On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone details how Project 2025 is designed to be “a instrument of Donald Trump's revenge”
Carusone: “And the design here ... is to restructure government and also do it in such a way that it can't really be unwound, but rather worse, turn it into an instrument of Donald Trump's revenge.”
Published
Citation From the August 7, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Alex Wagner Tonight
ALI VELSHI (HOST): For weeks, Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, which is an ultra conservative policy blueprint for a second Trump administration organized and written by the Heritage Foundation. Trump has said in the past, though, that he's moderated his comments since that he has no idea who's in charge of Project 2025, and he didn't even know what it was.
But Project 2025 and Donald Trump are inseparable.
At least 140 Trump administration alumni helped create this document. Trump's running mate, JD Vance, wrote the foreword of an upcoming book authored by the architect of Project 2025, its new leader, Kevin Roberts.
Today, we learned that publication of that book has been conveniently delayed until a week after the election.
And tonight, the Washington Post reports that in April 2022, Donald Trump shared a 45 minute private flight with Roberts on route to a Heritage Foundation conference where Trump said in a keynote address, "The group's policy proposals are going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do."
Our movement. Joining me now, Angelo Carusone, President and CEO of Media Matters For America, a nonprofit group that has been doing extensive research on Project 2025 and combating misinformation around it.
Angelo, good to see you again. You know, my mind went to you because you've really studied this thing, and there are sections and chapters on literally every part of government.
But fundamentally, if you've gone through this document, what you understand is the most important part of it are not necessarily the specific very right-wing policies therein, but the idea that it restructures the entire federal government in a way that the next president could not easily fix.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Well, that's exactly right. I mean, it is designed to be not an aspirational set of ideas, or just, you know, proposals or value structures. It's a -- it's an actual plan.
And you know that because the one document that's not public, is not the policy, that 900 page policy document that everybody's talking about, but rather the 180 day agenda document, which is a step by step instruction manual for what the first 180 days in the administration are going to look like -- what every single office, what every single department, what every key entity is supposed to do.
And then underneath that is this thing called "Schedule F," which is identifying thousands of key federal government positions that need to be terminated immediately or firing those individuals. And already, they have a database of more than 4,000 people that they pre-vetted that would immediately be slotted into those roles. So, it's both the transition team and a deep plan already baked into one.
And the design here, as you noted, is to restructure government and also do it in such a way that it can't really be unwound, but rather worse, turn it into an instrument of Donald Trump's revenge.
VELSHI: So the Schedule F, the most boring thing I've ever heard in terms of a name, and meant to not make you think of anything except that what we don't think about, whether you are from the United States or Canada or the UK or Germany or France or any of these places, is that you don't know the names of the people in the civil service by design.
Other than the top person, the minister of something or the secretary of a department, you know no one else's names because they are either career people or experts.
Schedule F and and Project 25 changes that.
CARUSONE: That's right. And as you noted, it's, you know, civil service. I mean, the idea here is that these people are doing public service, right?
I mean, they're not doing it for the money. They're not doing it for the hours, right, or the perks. They're doing it because it is actually a service.
And one of the things that Schedule F does is reclassify what would be civil service positions and sort of reorients them around to something that allows them to be treated as political appointees.
And that's something that's going to make this difference.
VELSHI: We're not talking about 50 jobs or 500 jobs or 5,000 jobs. We're talking about 50,000 positions in the American government that you and I would think of as civil service jobs, occupied by people whose names we don't know and will never know, reclassified as political jobs.
That sounds like countries that we talk about that have unstable governments.
CARUSONE: That's right. And, you know, if you think about this in the context of what the right-wing has railed against, not just their ideas, but one of the things that we heard over and over and over again was that there was the deep state that was stopping Donald Trump from implementing a lot of the policies that the rest of the right-wing really wanted.
And this is really a way to sort of go at what the right-wing has identified as the deep state.
And ultimately, that's just as you noted, it's the civil servants, but that's why they see this as a mechanism. And this is the part that's so scary about it. It's not just what's being proposed.
It's that they actually, unlike last time around when Trump got into office and, you know, after he lost the last election, this time they actually have a resourced plan and the personnel to implement it.
And what you're seeing here is sort of this backsliding around Project 2025 or attempts to do that is you notice they're not really rejecting the notions around it or the ideas, and there's sort of this wink and a nod and a dance.
And even the way they're doing is kind of lying as this most recent video, you know, picture sort of illustrates. And that's the part that's so unsettling. They know it's not popular, but they're bent on sort of implementing it, and we should all be deeply concerned about it.
VELSHI: And Kevin Roberts, the guy who, was in charge of the Heritage Foundation, have come out and said, "Of course, they're gonna disavow it. That's good politics. They should disavow it."
But once they come into government, this is the plan. And everybody involved -- that no one involved in it is disavowing it -- and these are people who are in Trump's inner inner circle. This is not peripheral people who had minor jobs in the Trump administration.
CARUSONE: That's exactly right. And look, I know why maybe perhaps they wanted to delay the release of this book.
I mean, especially until after the election now that there's a spotlight, now that the media is paying attention to it and asking the kinds of questions, and looking into this, I know why. Because they would look into the book.
We have a copy of it, actually. And one of the things that Kevin Roberts writes about in his book is he just -- he describes that having a child should not be considered an individual choice.
And there's an entire argument in the book about how you shouldn't -- that it's not a personal choice, that it's something that society should impose on people, which is why they're opposed to contraception and why that needs to be banned.
And part of what that book is is designed to marshal a narrative around the very policy that would ultimately be implemented as a result of Project 2025.
VELSHI: Yeah. You should get a honor like, a free copy of The Handmaid's Tale when you get Kevin Roberts' book. Yeah. Read them next to each other, and they make a lot of sense.
It feels like it'll be the same thing. Angelo, great to see you as always, thank you for joining us.