CNN breaks down the undercover interview that features Project 2025 architect Russell Vought discussing the secret plan for a future Trump administration
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From the August 15, 2024, edition of CNN's CNN Newsroom with Jim Acosta
KYUNG LAH (CNN): You are looking at secretly recorded video of Russell Vought, a former cabinet member in the Trump administration.
RUSSELL VOUGHT: This year has been predominantly now getting ready for a year five of a Trump administration. We've got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature.
LAH: Vought, the platform policy director for the Republican National Committee, says, he is building the plan for Trump's second term.
DONALD TRUMP: I don't know what the hell it is. It's Project 25.
LAH: Trump publicly disavowed Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for his administration if he gets reelected. But in private, Vought said that's just politics. The details of the real plans are secret and based on Trump's own beliefs.
VOUGHT: Notwithstanding I expect you hear 10 more times from the rally, the president, you know, distancing himself from the left's boogeyman of Project 2025.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, and you're not worried about that?
VOUGHT: No, I'm not worried about it. And so, I see what he's doing is just very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand. He's very supportive of what we do and know that we have all manner of things that we do that's, you know, even unrelated to Project 2025.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sure.
LAH: Vought has been a mastermind behind expanding the powers of the presidency. Some of those policy proposals Trump has supported, two sources tell CNN. Trump even hosted a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser two years ago for the group Vought founded, the right-wing Center for Renewing America.
VOUGHT: He's been at our organization. He's raised money for our organization. He's blessed it.
LAH: In this hotel suite, Vought thinks he's talking to family members of a wealthy donor. But one is a journalist or the other, an actor working undercover for the U.K.-based Centre for Climate Reporting. The centre provided the video to CNN on the condition we blur their faces so they can continue their undercover work. The conversation covers a host of issues like abortion and how his position differs from Trump.
VOUGHT: He talks about rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Well, I don't actually believe in those exceptions.
I want to get to abolition, but I also got to win elections. And so, I want to get as far as we possibly can.
LAH: His view of who should be an American.
VOUGHT: So I want to make sure that we can say we're a Christian nation and my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That's pretty close to Christian nationalism. Can we, if we're going to have legal immigration, can we get people that actually believe in Christianity? Is that something? Or do we have to have we now had to -- you know, are we not allowed to ask questions about Sharia law.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What could we see America looking like, I guess I do in an ideal world?
VOUGHT: In an ideal world, I mean, I think we could save the country and a sense of, you know, the largest deportation in history.
LAH: And even pornography.
VOUGHT: We'd have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?
LAH: But the most striking of Vought's statements has to do with presidential power.
VOUGHT: George Floyd was obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.
VOUGHT: It's the left's belief that structures in society are the problem. Pulling society down for purposes of revolution is exactly what they want. And what you're seeing at college campuses as a part of that as well. The president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military.
LAH: A major part of Vought's plan is turning thousands of career federal jobs into political appointments, meaning workers could be fired if they're not sufficiently loyal to Trump.
VOUGHT: Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. I want to be the person who crushes the deep state. I think there's a lot of different ways to do that. It is defunding it. It's impoundment, the ability to not spend money. It's getting rid of their independence.
LAH: Even as Vought talks about the so-called deep state, he claims his group is forming its own to take over on day one.
VOUGHT: We are trying to create a shadow Office of Management and Budget, a shadow National Security Council, and a shadow Office of Legal Counsel. These are the main organs in government that you need outside to create the battle plan.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And you're not going to publish these?
VOUGHT: No. No.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They go straight to --
VOUGHT: Yeah, they're very, very close hold.