Trump has long tried to distance himself from Project 2025. Now that he's won, his acolytes say it's the plan for a second term.Steven Senne/AP
On Wednesday morning, some of Trump’s favorite fans finally felt comfortable joking about what the next president has long denied: Project 2025 has always been the plan for a second Trump term.
“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh wrote in a post on X of the 900-plus-page extremist guidebook. Walsh’s message soon got picked up and promoted by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist who was recently released from prison, where he landed after ignoring a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee. “Fabulous,” Bannon said, chuckling, after reading Walsh’s post out loud on his War Room podcast today. “We might have to put that everywhere.”
Benny Johnson, a conservative YouTuber with 2.59 million followers who has called affirmative action “Nazi-level thinking” and said Trump should prosecute Biden for human trafficking of immigrants, also chimed in: “It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time,” he posted on X.
Bo French, a local Texas GOP official who recently came under fire for using slurs about gay people and people with disabilities on social media, wrote: “Can we admit now that we are going to implement Project 2025?”
Walsh, Bannon, and the others are not the only people in Trump’s orbit who have made these promises. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, there is a long list of his connections to it, which include many people who have similarly said that Trump plans to enact the policies if reelected. Russell Vought, a potential next chief of staff profiled by my colleague Isabela Dias, said in a secretly recorded meeting that Project 2025 is the real Trump plan and the distancing tactic was just campaign necessity.
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign, the RNC, and the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing think tank behind the plan—did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Mother Jones.
If these claims are true, then Trump could potentially see an erosion of support from his base. As I reported in September, an NBC News poll found that only 7 percent of GOP voters had positive views of Project 2025, while 33 percent held negative views. That is not entirely surprising when you consider the drastic ways it could radically reshape American life if enacted. It calls for banning abortion pills nationwide; using big tech to surveil abortion access; rolling back climate policies; enabling workplace discrimination; and worsening wealth inequality.
