Project 2025

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      Project 2025 started a half century ago. A Trump win could solidify it forever | David Sirota

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      You can be forgiven for thinking Vice-President Kamala Harris’s first attack ad against Donald Trump seems a little far-fetched. Launched this week, the television spot has all the hallmarks of a YouTube video promoting an internet conspiracy theory. There’s the obligatory scary music and the baritone narrator warning about a mysterious manifesto with the kind of cartoonish name that a Bond villain would label his blueprint for global conquest: Project 2025.And yet, this isn’t a Dr Evil send-up: Project 2025 is very real, it is absolutely Trump’s agenda and it wasn’t some slapdash screed that came out of nowhere. It is the culmination of the 50-year plot that our reporters at the Lever have uncovered in our new audio series Master Plan – a scheme first envisioned by the US supreme court justice who created the foundation for Citizens United and the modern era of corporate politics.Project 2025 touts itself as “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025” – a grandiose and self-important billing, but no overstatement. The 922-page manifesto is a plug-and-play agenda of detailed policies designed to immediately empower the conservative movement, billionaires and Republican donors the moment Trump is sworn in for a second term.Highlights include plans to kill off climate regulations; eviscerate pollution laws; terminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protects Americans from Wall Street scams; raise taxes on the middle class to finance billionaire and corporate tax cuts; empower the White House to replace civil servants with ideological loyalists; and limit the government’s authority to enforce campaign finance laws designed to deter pay-to-play corruption.The blueprint’s provenance means that it isn’t some fanciful pie-in-the-sky wishlist – it is a meticulously constructed action plan designed to be implemented, just as an earlier version of it was in Trump’s first term.Project 2025 was built with the involvement of at least 140 former Trump administration officials, it is endorsed by a constellation of oligarch-funded conservative groups, and it is published by the powerful Heritage Foundation, which Trump himself lauded as “a great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America”.This connection to the Heritage Foundation isn’t incidental. It tells us that conservatives see a Trump presidency as the final stage of their grand half-century scheme to destroy the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society – a scheme first outlined a half-century ago.Heritage was originally launched in the early 1970s with seed funding from the beer magnate Joseph Coors. He told a historian that his political activism at the time was specifically “stirred” by a 1971 memo authored by the soon-to-be supreme court justice Lewis Powell. That memo written for the US Chamber of Commerce implored corporations and oligarchs to be “far more aggressive” in influencing the political system, which he feared was becoming far too responsive to popular demands for the regulation of business.“It is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system – at all levels and at every opportunity – be far more aggressive than in the past,” wrote Powell, who would soon after author a landmark supreme court ruling giving corporations new rights to spend money influencing elections. “There should be not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.”According to documents unearthed in Master Plan, the chamber established a taskforce on the Powell memorandum composed of executives from some of the country’s most powerful corporations including General Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Amway and United States Steel.At a series of secret meetings in the 1970s, those powerbrokers formulated ways corporate groups could build out their political, legal and communications apparatus. The resulting political infrastructure – conservative thinktanks, law firms and advocacy groups – aimed to weaken campaign finance laws so that corporations could wield more power, and then use that power to tilt the courts and legislative systems in their favor.With Powell’s memo inspiring Coors’s lavish funding, Heritage carved out a special role for itself in all this nascent organizing: it focused intently on public policy.“Around the vortex of Heritage have spun projects, individuals and organizations devoted to Coors’ ambition to rescue the United States from the gloom and despair he believes it to be in,” the Washington Post reported in 1975. “Weyrich and Coors agree that the liberalizing trend must be halted or the United States will become, in effect, another version of godless communism.”In a White House memo just before that story was published, President Gerald Ford’s deputy chief of staff, Dick Cheney, told his boss, Donald Rumsfeld: “Coors may have problems by using this tax exempt foundation to support political activities.”But as the Powell memo movement’s conservative legal groups secured supreme court victories gutting campaign finance laws and ushering in the era of dark money, such groups faced little scrutiny in how they blurred the legal distinction between dispassionate charity and political machine.Heritage was most certainly the latter, and within a few years of its launch, it was focused on influencing presidential administrations with the original version of Project 2025 – Mandate for Leadership, described in the press at the time as “a blueprint for grabbing the government by its frayed New Deal lapels and shaking out 48 years of liberal policy”.“Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981 – the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency,” Heritage gushes in the foreword of Project 2025, which is officially the ninth installment of the Mandate for Leadership series. “By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy.”Underscoring that success, Reagan delivered a speech at Heritage lauding “the importance of the Heritage Foundation, the remarkable work of Ed Feulner, Joe and Holly Coors [and] so many of you in this room in bringing to Washington the political revolution.”Fast forward through the neoliberal rampage of tax cuts and deregulation that defined Reagan’s term and three more Republican presidencies, and the question now is: would that same political revolution inspired by the Powell memo’s master plan continue if Trump wins again?The recent past offers clues: during the first year of Trump’s first term, Heritage boasted that two-thirds of its 2016 Mandate for Leadership recommendations were championed by the Republican president.Will Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s agenda find the same receptive audience in a second Trump administration? Or should we trust Trump when now – under assault by Harris’s criticism – he insists he doesn’t even know what Project 2025 is?The answer to that can be found in the words of Trump’s own running mate.“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill,” wrote the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. “It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign speechwriter More

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      Project 2025: Democrats warn convention extreme plan is no joke

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      The Saturday Night Live cast member Kenan Thompson carted out a massive version of the Project 2025 book onto the main stage at the Democratic national convention on Wednesday night. Despite the comedian’s involvement with the prop, which has been used throughout the convention, Democrats want voters to know that the conservative manifesto for a second Trump administration is no joke.Democrats have sprinkled the words “Project 2025” into speech after speech for months, culminating in the big book’s spot on the big stage – a sign of the toxicity that the mere mention of the project has with voters of multiple political persuasions.The project would dismantle much of what Democrats have done in the federal government under Joe Biden’s administration. The 900-plus-page policy outline, the Mandate for Leadership, is just one piece of the plan, which also involves assembling a roster of potential political appointees for jobs if Donald Trump wins, training those allies on how it thinks the government should work and coming up with a playbook to swiftly put those plans into place if Trump wins in November.A poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst released earlier this month showed that more than half of respondents had heard of Project 2025, and the majority of those surveyed did not agree with many of its aims.Trump and his campaign have worked to distance the candidate from the project, which was put together by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation. But many of the authors and groups behind the project have Trump ties, and the policy goals often align with things Trump has said he intends to do if he wins again. Trump’s team cheered when a Project 2025 leader announced he was stepping down from his role after pressure from the campaign.After the Minnesota governor and vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, mentioned Project 2025 in his speech on Wednesday night, Trump called into Fox & Friends on Thursday morning to say it was “disgraceful” that Democrats keep tying him to it.“They know I have nothing to do with it,” he said. “I had no idea what it was. A group of people got together, they drew up some conservative values, very conservative values, and in some cases perhaps they went over the line, perhaps they didn’t, but I have no idea what Project 25 is.”Each night at the convention, an elected official has lugged the book back on to the stage to cite an exact page number for a policy that should concern Democrats. The Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow talked about plans to weaponize the Department of Justice. The Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta talked about its plans to stop Medicare from negotiating drug prices. The Colorado governor, Jared Polis, pointed to plans to limit abortions and promote “traditional” families.“Usually Republicans want to ban books but now they’re trying to shove this down our throats,” Kenyatta said.The bit with SNL’s Thompson involved video appearances by a handful of Democrats from around the country who would be affected by policy changes the project suggests, including a teacher, a federal employee and a doctor.“What do you do for a living?” Thompson asks an OB-GYN. “An OB-GYN that delivers babies? Uh-oh.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s bad news, isn’t it?” the OB-GYN responds.“It sure is. On page 459, Project 2025 resurrects a law from the 1800s called the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide and throw healthcare providers in jail,” Thompson replies.The speakers, including Thompson, reference a webpage put up by the Harris campaign to highlight parts of the project that are most egregious for Democrats.“Just remember, everything that we just talked about is very real. It is in this book,” Thompson said. “You can stop it from ever happening by electing Kamala Harris as the president of the United States.” More

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      Free meals v hungry children: is this the school lunch election? | Marcus Weaver-Hightower

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      The humble school meal is having a moment. With the nomination of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as Kamala Harris’s running mate, many voters and pundits are suddenly talking about school meals. And that’s good, because the stakes are high for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs since the campaigns and their parties have very different records and plans.Since Walz became the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, an image of him has frequently circulated. In the photograph, he’s surrounded by smiling children hugging him after he signed a 2023 bill making school meals universally free for all Minnesota children. His was the fourth state to commit to feeding all children at school; now nine states have done so, and more are considering similar measures. No more forms to fill out to prove your income, which busy parents can forget or that get crumpled in a backpack. No more penalizing children when their parents fall behind on lunch accounts. Every kid gets fed, powering them up for their day’s work learning and growing.By most measures, the Minnesota program has been successful and popular. Participation in the meals program soared, increasing 15% at lunch and 37% at breakfast compared with the previous year. Due to those increases, the economies of scale improved, and some districts have been able to invest more in scratch cooking with ingredients from local farmers. It turns out that relieving cafeteria staff of the duty to go after parents who fall behind on lunch payments leaves them more time to focus on food quality.Minnesota’s registered voters are overwhelmingly happy with the program, too. A KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showed that 72% agreed with the legislation, including 90% of liberals and 57% of conservatives. Even 59% of Trump voters in 2020 agreed. In online forums, Minnesota commenters tend to be remarkably supportive of feeding all children, even if they don’t have any themselves or if they think the food could be better. Parents rave about the convenience and savings.Minnesota’s success isn’t an outlier, but a consistent feature of free meals for all. A 2022 study of the national Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which provides universally free meals nationwide in districts that have a poverty rate of 25% or more, found that more kids eat when the meal is free. That’s true even among kids who were already eligible for free or reduced-price meals, suggesting that stigma is keeping many from accepting assistance. Even more helpful, families with children in schools that provide meals tend to spend less at the grocery store while still improving the quality of their diets. And, perhaps most important, research consistently shows that school meals improve students’ academic performance, behavior and health outcomes.It’s not assured that a Harris-Walz administration would push such legislation nationally. Harris has mentioned school meal programs at least twice, once in a 2017 Facebook post deploring lunch shaming and recently on X, when she touted Walz’s school lunch program as a sign of support for the middle class. But if the Democratic ticket does put the issue on its platform or list of priorities, school meals would at least have a knowledgable champion in Walz. He has seen it work on the ground, and he knows the benefits that it brings to the vast majority of families with children in his state.Meanwhile, Minnesota Republican lawmakers have criticized the free meals program. State representative Kristin Robbins’s complaint is typical: “All the low-income students who need – and we want to provide, make sure no one goes hungry – they were getting [meals] through the free and reduced lunch program. This [new legislation] gave free lunch to all the wealthy families … Is that really a priority?” Walz’s reply to this argument dripped with irony: “Isn’t that rich? Our Republican colleagues were concerned this would be a tax cut for the wealthiest.” The year before, the Minnesota GOP proposed a $3.5bn tax cut that largely would have benefited the wealthiest 20%. Feeding all the state’s schoolchildren, even after going over budget because it was so popular, costs only about one-seventh of that.Republicans at the national level, too, disdain expanding access to free meals and improving nutrition standards. In March, the Republican Study Committee, a caucus to which roughly three-quarters of all Republican House members belong, released its 2025 budget proposal. It called for ending the CEP for high-poverty districts. Doing so would snatch school meals from millions of children currently receiving them, shifting that cost back to their families. It would also probably increase the bureaucracy for schools, though Republicans claim that this administrative system is rife with “fraud and abuse”. While there have been high-profile cases of fraud in the school meals programs (for instance, a Chicago area nutrition director was recently convicted of stealing $1.5m, largely in chicken wings), most identified “abuse” entails clerical errors like giving wrongly categorized meals (free or reduced-price) to kids very near the income cutoffs or ringing up a meal without one of the required components on the tray, like enough vegetables. I would also point out that, if all children got the meals free, there would be no “fraud” in giving a hungry child a school meal, and we could save the labor and cost of all that paperwork.Reducing access to free school meals is also a priority of the now-infamous Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next administration. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but his ties to it are indisputable and a second Trump White House would probably be well populated with its adherents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRegarding school meals, Project 2025 repeats the willful deception that the federal lunch and breakfast programs are “specifically for children in poverty”. In truth, from their beginnings, these programs were meant for all children. But they always made allowances for impoverished children’s access – not only poor children, but inclusive of poor children. The authors of Project 2025 argue that any expansion of free meals is against the “original intent” and creates “an entitlement for students from middle- and upper-income homes”. (I wonder what they think of all those wealthy children getting free textbooks?) Their stated policy goals are to “work with lawmakers to eliminate CEP” and to “reject efforts to create universal free school meals”.While Trump himself may know little about school meals policy (I have never found an instance of him directly talking about it), his first administration set out immediately to relax nutrition standards set under President Obama. The very first policy announcement from Sonny Perdue, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, was that his department would seek to bring back higher-fat chocolate milk, reduce whole grain requirements and stop sodium reductions. And despite the US Department of Agriculture’s own research findings that Obama-era rules had made school meals significantly healthier and debunking claims that plate waste was increasing, one of the last acts of the Trump USDA was to propose a further weakening of nutrition standards to require fewer fruits and allow yet more usually high-salt items such as pizza and hash browns. But the clock ran out on that proposal, and the Biden-Harris administration then increased school meals’ nutrition standards.Given the Republicans’ legislative goals and the direction of one of the GOP’s leading thinktanks, a second Trump administration would almost surely unravel access to school meals and gut hard-won, incremental gains that have made them healthier. All this despite nationwide polls that indicate a majority of US voters agree that all kids should get universally free school meals. More

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      Project 2025 mainly led by ex-Trump officials, leaked videos reveal

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      Newly leaked training videos confirm how the staffing initiative of Project 2025, the controversial rightwing plan for the next Republican presidency, is gearing up for a major effort to replace non-partisan civil servants with conservative loyalists, and is being led by many former Trump administration officials.The videos, created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy and published over the weekend by ProPublica and Documented, expose part of the Heritage Foundation thinktank’s plan to recruit and train political appointees on behalf of a future conservative administration.A major aim of Project 2025 – running alongside its controversial policy proposals – is to replace thousands of government employees, most of whom work in career positions for administrations on both sides of the political aisle, with partisan Republican loyalists.Of the 36 featured speakers, 29 previously worked for former US president Donald Trump in some capacity.The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation of the group’s director two weeks ago, reportedly due to “pressure from Trump campaign leadership”. Trump has recently attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 amid intense criticism and backlash regarding the group’s extreme policy proposals. As well as calling for the replacement of civil servants with Trump loyalists, those plans include eliminating the education department, shrinking environmental protections, and reducing LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.In the 23 training videos, totaling more than 14 hours, former Trump administration officials gave advice to future appointees on governing and how to best advance their conservative policies.In one video, Rick Dearborn, who was a part of Trump’s 2016 transition team and served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, admitted that during the Trump administration it was “tough” to fill all the positions at first.The recruiting and training that Project 2025 is doing right now, Dearborn said, is “going to be so important to the next president, because establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now” is a “luxury” that the Trump administration did not have in 2016.In another video, Bethany Kozma, the former deputy chief of staff at the US Agency for International Development during the the Trump administration, said that the climate change movement is part of a goal by the government to “control people”.“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma said. The training video was titled “Left-Wing Code Words and Language.”In the same video, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the justice department under Trump, criticized the Joe Biden administration’s creation of gender adviser positions in the federal government.Sullivan called for the position to be “eradicated” as well as “all the task forces”, “the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites” and a “complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications”.In other videos, several speakers suggested that future conservative political appointees should be prepared to expect a hostility from the mainstream media, from within the federal government, and also from people in Washington DC.The capital city is a place that “does not share your conservative values”, Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at the US Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, told future appointees.Primorac told viewers not to let “career bureaucrats hinder you from advancing the president’s agenda”, adding that “they’re hostile to it because you’re here to to do something that’s not in their interest.”“You’re here to cut government, you’re here to cut spending, you’re here to cut regulations.”Speakers also encouraged the future appointees to focus their attention and time on conservative media outlets, as those are the only ones trusted by conservative voters.Other speakers advised future appointees to avoid creating a paper trail of sensitive communications that could be obtained by the Freedom of Information Act or by Congress.In a statement sent to ProPublica after the videos were released, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign said that Trump’s only official policy agenda is Agenda 47.Last month, after Project 2025 director Paul Dans stepped down, the Heritage Foundation said that while the organization would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels – federal, state and local – will continue”.As Trump has tried to distance himself from the controversial plan – claiming last month to “know nothing about Project 2025” and to have “no idea who is behind it” – the Washington Post reported last week that Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, told the paper that he had personally talked to Trump about it. “My role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me,” he said.Photos were also published of Trump with Roberts on a private plane in 2022, and Trump gave a keynote speech to the foundation’s annual conference. 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      Project 2025 architect compared abortion to slavery and the Holocaust

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      In a speech earlier this year, Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, a vast plan for a second Trump administration, compared abortion to slavery, lynchings, the Holocaust, antisemitic violence and terror attacks.“Every slave auction, every lynching, every concentration camp, every abortion mill, every pogrom, every terrorist bombing from the Middle East to Kermit Gosnell, from Herod to Hitler to Hamas, has been justified on the same inhuman pretense that the victims aren’t really people,” Roberts said.The remarks were reported by Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog.Gosnell, an abortion doctor in Philadelphia, was sentenced to life in prison in 2013, for the murder of three babies.Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, a hard-right thinktank. He spoke about abortion in Washington DC in January, at the National Pro-Life Summit, hosted by Students for Life in America, a Project 2025 advisory board member.Project 2025 is a 900-plus-page policy plan for rightwing change at every level of federal government. The Heritage Foundation has coordinated such plans since 1980 but Democrats and progressive groups have successfully raised alarm over Project 2025, regarding reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental protections and other concerns.Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the Democratic nominees for president and vice-president, have made Project 2025 a key part of their campaign, their attacks echoed by candidates for Congress and state posts.Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and key advisers have sought to back away. Earlier this week, a Trump spokesperson told the Washington Post, which reported links between Trump and Roberts including shared flights, Project 2025 “has never and will never be an accurate reflection of President Trump’s policies”.Efforts to limit damage continue. Last month the Project 2025 director, Paul Dans, stepped down, reportedly under pressure from Trump’s campaign. Earlier this week, as Democrats in Congress demanded publication of Project 2025 plans for the first 180 days of a second Trump administration, which remain under wraps, a book by Roberts and introduced by Vance was delayed until after election day.On Thursday, Roberts told a podcast it was “good” to see such moves, adding: “I mean, they’re trying to win an election. Also, legally it’s important for people to know that Project 2025 is independent of any candidate … we’ve put this together for any candidate to lean on.”But his January remarks about abortion added fuel to the fire. Then, Roberts said: “The butcher’s bill of history is chillingly clear. Once a society deems certain individuals not fully human, it soon treats them as if they weren’t human at all. And it never stops with one group.“… Is it any surprise that the same party of death celebrating violence in the womb also justifies, and even cheers, the surgical mutilation of children, the euthanizing of the depressed, the persecution of parents and churchgoers, even a genocidal war to exterminate the Jewish people?“Make no mistake: This idea of human inequality – that some people count and some people don’t – doesn’t come from the media or the government or the elite or the left or even Planned Parenthood. It comes straight from hell.”Earlier this week, Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said: “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country.“Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real – in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.” More

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      Trump shared private flight with Project 2025 head despite denying connection

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      Donald Trump shared a private flight with the head of the rightwing thinktank behind Project 2025, the Washington Post reported, publishing evidence including a picture of the two men in airplane seats, grinning.The flight was on its way to a conference organized by the thinktank, at which Trump told group members they would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do”.Orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a 900-page plan initially presented for a second Trump administration that posits aggressive rightwing reform to every corner of the federal government.Democratic attacks have particularly focused on its threats to reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and other progressive concerns.Appearing to fear that Kamala Harris was making Project 2025 an effective campaign issue, Trump and allies have since tried to disavow the effort, with Trump claiming last month he had “no idea who is in charge of” Project 2025.On Thursday, a spokesperson for Trump told the Post that Project 2025 “has never and will never be an accurate reflection of President Trump’s policies”.But the Post published plane-tracking data and the picture of Trump with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, in April 2022.The two men were flying from Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, to Amelia Island in the same state for the annual Heritage conference.At the conference, the Post said, Trump told attendees: “With Kevin and the staff, and I met so many of them now, I took pictures with among the most handsome, beautiful people I’ve ever seen.”The Post also pointed out that in April of this year Roberts told the paper: “I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025 because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”Democratic attacks on Project 2025 have inflicted appreciable damage. Last month, Project 2025 director Paul Dans stepped down amid “pressure from Trump campaign leadership”, the Daily Beast first reported.Roberts has attracted attention, too. In July, he told the Trump ally Steve Bannon: “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”Controversy over such comments drew attention to Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, which has an introduction by the Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick. Publication has now been delayed until after election day.In his introduction, obtained by the New Republic, Vance calls the Heritage Foundation “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump”. The group has indeed produced policy plans for Republican administrations since 1980. But none have proved remotely as controversial as Project 2025.Earlier this week, two House Democrats told Roberts to publish plans for the first 180 days of a second Trump administration, which remain under wraps.“It is time to stop hiding the ball on what we are concerned could very well be the most radical, extreme, and dangerous parts of Project 2025,” Jared Huffman of California and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said in an open letter.On Thursday, the Post quoted an anonymous Project 2025 source as saying that some contributors saw controversy over their work, and Trump’s attempts to disavow it, as “a disaster, a catastrophe … the wishful-thinking school is that this will all blow over”. More

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      The coach v the couch: key takeaways from the first Harris-Walz rally

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      Kamala Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, to supporters at a packed, energetic rally at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.The event, which kicks off a week-long tour through the most politically competitive US states, marks a new chapter for the Harris campaign after securing enough delegates to be the Democratic nominee.Here’s what you need to know:Harris sought to define Walz foremost as a teacher, veteran and football coachHarris called Walz the “kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having”. She told a story about him agreeing to lead his school’s gay-straight alliance, knowing “the signal it would send to have a football coach get involved”.Harris also spoke of his skills as a marksman and his views on the second amendment. And finally, she talked at length about Walz’s time in the army national guard and his service to the country.Walz focused on a unifying, future-focused messageWalz, who like Harris is known for his smile, started his speech by saying: “Thank you for the trust you put in me, but more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.” He then spoke about growing up in the “heartland”, respecting neighbors, and his family of educators, attempting to differentiate the ticket from Donald Trump and JD Vance’s focus on mass deportation and crime.“If Donald Trump and JD Vance are irritated that Kamala Harris smiles and laughs, they’re really going to be irritated by Tim Walz,” Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of Minnesota’s house of representatives, told the Guardian.’Mind your own damn business’: Walz attacked the Trump-Vance ticket with a focus on reproductive rights and other freedomsWalz talked about his daughter Hope, who often appears in videos and photographs with her father, being born through IVF, and Republican attacks on contraception and abortion. Abortion opponents have been increasingly pushing for broader measures that would give rights and protections to embryos and fetuses, which could have big implications for fertility treatments.He also spoke about gun control, a tenet of the Harris campaign, saying he supported the second amendment but that children should have the freedom to go to school without the concern of school shootings.Walz made a direct hit at Project 2025, the conservative manifesto created by Trump allies and advisers. “Don’t believe him when he plays dumb,” he said of the former president. “He knows exactly what Project 2025 will to do restrict our freedoms.”He encapsulated his idea in another sticky colloquialism to counter Republicans hoping to intervene in medical practices and schools: “Mind your own damn business.”Josh Shapiro, who had been a vice-presidential contender, still made his markThe Pennsylvania governor who was also in the final running to be Harris’s running mate, spoke before Harris and Walz. His pitch-perfect and fiery speech helped set the tone for the rally, and he threw his support behind the newly announced ticket.Shapiro and Walz’s speeches also made the distinction between the two politicians clear. Shapiro has been described as Obama-like in his polished and forceful delivery. Meanwhile, Walz, whose speech spanned dad jokes and pointed attacks on his opponents, seasoned his remarks with midwestern dialect, adding a “damn well” here and a “come on” there. “Say it with me! We are not going back,” he said, starting a chant from the audience. “We’ve got 91 days. My god, that’s easy,” he said. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”The couch joke was madeWalz said his GOP rival, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, and Trump “are creepy and yes, they’re weird as hell”. He added that he “can’t wait to debate the guy”, speaking of Vance. Then, to sustained cheers and laughter, he made a reference to the baseless, but much-shared claim, that Vance admitted to having sex with a couch in his memoir. “That is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up”.Stumping earlier today in Pennsylvania, Vance said: “I absolutely want to debate Tim Walz,” but not until after the Democratic convention, he said, because of the sudden change in the Democratic ticket. More

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      Is this the end of Project 2025? – podcast

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      This week, Paul Dans, the leader of the controversial Project 2025, resigned and signalled in a company email that work on it was ‘winding down’. The project had become a manifesto of rightwing policies that would serve as a guide for the next Republican president. However, there is a significant stumbling block: Donald Trump wants nothing to do with it.
      Joan E Greve and Rachel Leingang discuss whether this marks the beginning of the end of Project 2025

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