Trump campaign’s Project 2025 bashing irks conservative loyalists

The Trump campaign’s intense pushback to Project 2025 amid sustained attacks from Democrats is frustrating conservatives inside and outside the effort who worry that the disavowal will result in the former president alienating his most loyal supporters.

It was one thing for Trump to separate himself amid Democratic messaging centering on the Heritage Foundation-led project’s policy blueprint, which sometimes differs from that of the former president and was intended to kick-start a transition to a conservative White House. 

But the extremely public criticism, with one recent statement from the Trump campaign cheering the potential demise of Project 2025, is prompting concern about potential damage to Trump’s relationship with the conservative ecosystem that supports him – as well as how it could inadvertently fuel more Democratic messaging centered on Project 2025.

“There’s been a lot of talk in MAGAworld about whether Trump has learned from the personnel mistakes of his first term. Disavowing Project 2025 is a signal to his base that he has not learned those lessons,” one former Trump administration official told The Hill. “The types of people that listen to [Steve] Bannon’s War Room are going to be very demoralized by that.”

Project 2025 is perhaps now best-known for the over-900-page “Mandate for Leadership” book of policy proposals, continuing a tradition of crafting a suggested new administration roadmap that first started in the Reagan era. 

But it also has a personnel-vetting effort filled with thousands of individuals. The idea was to kick-start recommendations to fill roles in the next administration, to avoid a repeat of the rocky 2017 Trump transition or selection of appointees who do not align ideologically.

The Trump campaign has long said that the effort does not speak for its transition work, and Project 2025 has sought to clarify the same. But the public statements have become steadily more intense as Democratic attacks have gone viral, breaking out into social media and celebrity statements.

As initial stories about Project 2025 trickled out in the fall of last year, Trump campaign senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement that while “efforts by various non-profit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful,” they would only be recommendations.

By the Republican National Convention last month, LaCivita called Project 2025 “a pain in the a--.” Last week, as news broke that Project 2025 Director Paul Dans — also a former Trump administration official — would step down from his post, the campaign was openly hostile.

“Reports of Project 2025's demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you," Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement on Tuesday.

Republican National Committee (RNC) co-chair Lara Trump piled on in a Washington Times op-ed on Thursday, calling Project 2025 an “absurd vision” that has “little, if any” common sense. 

Though the statements are intended to neutralize the Democratic attacks, one contributor to the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership policy book said that the op-ed and campaign statement were “pouring gasoline on the fire,” and has been met with a “redoubled” effort from the left to tie Project 2025 to Trump.

“The whole brouhaha is saddening,” a second contributor to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership book told The Hill, saying their own policy work was “in the hope of bringing our movement together.”

The Trump campaign statements also led a number of conservative commentators to raise concerns publicly.

“Trumpworld bows down to left-wing media lies, and keeps signaling he doesn’t want his most loyal foot soldiers — who kept with him even when very few others did — or their conservative ideas in his next administration. Interesting,” Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, posted on the social media site X on Tuesday.

Some see a misguided strategy in the insistence that the “Project 2025 is not a blueprint for anything resembling a second Trump administration,” as Lara Trump put it in her op-ed.

There are some notable policy splits between the think tank wishlist and Trump, such as on the politically tricky issue of abortion: Whereas Project 2025 calls to rescind federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, Trump has said he will not block access to abortion pills.

But there is also plenty of overlap. The Trump-approved 2024 GOP platform, for instance, calls to “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY,” while the Project 2025 policy book says the next administration must prioritize “border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation.” Many former Trump administration officials wrote sections of the policy book.

“If they don't want to go with the ideas in the book, that's fine, but there's lots of great ideas in the book,” the first Project 2025 contributor said. “You'd have to be creative to come up with a lot of policy ideas that are not in the book.”

Another source, from a conservative organization outside the Heritage Foundation but one that is supportive of the project, said that the core dispute is not actually about policy, but about who would be in control of the next Trump administration.

“The idea that, like, ‘oh, Project 2025, is hurting us’ is absurd,” the person said. “Everyone who's really honest – what's really manifesting here is sort of a power struggle over who's going to decide the personnel for the next administration.”

“Of course the President is going to pick his personnel, no matter who it is,” the person added, saying that Project 2025 was not intended to forcefully push personnel in.

There is a possibility that despite the public criticism now, Trump could still take the think tank’s recommendations to assemble his transition if he wins. His campaign has not publicly announced a transition team head yet, falling behind the timeline in 2016, when former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) was announced as head of the transition in May.

“We'll see how this cookie crumbles. I – or the people I know who worked on [Project 2025] – don't feel blackballed. And still are working like dogs to get Trump elected,” the second Project 2025 contributor said. “I don't like seeing Republicans go after their own, but this is a political campaign.”

A Trump campaign official told The Hill that the campaign is focused on securing victory on Election Day, and “will be ready to transition President Trump to the White House in January 2025."

Asked about the conservative criticism of how it is handling Project 2025, the Trump campaign provided a statement from Senior Adviser Danielle Alvarez reiterating its independence from outside policy efforts that Democrats highlight.

“President Trump's 20 promises to the forgotten men and women and RNC Platform are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term,” Alvarez said in the statement. “Dangerously liberal Kamala Harris and the DNC are LYING and fear-mongering because they have NOTHING else to offer the American people. Remember these are the same people that lied to Americans and hid Joe Biden’s cognitive decline all these years.”