A resurfaced video from two years ago shows former President Donald Trump endorsing the plan that would become known as Project 2025, an ultra-conservative roadmap for the next Republican president to drastically reshape the government — contradicting Trump’s recent claims that he has nothing to do with the initiative.
On Thursday, MSNBC aired the clip, which shows Trump speaking at an event held by the Heritage Foundation, the organization that developed Project 2025, in April 2022. Among other items, Project 2025 includes calls to “maintain a biblically based” abortion policy, roll back LGBTQ rights, upend the civil service program, and establish a Christian nationalist government in the U.S.
The video shows Trump claiming that the Heritage Foundation was going to “lay the groundwork” for the future of the conservative movement.
Heritage is “a great group,” Trump goes on, stating that they will create “detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do” if he and Republicans win control of the federal government in this fall’s elections.
At the 2022 event, Trump was introduced to the stage by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. Roberts recently said on a right-wing media channel that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution,” adding that things “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
“They’re going to work on some other things that are going to be very exciting, I think, Kevin, I think maybe the most exciting of all,” Trump said in the 2022 video, describing his anticipation for the then-unnamed Project 2025.
Although he was adamant in his support for the project in 2022, Trump attempted to disavow Project 2025 earlier this month, claiming he wasn’t affiliated with it in any way.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump wrote in a social media post.
The newly-released video seems to contradict that statement. But there have been other indications that Trump’s claims are disingenuous, including the fact that dozens of former Trump officials took part in authoring Project 2025, and that Heritage is a key sponsor of the Republican National Convention, where Trump is set to be officially nominated as the GOP candidate next week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Trump appears to be distancing himself from Heritage and Project 2025 in a manner strategically similar to his attempts to soften how voters perceive his views on abortion. In recent weeks, Trump has tried to portray himself as supporting a “states’ rights” stance on the procedure. In reality, however, Trump has openly celebrated the fact that his three appointments to the Supreme Court helped upend federal abortion abortion protections — and earlier this year, Trump expressed support for a nationwide abortion ban.
Polling demonstrates that although the American public is largely unfamiliar with Project 2025, the plan is deeply unpopular when people learn about its proposals.
According to an Accountable.US/Upswing poll on Project 2025 conducted in May, only 12 percent of Americans knew a “great deal” or “a lot” about the right-wing set of proposals. After a “straight reading” of what Project 2025 is — describing the plan, without details, as being a “collection of policy proposals that will reshape the executive branch of American government in the next conservative presidency” — favorability for Project 2025 went up.
But support dropped when specifics were discussed, the poll found.
For example, 87 percent opposed cutting Social Security benefits for younger workers, and 86 percent said they opposed eliminating the Head Start program. Seventy-seven percent disapproved of passages that aim to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ people, 68 percent opposed criminalizing abortion medication, and 82 percent were against allowing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to increase abortion surveillance. Seventy-nine percent also opposed the plan to allow presidents to fire employees in the civil service program based on their loyalties to them.
After those policies and more were thoroughly explained, 66 percent of respondents in the poll said they had a negative view of Project 2025, while only 25 percent said they approved.
That poll’s findings appear to have been confirmed by another survey. A Navigator Research poll in June similarly found that 7 in 10 respondents didn’t know enough about Project 2025 to formulate an opinion. When presented with 19 specific policies within the proposal, however, their views drastically changed, with 63 percent saying they opposed Project 2025 and only 24 percent approving.
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