On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how Project 2025 is already in motion with a goal to “end multiculturalism”
Carusone: “It's not just about these bureaucracies and implementing and pushing government power, it's also about reshaping what the United States looks like from the government to the day-to-day way that society operates”
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From the November 25, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): In August of this year, one of the architects of Project 2025, Russel Vought, as you just heard, wasn't nervous about Donald Trump's repeated distancing of himself from that plan. Donald Trump has said it at rallies, he's said it on Fox News, even during the debate. He had no idea that was written in Project 2025, that it had nothing to do with him.
But Vought wasn't nervous because he knew Trump's claims were just for show. If Trump, won he would embrace the policies and those involved in the 900 page radical agenda. Well, surprise surprise, that's exactly what happened.
Trump just tapped Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget, a role he had in the last Trump administration, further cementing Trump's second term with Project 2025. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, posted "Donald Trump lied through his teeth to pretend he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Trump named the lead architect of Project 2025 to oversee the budget office. We'll hold them accountable."
And a voice familiar to our viewers, former US attorney Joyce Vance, said bluntly, "The bottom line is that all of the pieces of Project 2025 that we've discussed the last year are in play." Pieces like rooting out the so-called "deep state," banning abortion medication, infringing on the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals, dismantling the Department of Education, the list goes on and on.
Vought, in particular, has been vocal about expanding the role of the president. He wrote Project 2025's section on the executive branch. "The president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences -- or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical supposedly 'woke' faction of the country. The modern conservative President's task is to limit, control and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people." Listen to what Vought told Tucker Carlson, just last week.
[CLIP BEGINS]
RUSSEL VOUGHT: The president has to move, executively, as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and their power centers. And I think there are a couple of ways to do it. Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies.
[CLIP ENDS]
MENENDEZ: Okay. Keep in mind, Vought is not the only one who worked on Project 2025 that has received Trump's blessing. Brendan Carr was picked to head the Federal Communications Commission, as well as Tom Homan, Trump's border czar. John Ratcliffe, chosen to lead the CIA, and Trump's pick for ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, were all contributors to Project 2025.
...
Angelo, I mean, knock me over with a feather. I am just so surprised to see that Project 2025, despite being disavowed by Trump, is now center stage in his administration.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, I mean, they -- they were saying it all along. Not that he was going to run against the brand, but ultimately that he needed Project 2025 if he were elected. This is what they were preparing for. And I want to start there because the Vought thing is particularly significant in terms of the realization of Project 2025. And here's why.
When we think about that term, a lot of it gets discussed in terms of that 900 page policy book that got a lot of attention, they laid out their aspirations all in one place. But Project 2025 was something much more than that. It was a massive personnel database which, outside of the names that everybody is talking about in the media, it's already being reported that the incoming administering is relying on that database to fill all sorts of lower level positions already. And then the other part of Project 2025 was the thing that Russel Vought was working on in secret, which is called the "180 day playbook." And that was a suite of documents, about 350, executive orders, action that were given to agencies, memos supporting legal substantiation for all kinds of instructions and it ties that clip that you heard him say with Tucker Carlson, where he says that he would have to act fast.
The idea behind that is to implement these things. And they're already on the shelf. Not just the aspirational ideas, but the actual implementation for smashing away a lot of the norms and the things that we rely on for rule of law, like the independence of the DOJ so that it's not politicized. That goes out the window. But they're ready to go.
And Russel Vought was a key part of that Project 2025 component and now he's going to be in a place in the administration to take those documents that he spent all this time working on and put them into action. And that I think is the part that's the most concerning is not just that he's pulling in these people, but that he's actually putting in the people that had the plan for implementation of Project 2025.
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MENENDEZ: Angelo, I want to drill down just a little bit on Vought himself and some reporting that Media Matters did. "While at the helm of the Center for Renewing America, Vought has been outspoken in his advocacy of Schedule F -- a scheme to reclassify career civil servants as political appointees. Trump attempted to implement Schedule F in the waning days of his first term, but its affects were blunted by his loss in 2020. If his incoming administration moves forward with the plan, which seems all but inevitable, as many as 50,000 career staffers could be replaced with MAGA loyalists. (Some other estimates put the number closer to 20,000.)
What are you doing right now if you are a federal employee just bracing for impact?
CARUSONE: Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably -- and Ben was sort of getting to before, right? Because one of the things that Vought has been talking about, aside from the Schedule F piece, is that you want to inflict trauma on the personnel in these agencies, as well. That was his words. "You have to inflict trauma." One of the objectives when they get in is to sort of create conditions where a bunch of people just voluntarily leave themselves so they don't have to deal with legal limbo around some of the rescheduling under Schedule F.
To that point, if you're one these employees, you're assuming, you're going to get -- lose your job to some extent or you are already beginning to anticipate that. Or you're going back and saying, "Well, I attended a DEI training or seminar at some point in my career" and that's one of the identifiers for termination. Under these new things is that if you had done anything, including participating in an employment training for it, you are automatically marked to get the boot. And so, if you're one of these employees, you're on the job market, most likely.
And I think that is either because of directly -- because if you think you are going to be affected by Schedule F or because you believe that they're going to try to inflict some kind of trauma on you to push you out, so you'd rather leave on your own terms.
So, it makes it easier, sort of clearing, you know, understandably. But the runway is being cleared for them to move in their individuals, their people that could then put these actions in place. And the part that makes that so concerning is that it is an all-out assault, not just on norms and on government.
In some ways that's hard because defending the status quo in an environment where people don't like the status quo is not the best turf to be in, right. And so, there are ostensibly for many people, they're like "Wow, they're going in there and doing something good. But underneath the hood, they're doing something insidious.
And Vought laid it out. You erode this, you use the DOJ for political persecutions, you implement Schedule F so you can have all the power you want. You direct the military inward to help force and impose your will, something that he has been instrumental in. And his end result, one of the things that he's repeatedly said, is that the goal here is to "end multiculturalism in America." And that's the part that -- that's their guiding light.
And it's not just about these bureaucracies and implementing and pushing government power, it's also about reshaping what the United States looks like from the government to the day-to-day way that society operates. And they're doing it and this personnel piece is the first domino to fall in that implementation of the agenda.