Project 2025 isn't dead. It's just transitioning into its next phase

It's been grimly satisfying to see just how panicked Donald Trump's campaign advisers have gotten in their attempts to distance their seditionist convicted felon candidate from the would-be Trump policy positions written up by Trump ex-administration members and published by the giddily extremist Heritage Foundation.

You'll note I said Trump's campaign advisers, not Donald Trump personally; if we've learned anything about Trump from his campaigns and White House stint, it's that the man doesn't give a flying damn about policy and gets enraged when his advisers try to rope him into having one. If you're trying to get him to read something, it'd better have a picture of his face plastered on the frontpage. If you're trying to get him to do something, you'd better damn well have the phone number of a Fox News producer so you can launder your message through some Trump-praising talking heads. We don't have to make any great leaps of logic to presume that Trump himself has never once given a damn about what dozens of his former administration toadies have been up to; the man can't even come up with an opinion on current news stories that goes beyond hurling the laziest of insults at his detractors while simultaneously praising (checks notes) Russia's Vladimir Putin.

No, the Trump campaign attacks on Project 2025 are coming entirely from the battle between the group of amoral coup-supporting Trump sycophants currently siphoning money out of the base to support Trump's election and a second group of amoral coup-supporting Trump sycophants that are less focused on winning the election and far more focused on playing Barbie's Fascist Dreamhouse with the levers of government.

Or, as Dan Moynihan puts it:

This problem is that the part of Trumpworld concerned about governing run into conflict with the part of Trumpworld concerned about winning the 2024 election. This conflict arose precisely because the governing part is so unpopular, not because of any fundamental philosophical disagreement. The people running Trump’s campaign are furious that their efforts to block meaningful policy detail are being undermined by the guys who wrote a 900 page book explaining how they will govern. They want Project 2025 to go away, at least until after the election. The message shared with Heritage was: “Shut the hell up. Everyone knows you did this or are doing it, stop talking about it, stop trying to raise money off of it, don’t go on TV talking about it, just leave it.”

The second of those two links leads to a Politico story from last Friday that was the subject of widespread mockery in the online sphere for its headline portrayal of Project 2025 as an empty-office nothingburger after the reporter got a guided and monitored tour of their offices and didn't see whatever torture equipment or mutated six-armed guard monkeys he presumed a den of far-right extremism ought to have. But now that we've had our fun at the continued press inability to recognize what's in front of their own faces, the Politico story is one that offers up some insights on the slapfight between the G.I. Joe Policy Playset seditionists and the ones still collecting their checks directly from the Republican Party.

From it, we learn that Trump senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles were the campaign-side sedition backers who pressed Heritage to put a sock in their "here is how we will do a fascism" pronouncements. The "shut the hell up" phone call came last November, but by that point the Heritage Foundation-assembled Mandate for Leadership had already been published and widely boasted about. Even if that genie could be stuffed back inside the bottle, LaCivita and Wiles were still asking for the impossible. Nobody in the history of politics has ever been able to convince far-right Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts to shut his piehole, not once in the history of ever even though Kevin Roberts shutting up would immediately solve at least ten percent of all of modern America's problems, and telling an assemblage of a dozen dozen of the most ambitious people in Washington, D.C., that they should refrain from Sharing Their Fking Thoughts for the next 12 months is like asking a leopard to stop eating faces. It ain't gonna happen.

By the spring — around the time Heritage agreed to let me visit for this story — they had inched back out into the public conversation, with [Paul] Dans sitting for  several  extended interviews and Roberts giving a long interview with The New York Times Magazine about Heritage’s ambition of “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

On July 5, in the middle of another Democratic-driven news cycle tying Trump to Project 2025’s policy proposals, Trump issued his  first formal denunciation, adding, “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The Trump campaign continued its public attacks throughout July, with LaCivita calling the project “a pain in the ass” and Trump reasserting his distance from it. By the end of the month — as the Trump campaign got closer to announcing its own, formal transition project — there was a sense within Heritage that something had to give.

Ah, there we go. So from this collection of events we can gather what actually happened, in this fight between the campaign-team seditionists and the Springtime for Hitler ones. LaCivita and Wiles tried very patiently to explain to the extremists of Trump-allied far-right think tanks that boasting about how the movement was going to ban abortion, deport millions, fire anyone in government who wasn't a Dear Leader acolyte, guide the nation into a new era of Christian nationalism and throw all their enemies in prison was not a winning campaign message, not when you say it out loud like that. That fight lasted for months, but Roberts and the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Presidential Transition Project Director, ex-Trump administration member Paul Dans, still refused to shut up and so LaCivita likely went to Trump and told Trump something like "them guys over there are using your name over and over again to get famous but you're not getting any money from it" and Trump, being Trump, immediately blew a gasket and agreed they needed to get a good strong kneecapping.

It's a pattern we've seen over and over. Trump doesn't pay attention to anything his associates do, he doesn't care, he can't be bothered to learn. You can have a whole raging pandemic going on and you won't get Donald Trump to care beyond assigning his son-in-law to go fix it and get back to him. And this makes Trump infinitely pliable, because in any toxic management environment led by someone who rates their underlings solely by how obsequiously they can grovel and sing the boss' praises, all you ever have to do to knife any coworker in the back is start a whisper campaign claiming that so-and-so hasn't been groveling nearly enough of late and that sure does seem suspicious.

LaCivita currently holds the position Steve Bannon once held in Trump's orbit. He's the guy who lives closest to Donald Trump's earlobe, therefore LaCivita is going to be able to knife anyone in Trump's orbit he wants to knife. At some point whoever's whispering in Trump's other ear (thank goodness he still has two, or the fights in the Mar-a-Lago buffet lines to get next to his "good" one would have already left several socialites dead) will be able to do the same to LaCivita, and the circle of life around Trump will continue.

The "something had to give" part of LaCivita's quest to get the Heritage Foundation to stop saying overtly fascist things out loud turned out to be slightly early exit of Paul Dans, who the reporting rumor mills tend to portray as an unwelcome self-promoter-slash-stalker rather than part of Trump's true "inner circle." But as Moynihan and Politico both note, the major work that Dans was responsible for is already done and over with. The Database of Somewhat Vetted Acolytes is humming along, collecting thousands of resumes. The Mandate for Leadership was assembled, edited, published, and all but hand-delivered to Democratic campaign offices around the country.

There's only one part of Project 2025 that's still unreleased, and Dans isn't responsible for that part.

(Project 2025’s final part, known as “Pillar IV,” involves the creation of an “180-day playbook” for implementing the policy agenda — but the playbook would be kept confidential.)

Pillar IV is the thinktankian code phrase for the plan to actually implement the "deep state" purge of government employees that still appears to be brazenly illegal, if anyone still gave a damn about such things. It's being kept secret precisely because even the crackpots of the Heritage Foundation know there are some things they still shouldn't be saying publicly, and high on that list would be your flowchart of how you're going to skirt or outright break federal laws in order to remold goverment agencies into subservient subdivisions of the Republican Party itself.

It's also likely to be quite the deranged document, and one we may never see unless it's leaked in some future seditionist-on-seditionist power struggle:

Many of the people who have been closely involved in the project — including Russell Vought, who is leading the work on Pillar IV, and Johnny McEntee, a former top aide to Trump — are likely to hold senior positions in the next Trump White House, and Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance remains close with Roberts, having authored the foreword to his new book. 

Russell Vought is, for those of you who are unawares, the former Trump administration's Director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of the biggest expected cheeses in any Trump 2.0 cracker factory. He's also an absolutely frothing proponent of the theory that our culture and government has been corrupted by "woke," by which he appears to mean any and all anti-racism efforts, and Roberts and Vought are two of the names responsible for some of the most unhinged rhetoric in the 920+ page Mandate for Leadership.

[T]he next Administration will face a significant challenge in unwinding policies and procedures that are used to advance radical gender, racial, and equity initiatives under the banner of science. Similarly, the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding. As with other federal departments and agencies, the Biden Administration’s leveraging of the federal government’s resources to further the woke agenda should be reversed and scrubbed from all policy manuals, guidance documents, and agendas, and scientific excellence and innovation should be restored as the OSTP’s top priority.

God, what a weird-ass freak. Keep in mind, all of these people are the top minds in the conservative movement. They're the people running the think tanks and issuing high-minded quotes to the reporters that flock to them, and they're absolutely convinced that American society not being quite the ball of violent racism it once was can only mean that somebody's been conspiring against them.

Weird. Ass. Freaks.

With any luck, all of this will become at least temporarily moot come November. Plans to purge NOAA and other science-minded government agencies of "climate fanaticism" and "radical gender initiatives" will not do the movement much good if fascism is soundly defeated in the November elections and—and this is a big if—if a sizable enough chunk of Republican state and federal officers again refuse to go along with plans to nullify that new election by claiming it was somehow tainted by invisible and undetectable "fraud."

But even if the public issues a thorough thrashing of the Republican Party's new coup-supporting white nationalist incarnation, it won't result in an end to this movement. It's backed by too many billionaires; the press is drawn to the extremism as a source of continual political "excitement." This is a fight we'll have to keep winning for the rest of our damn lives, because as I've already said: You will never, ever convince conspiracy-peddling fascists to shut their damn mouths. It ain't never gonna happen.