During a segment analyzing Vice President Kamala Harris’ and former President Donald Trump’s Univision town halls, host Elián Zidán failed to contextualize Trump’s connections to Project 2025, citing the network’s fact-checking division elDetector to misleadingly say it is false that Project 2025 is “Donald Trump’s plan if he is elected president.”
Project 2025 — a comprehensive transition plan organized by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to guide the next GOP presidential administration — is the conservative movement’s most robust policy and staffing proposal for a potential second Trump White House. Its extreme agenda represents a threat to democracy, civil rights, the climate, and more. The project has deep ties to Trump; as CNN reported, “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025.”
During a segment called “Después de las Respuestas,” Zidán, who is the host of Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna, highlighted a quote from Harris during her own town hall in which she said, “I urge everyone to look into Project 2025, which is Donald Trump's plan if he is elected president.” Without context, Zidán said that according to elDetector, the statement is “false. And that is [because] this 900-page text was developed by the Heritage Foundation … not Donald Trump.”
The Trump campaign has lately attempted to distance itself from efforts to promote or speculate about “future presidential staffing or policy announcements.” However, Project 2025 is significantly more developed than the Trump campaign’s transition initiative, called Agenda47. And given that the Heritage plan has the backing of virtually the entire conservative movement and links to numerous former Trump officials and advisers, it appears all but inevitable that Trump and his allies will rely on the policies and personnel assembled by Project 2025 if he is reelected in November.
Connections between Trump and his allies to the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 include:
- Trump gave the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation’s annual leadership conference in April 2022, where he said the organization is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” “He’s going to be so incredible,” Trump said of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. “I know that for a fact, because I know what he did and where he came from, and he’s going to be outstanding, and congratulations to his very exciting new role and a very important role.” [Media Matters, 7/8/24; Twitter/X, 7/11/24]
- CNN reported that there are “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump.” CNN’s review also found that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, … including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.” [CNN, 7/11/24]
- 31 of the 38 core Project 2025 writers and editors reportedly worked in Trump’s administration and/or transition. [Twitter/X, 7/8/24]
- The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee nominated Project 2025 author Russ Vought as the policy director of the RNC’s 2024 Committee on the Platform. Vought, who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, has also authored a chapter in Mandate for Leadership [Media Matters, 5/21/24]
- Heritage's Kevin Roberts boasted that Americans are “excited about the possibility for those areas where President Trump and Project 2025 significantly overlap.” [Media Matters, 10/4/24]
