Project 2025 Leader Just Made It Harder for Trump to Distance Himself
One day after Donald Trump was caught red-handed lying about his storied relationship with Project 2025, the president of the group behind the scheme is claiming it’s actually a good thing that the Republican presidential nominee is playing down his favor with the agenda—all while admitting that the two are, actually, very close.
Speaking with right-wing commentator Michele Tafoya on her podcast Thursday, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said “it’s good” that Trump is trying to “distance [his] campaign” from Project 2025, which he described as a platform for “any candidate to lean on.” But in doing so, he also let slip that his relationship with Trump—who insisted in July that he had “no idea who is behind” Project 2025—was “very good.”
“To the heart of your question, our relationship with Mr. Trump and his advisers remains very good,” Roberts said. “It’s one where we’re not coordinating at all.”
Heritage Foundation President and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts: It's good that President Trump and his campaign distance their campaign from anything else ... They're trying to win an election. ... Our relationship with Mr. Trump and his advisors remains very good. pic.twitter.com/HSuVpXdnbP
— Media Matters (@mmfa) August 8, 2024
Instead, according to Roberts, the massive overlap between Project 2025, the RNC, and Trump’s official campaign platform, Agenda 47, is simply because they all fall in the same “big lane.”
Donald Trump has spent weeks trying to disavow Project 2025 since it became clear just how deeply unpopular the christo-nationalist agenda is among American voters. He even went as far as to claim that he knew “nothing about Project 2025” after Roberts called for a “bloodless” revolution. But the renewed insistence that the two have no direct correlation comes just one day after photographic evidence emerged of Trump and Roberts taking a private flight together in April 2022 to a Heritage Foundation conference—where Trump was slated as the keynote speaker.
“I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025,” Roberts told The Washington Post that month, “because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”
Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy and was designed to be a transition playbook to expedite the first 180 days of a potential second Trump presidency. But the 920-page Christian-nationalist manifesto boasts what would otherwise be considered outrageous policy positions, including dismantling staples of the executive branch, such as the Department of Education.