Once Enemies, Trumpists and Mainstream Conservatives Are Now Chillingly United

This week, delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) officially voted to adopt their new platform. Looming large behind the formal adoption of the party’s platform is Project 2025, a “governing agenda” that, by its own description, seeks to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left.” Press coverage of Project 2025 has ramped up considerably over the last few months, as has anxiety outside of the Republican Party about what the agenda could mean for the future of the country. Media attention has grown to such a fever pitch in recent weeks that Donald Trump felt obligated to distance himself, professing to have “no idea” who was behind the initiative. While a cursory look at the authors behind the policy guide easily gives the lie to Trump’s claim, it is less clear at first glance what the relationship between Project 2025 and the official RNC platform is. A closer examination reveals that whatever daylight once existed between the more clinical, stuffy conservatism of the inside-the-Beltway class and Trump’s red meat populism has all but evaporated in the 2024 Republican Party platform.

The tenets of Project 2025 are concretized in the Heritage Foundation’s current version of the Mandate for Leadership, now in its ninth edition. The Mandate has been published by the Heritage Foundation — arguably the most prominent conservative think tank in the U.S. — since the early days of the Reagan administration. These books, which often run for hundreds of pages, are essentially right-wing policy wish lists, fleshed out with statistics, talking points and history lessons. The books have a long track record of providing the basis for policy in various Republican administrations. As far back as the Reagan presidency, in fact, authors who had worked to craft the first edition of the Mandate for Leadership were subsequently hired to work directly under Reagan, establishing a trend that continues in Republican politics to this day. The Mandate for Leadership series is also noted for its extreme specificity and for providing an extraordinarily detailed playbook that incoming Republican administrations can begin to use immediately to execute right-wing policy objectives.

In this sense, Trump’s adoption of the recommendations in the Project 2025 book would not represent much of a departure from decades of Republican policy making. What is different, though, is the extent to which Trump’s particular brand of politics has informed the text of Project 2025, which has in turn refined and operationalized Trump’s nativist, autocratic and anti-bureaucratic impulses, creating a feedback cycle of increasingly far right policy.

At the highest level, Project 2025 and the RNC platform are united in one, overarching goal: destroying the administrative state. Where the RNC platform promises to “slash Regulations that stifle jobs” and vows to shutter federal agencies like the Department of Education, Project 2025’s authors are more overt: “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people” reads the heading of one of the four promises that it suggests a Republican president should make to voters. Both documents, though, are united in their opposition to regulation and bureaucratic administration, blamed variously for stifling business innovation, hastening inflation and hindering technological advancement.

The parallels between the two documents continue in this fashion. The RNC platform, written in Trump’s unmistakable cant, traffics in folksiness, braggadocio and ad hominem attacks on perceived enemies (e.g. “foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists”). Meanwhile, the Mandate uses language more typical of an august Washington, D.C. institution. Where Project 2025’s authors write, “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized,” The RNC platform promises to “reverse the Democrats’ destructive Open Borders Policies that have allowed criminal gangs and Illegal Aliens from around the World to roam the United States without consequences.” While the packaging and intended audience of these documents might differ, the actual contents of each are remarkably similar.

The connections between Trump’s orbit and Project 2025 go far beyond similarities in platform, too. According to Newsweek, 31 contributors to the Project 2025 blueprint served in various capacities in Trump’s first administration. That includes Paul Dans and Steven Groves, who edited the entire 920-page blueprint document. Former administration officials now involved with Project 2025 served in a range of roles under Trump, representing a wide breadth of experience and area expertise. Where earlier Republican administrations had routinely hired Heritage staff who had worked on the Mandate series, the communion between Trump’s underlings and the ninth edition is unique: Former administration officials have authored a policy document to inform the incoming Trump administration, which in turn may employ them again to implement and execute the very policies they recommended.

The close working relationship between the Heritage Foundation and once and future Trump bureaucrats is even more remarkable when one considers how intensely the Heritage Foundation opposed Trump’s candidacy in the early days of his first campaign. In the run up to the 2016 Republican primary, Heritage members openly disparaged Trump, with one senior member calling Trump a “clown” who “needs to be out of the race” on Fox News. As the 2016 election approached, Heritage’s then-President Jim DeMint declined to make a recommendation regarding whether to support Trump’s candidacy. Trump’s brand of firebrand populism was aesthetically foreign to Heritage and his muddled ideology raised fears that he was an unreliable standard-bearer for Heritage’s brand of conservative policy making. As a vice president at Heritage put it, “Donald Trump is not a conservative—he’s a reality TV star.”

At the highest level, Project 2025 and the RNC platform are united in one, overarching goal: destroying the administrative state.

By the middle of the first Trump administration, though, Heritage’s leadership was singing a different tune. Despite their contrasting approaches, the Trump administration and Heritage had cultivated a mutually beneficial relationship in the early days of his presidency: Trump, coming off a threadbare effort lacking the deep bench of advisors typical of a presidential campaign, desperately needed staff, and Heritage had a slew of recommendations. Heritage has long maintained a roster of “trusted movement conservatives” and was eager to have these pre-vetted ideologues staff the ranks of the incoming administration. By 2018, Heritage was bragging to the media that two-thirds of its agenda had been adopted by the Trump administration.

To say that the influence between Heritage and Trump has been unidirectional would be a gross oversimplification, though. In fact, the newly adopted RNC platform presents a kind of synthesis of Heritage’s more traditional conservatism and Trump’s populist nativism. The collaboration between the conservative think tank and the ultra-right outsiders who have been drawn into Trump’s orbit has culminated in a new brand of politics for the Republican Party.

Take, for example, the approach to military spending and European military alliances recommended by Heritage in the previous edition of the Mandate for Leadership, released in 2016. In that edition, the authors recommended emboldening NATO to “send a strong message to Russia” and encouraged shoring up military spending in Europe to check “Russian adventurism in Eastern Europe.” Trump’s NATO-skepticism, though, has clearly had an impact on Heritage’s approach to so-called strategic alliances in Europe. Project 2025, while acknowledging that “one school of conservative thought” still promotes a bellicose stance towards Russia, recommends instead a third-way approach that foregrounds the question “What is in the interest of the American people?” Heritage goes on to recommend a restrained spending policy in Ukraine that shifts significant amounts of the fiscal burden for carrying on the Ukraine war effort to European allies. In other words, “America First” is the new slogan of conservative military policy.

Heritage is well aware of the critical role it has played in threading Trumpism into longer running conservative political traditions. Heritage’s current president, Kevin Roberts, told the New York Times in January that the foundation’s role is “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Roberts clearly feels Heritage has succeeded in this effort. As the RNC opened on July 15, he crowed to an audience at Heritage’s all-day Policy Fest, an official part of the RNC programming in Milwaukee. “For once in modern American history, we have a plan among a unified movement,” he said. Policy Fest was one of two events sponsored by Heritage at the RNC; the only other outside organization allotted that much hosting time in the official RNC schedule is the America First Policy Institute, Trump’s own public policy institute.

Ultimately, this all points to the degree that not only the Republican Party, but also significant chunks of the conservative think tank complex in the U.S. have realigned under Trump. While Heritage and its allies in traditional conservatism once viewed Trump and his coterie with suspicion and alarm, they have since developed a cozy symbiosis. And, with the Heritage Foundation now back at the forefront of right-wing policy making, a second Trump administration is surely prepared to implement the Project 2025 recommendations to the hilt.