On a Thursday morning in early June, I hopped off a train at Washington’s Union Station and walked a few blocks east to get a glimpse into the headquarters of one of the most secretive — and most hyped — organizations in America: Project 2025, tucked away inside the main offices of the Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill.
My visit came at an opportune moment: For months, journalists and liberal watchdog groups had been poring over Project 2025’s 900-page policy book — titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — which purports to be a “comprehensive policy guide” for the next Republican administration, including recommendations to restrict access to medical abortion, remove civil service protections for some federal workers and banning pornography. If you’ve heard a Democrat talking apocalyptically about Project 2025 in the past few months, this document is probably what they have in mind.
Over the course of my visit, I came to see that the emptiness of the Project 2025 offices at Heritage headquarters was a good metaphor for the project as whole. On both the left and the right, Project 2025 had been portrayed as a vast and well-orchestrated operation — either to rationalize and systematize Trumpism, according to some conservatives, or to undermine democracy and implement an ultra-disciplined reactionary regime, according to some liberals.
Instead, what I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership. Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House.
This article is a mirage.
“Nothing behind P2025 at all, see? So stop worrying about it and thinking about it…”
What do you expect from Politico? They’re owned by Axel Springer Verlag, founded by the wannabe Murdoch from Germany.
Axel Springer, the media company that is trying to sue Adblock in Germany saying that blocking ads infringes on their copyright? The Axel Springer that lost that suit, so now they’re re-filing again? That Axel Springer?
No but the bot said it’s high factuality so if they say Project 2025 is a mirage it must be right.
this has been a thing in writing since the 1980’s and we’ve enacted almost 75% of all the recommendations so far; it’s not the boogeyman that it’s made out to be in this election cycle.
then again; people who buy into this strawman also tend to minimize an active genocide as nothing more than a “single issue” vote so i guess you have to create something to get them to care.
Exactly. Besides, they already created their work, that 900-page manual. What’s left to do? At most, advocate, which the foundation would do anyway.