‘Exactly What Our Movement Will Do’: Unearthed Clip Shows Trump Endorsing Work on Project 2025 — He Now Claims He Knows Nothing About
AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
Former President Donald Trump has tried to distance himself in recent days from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 25, despite telling the group in 2022 that they were crafting the “groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will.”
NBC News’s Vaughn Hillyard shared a clip from Trump’s keynote address at Heritage’s annual leadership conference, in which the former president said, “Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork.”
“And Heritage does such an incredible job at that. This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming, that’s coming,” Trump declared.
Trump, in April ’22, keynoted a Heritage dinner as it began work on Project 2025:
“This is a great group & they’re going to lay the groundwork & detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” pic.twitter.com/2ni0XESMci
— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) July 11, 2024
The Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 have been front and center in the 2024 presidential campaign as Democrats sound the alarm over the plan.
Project 2025 is a sweeping 920-page plan that would reshape the U.S. government and institute many of the hard right’s long-sought-after desires, including more limits on abortion, abolishing the Department of Education, ending workplace protections for LGBTQ people, limiting the U.S. role in NATO, and a dramatic build-up of nuclear weapons.
NBC News reported on Project 2025’s designs for reshaping the federal workforce:
The proposal’s most dramatic shift would be to reclassify thousands of federal jobs, allowing Trump to fire career employees and replace them with his picks.
This would be the most dramatic shift in the federal workforce since the 1880s, when reformers ended the partisan “spoils system,” which led to incompetence, graft and corruption within federal agencies. “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” the authors say in a foreword.
Trump posted on Truth Social last Friday, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
However, Project 2025 is not only regularly hyped by Trump allies who are likely to comprise his second administration if reelected, but it was created primarily by his former staffers.
Scripps News noted this week, “Former President Trump tried to distance himself, posting, ‘I know nothing about project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.’ Despite that claim, watchdog groups say around 80% of Project 2025 contributors are former Trump staffers, including director Paul Danz, who served in the Office of Personnel Management. Former special assistant Spencer Chretien is associate director. Peter Navarro, a former Trump official now in prison after a contempt of Congress conviction, wrote a chapter on trade policy. Former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller writes a chapter on the Department of Defense and Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt appears in a Project 2025 training video.”
Watch the clip above.
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