Dans' resignation comes following the Trump campaign's attempts to distance itself from the project. Dans wrote in a statement that Project 2025 has “completed what we set out to do” and “our work is presently winding down.”
A statement from Trump campaign officials Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles claimed, “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”
It is exceptionally unlikely the project will actually wind down. Heritage President Kevin Roberts even wrote in a statement released on Twitter that the “policy drafting” work by Project 2025 was meant to conclude after the two party conventions but that the group “will continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels.”
The Washington Post reported that Project 2025 always planned to “hand off recommendations to the official presidential transition,” but the Trump campaign has yet to stand up an official transition team.
Project 2025 is a Heritage-backed coalition of right-wing individuals and organizations working to recruit conservatives to work for the next GOP presidential administration and proposing radical right-wing policy changes in essentially every department controlled by the White House. Many of the policy suggestions made in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership were written by former Trump White House officials or advisers.
Despite Trump’s efforts to disavow Project 2025, the Trump campaign and Project 2025 have many overlapping policy ideas, including both calling for the Department of Education to be dissolved. The most widely embraced policy suggestion between the two camps is calling for the reinstatement of Schedule F policies in order to dismantle the civil service and staff the next administration with loyal conservatives. Project 2025’s recruiting programs still seem to be an essential part of this Trump 2024 campaign promise.
Media Matters president Angelo Carusone added more context to Dans’ ouster.
Dans’ departure now leaves Heritage President Kevin Roberts as the de facto head of Project 2025. As Media Matters has repeatedly noted, Roberts has frequently bragged about the close connections between Trump and Project 2025.
- On July 9, Roberts told former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka: “Never before has the conservative movement been this unified around a governing agenda,” adding, “This project is in service” to Trump.
- Then on July 10, Roberts said that “the overlap is tremendous” between Trump's campaign platform and Project 2025, adding that “quibbles and differences of opinion” between Project 2025 and the GOP platform would be figured out once a new Trump “administration declares what their priorities are.”
- One day later, Roberts doubled down: “Our respective staffs have been in conversation throughout the campaign,” he said, adding: “I suspect very soon the president and his staff and I will sit down and talk through all of this.”
- Roberts kept going the next day, telling conservative The Daily Signal Podcast that Project 2025 and Trump campaign policy overlap on “all of the priority issues.”
The connections between the Trump campaign and Heritage don’t stop there.
- Trump recently said in a Fox News interview that he “agree[s]” with elements of Project 2025, though he didn’t specify which ones.
- Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), said in January that Heritage’s Roberts is “somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice.”
- Additionally, Vance has appeared at events and on several right-wing podcasts associated with Project 2025 partner organizations, praising their leaders and promoting their work.
Roberts hasn’t been shy about his grand ambitions for Project 2025 either.
- On June 24, Roberts told Steve Bannon that Project 2025 was a plan built for the “next century.”
- “Project 2025 is something that's going to transcend the next 4 years, the next 10 years,” he said on MSNBC in June. “It really is for the first time in the history of the conservative movement the apparatus for policy and personnel.”
- Also in June, The Washington Post quoted Roberts saying that Project 2025 is “building a governing agenda, not just for next January but long into the future.”
- In July, he boasted that “never before has the American conservative movement been this unified around a set of possible policy prescriptions.”
The lovefest between Trump and Heritage was firmly established less than halfway through Trump’s first term.
- Media Matters recently unearthed Heritage promotional material from March 2018 that bragged: “President Trump has already embraced 64% of our recommendations.”
- The next month, Trump returned the favor and repeated the figure during a tax reform event in Las Vegas. “The Heritage Foundation just came out recently, and they said that we've already implemented 64 percent of our top agenda items. And that's ahead of anybody, including Ronald Reagan,” Trump said. “So we've done a lot of work in a very short period of time. And you know, the bottom line is: America is open for business.”
Now, Dans is gone and the future of Project 2025 is at least partially unsettled, likely due in part to its increasing unpopularity. For now, the tensions between Trump and Heritage appear to revolve more around the former president’s ego and less around policy differences — which are mostly negligible between the two camps.
On July 2, Roberts went viral for comments he made on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, long a champion of Project 2025. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said. Less than a month later, it seems that his revolution is devouring its own.
