One word, one date: "Project 2025" is on every Democrat's lips. As Donald Trump prepares for a triumphant nomination at the Republican convention taking place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he is encumbered by a collective work with reactionary and martial overtones, from an influential think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 presents itself as a coalition of 110 conservative organizations, which for the past two years has been preparing an exhaustive program, in all key sectors, for a future Trump administration.
Since the spring, the Biden-Harris campaign team has issued dozens of press releases about the project. But public interest reached an all-time high after the televised debate. Joe Biden's setback was also the first moment when some of the most politicized Americans became interested in the race. From June 30 onward, internet traffic indices showed a meteoric rise in consultations on the subject of Project 2025, to the point of surpassing those concerning the American Football League (NFL) and even singer Taylor Swift, the country's biggest current star.
"Google Project 2025," Biden's account on X cryptically advised on July 9. That same evening, Kamala Harris was in Las Vegas, Nevada. She worked to divert attention from Biden's health to the plan that Trump has not at least officially endorsed. "Trump's advisers have created a 900-page blueprint – called Project 2025 – detailing everything else they plan to do in a second term," said Harris, "including a plan to cut Social Security, repeal our $35 cap on insulin, eliminate the Department of Education and end programs like Head Start [help for children up to age 5]."
Project 2025 is a product of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank. The concept of a pre-election collective work is not new. The inspiration is clearly the one published to accompany Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.
But never before had the ambition been so radical. "The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values," writes the project's director, Paul Dans, who was the head of the Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration in 2020.
In February, the New Republic called the document a path to "21st-century American fascism." Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts did nothing to quell the controversy. "We're in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be," he said on The War Room, the podcast of Trump's former special adviser Steve Bannon.
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