On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone details the way Trump will use Project 2025 staff to fill his administration with extremists
Carusone: “The only way for them to staff the new administration is to go through the Project 2025 database”
Published
Citation From the August 1, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
ALI VELSHI (HOST): Most Americans couldn't care less about Project 2025. Well, this is it, by the way. It's 922 pages ahead of it, bound in two volumes.
There's a lot of stuff in here. You're going to care about it. It just takes a while to get through it. This whole discussion about Project 2025 didn't begin well when JD Vance was added to the Trump ticket.
His unconvincing attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 --- Trump's, by the way as well -- were laughable. This week as the Trump campaign turns to full throated bashing of Project 2025, bashing of it and support of its "demise."
Even the project is trying to calm the storm around its extreme plan to end democracy and consolidate power under Donald Trump.
It is JD Vance who actually continues to complicate things by writing the forward to a book by the president of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025.
Vance's forward leaves little room for interpretation and is a violent and glowing endorsement of Robert's ideas that Vance calls "an essential weapon in the fights that lay ahead" and "a genuinely new future for conservatism."
Vance writes that the Heritage Foundation has "been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation."
Joining us now, president of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone. Angelo, good to see you. Thank you for, being with us. What a mess, man. What a mess.
They -- poor Heritage Foundation went to all this trouble to write a 922 page volume, not just to write it, but to make sure they recruited people from Donald Trump's actual orbit to headline these chapters, and now they can't run away from it fast enough.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): No. I mean and a lot of the distance that Trump's having here, and Vance, is it's like trying to distance yourself from your hand. Right? It's like the most you can get is arm's length because it's all connected.
And there's no way to separate that out because fundamentally, part of the thing to consider here is that Project 2025 is more than just a book. It's more than just a policy, even the shutdown effort illustrates that.
It's four parts. It's a policy book. It's personnel, which is all the staffing for how you re-staff the government when there's a new Trump administration. It's all the training that goes along with that. And then the fourth part, and this is the biggest link between Trump World and the Heritage world, it's the playbook, the 180 Day Playbook.
And the 180 Day Playbook is the last pillar of it. It's the step by step guide for the administration to implement the policy of Project 2025. The book that's already written that they've now announced they've shut down, that's being written by a guy -- Russ Vought, the same person that the Trump campaign nominated to be on the Republican Convention's policy platform committee. So, that's where the connective tissue here is.
Now, that document's not gonna be public, and that tells you all you need to know about the significance of that.
VELSHI: So, you made a couple of points here that I think are really useful because we're in the early days of people understanding Project 2025. It's a terrible read so people aren't going to go out and read it for themselves, but we're going to break down every single chapter and every single topic in it.
Two important points. It's 180 day implementation. This is not a 10 year project. This is 6 months from inauguration day. And number two, all the chapters in here are written by people in Trump's orbit or at least most of them are.
CARUSONE: That's right. Yeah, and that was by design.
And let's keep in mind that in April 2022, right when Project 2025 was first getting off the ground, Trump went to a Heritage Foundation event just like the way that, you know, JD Vance wrote the forward to Kevin Roberts' book.
And he announced, not only did he praise Kevin Roberts who runs the foundation, but he announced that the Heritage Foundation was going to be launching an initiative that lays both the policy and the and the groundwork for his new administration in 2025.
I mean, so he announced Project 2025 effectively in April 2022, and that's the part that's significant about this is that it is -- it is really the plan for how and what this administration is gonna look like. So when you look at, say, the parts of the policy that you referred to, it's the same stuff that Trump has been saying, which is weaponizing the DOJ in order to go after his political enemies and implement, you know, and implement a whole range of policies and revenge --
VELSHI: And they say it, Angelo. They say it. It's not even coded language.
CARUSONE: They do.
VELSHI: They specifically talk about wokeness and doing this and being able to orchestrate the government in a way that establishes conservative priorities. You don't have -- it's not coded.
CARUSONE: No, it's not. And I'll give one really clear example where -- from this week alone.
So, one of the ways in which the Project 2025 has identified which -- one of the prongs for firing personnel for being disqualified from working in government, well, it's a way -- if you're one of the first people out, is that if you went to a DEI related training when you were working for the government and you did not explicitly object to the training, that is grounds for firing under Project 2025 in a new Trump administration.
So there's part of the tie in. The same things that they fixate on in the public communications, this is the bedrock of that. It is spelled out in black and white.
And I think -- the part that I just can't forget, and part of the reason we've been talking about this now, we should never forget that one of the reasons, the main reason, why we're even talking about this, the catalyst for this discussion wasn't the book.
The book had been around for a while. It's that Kevin Roberts himself went out there and said that it will be a "bloodless revolution if liberals allow it." They threaten violence, as a mechanism for implementing this.
VELSHI: And then he came on our network and talked about it with my colleagues at great length.
And the funny part is that Trump's trying to disavow it, Vance is trying to disavow it, and then Kevin Roberts and the Heritage Foundation's response to the disavowal is that, "Well, that's just good politics for them to distance themselves from."
Like, it's the weirdest, most dysfunctional relationship in the world, but our viewers need to just forget that. They need to understand that they've written down what they are going to do.
So on Day 180 after January 20th, please don't be surprised when your abortion rights are taken away and, in remaining states, that you can or various things happen because it's all written down here.
This is what you're voting for.
CARUSONE: That's right. And then the part of that I think is important -- but all this distancing stuff, it doesn't even matter.
Let's even -- let's even concede it. Let's even say they're sincere about their distancing. Let's even give it to them. I don't, but let's do it. Let's play it out.
It won't matter because ultimately, the personnel, the people that Trump would have to hire when he gets into office, the only way for them to staff the new administration is to go through the Project 2025 personnel database that has been vetted, that has been organized, that has been implemented.
That is so -- so the people will ultimately be the carriers of the Project 2025 virus whether or not Trump cares about it or disavows it or not, the personnel is also the key factor here. So, the disavowals don't really mean anything when the very people they'd have to hire are all Project 2025 acolytes.
VELSHI: It's 96 days to make sure Americans, understand this, or 96 days to read this thing because it's a painful exercise.