was glorious. The temperatures were moderate, the skies were clear and the tourist sections of the city were teeming with happy Pearl Jam fans who’d just attended Saturday’s concert at Wrigley Field. My wife and I took our grandchildren to Navy Pier to visit the Chicago Children’s Museum, and as we walked back toward Michigan Avenue we saw the same sight we see every time we visit Chicago — an impressive, towering skyscraper with the name “Trump” emblazoned in immense letters across the building’s facade.I was reminded once again that Donald Trump is a singular figure in American politics. There is no one like him, and that means that no one can replace him. While it’s always perilous to make predictions about American politics — or anything else about the future — here’s one that I’m almost certain is correct: If Donald Trump loses in 2024, MAGA will fade. He is the irreplaceable key to its success.Last month, I wrote a column that generated intense blowback on the right because I argued that as a pro-life conservative I am voting for Kamala Harris. That was controversial enough, but what really seemed to make people angry was one of my stated motivations: that I am voting for Harris to try to save conservatism from MAGA. Defeating Trump, I said, gives conservative Americans a chance to “build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.”The MAGA response was, in essence, you’re fooling yourself. Trump or no Trump, we own the party now.In fact, this argument is one way that MAGA keeps other Republicans in line. Like it or not, they say, this is the modern Republican Party. You can choose it, or you can choose the Democrats, but don’t think for a moment that a different party is possible.But is that correct? We’re nine years into the Trump era of the Republican Party, and we can see a different reality: attempts to mimic Trump succeed in Republican primaries and deep red jurisdictions, but they fail in swing states and purple districts. Trump is MAGA’s most popular figure, and if he loses, then MAGA has nowhere to go but down.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny

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      Former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a convention of the Moms for Liberty in Washington.It didn’t look like a typical Trump rally.There were trays of mini-cupcakes and macarons. There were squadrons of helicopter moms buzzed off white wine. The excited women were wandering around the basement of a Marriott in downtown Washington, waiting for former President Donald J. Trump to show.It was the Joyful Warriors summit thrown by a bunch of agitated parents known as the Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group that was founded during the Covid pandemic. The group, which has more than 130,000 members across the country, has become quite influential in Republican politics.Their parental preoccupations were made apparent by the programming and pamphleteering on display. There were panels called “What Does It Mean to Abolish the Department of Education?” and “Moms Know Best: Protecting Kids from Secret Gender Transitions in Schools.” There was literature on child sex trafficking and on the damage wrought by Covid-era school closures, and there were copies of a book titled “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors Into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine.”The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”) — but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women.The attendees of the summit are among the voters whom Mr. Trump needs to win over.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters“These are women that have largely never been political,” Tiffany Justice, the group’s co-founder, said. “They’re people who, in the busiest time of their lives, realized that they needed to get involved in politics.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump to Speak at Moms for Liberty Convention

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      Last year, the former president told the group it was time to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts” in education. Does that message still resonate with voters?Former President Donald J. Trump is set to speak Friday evening to a gathering of Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group whose priorities mirror much of his own education platform.Like Mr. Trump, they have called for stricter classroom discipline and vouchers for private school tuition and home-schooling costs. They want to ban certain books and cut funding to schools that embrace progressive ideas on gender and race, while slimming down or even closing the federal Department of Education.But as his presidential campaign leans heavily on cultural divides over gender, parenting and education, there have been signs of voter weariness, and questions over whether social issues in schools are still energizing voters.“Is this a wave that’s on the decline?” asked Julie Marsh, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied school board elections. “We’re perhaps seeing signs of parents being turned off by some of this.”Mr. Trump’s appearance in Washington, D.C., is his second time speaking at the annual convention of Moms for Liberty, which was founded in 2021. He has embraced the group’s rhetoric, telling convention attendees last year that he would “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”In the past several months, Mr. Trump has floated provocative ideas like allowing parents to elect principals and creating an alternative credentialing body for teachers who embrace “patriotic values.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Saving Conservatism From Trumpism

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      More from our inbox:The Candidates’ Foreign ExperienceA Loss of Diversity in Network NewsProtecting School LibrariesIndependent Voters Thalassa Raasch for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How to Save Conservatism From Itself,” by David French (column, Aug. 12):I commend Mr. French for declaring his intention to vote for Kamala Harris despite his pro-life convictions. And although I do not share his anti-abortion stance, I respect his beliefs.However, in my view Mr. French is mistaken to think that if Donald Trump is defeated in November, there is hope for a conservatism that demonstrates real compassion.Mr. Trump has not become the standard-bearer of the Republican Party against its will; on the contrary, he has articulated (in his most inarticulate way) the fanaticism of today’s conservative movement in America.Absolutism in regard to abortion, gun ownership, immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, the slashing of benefits for the impoverished — these are the bedrock beliefs of today’s conservative movement, with or without Donald Trump. Who are the compassionate, compromise-seeking Republican leaders waiting in the wings to command a majority of voters once Mr. Trump somehow exits the stage?Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of where the Republican Party finds itself today. Until honorable, conservative-minded people like Mr. French recognize this, it seems impossible to me that the Republican Party can rise from its ashes.Barth LandorChicagoTo the Editor:I don’t think one man’s vote will “save conservatism from itself,” but every vote counts, so I’m sure Kamala Harris will appreciate David French’s.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More