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.
“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”
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.
Don’t care, I have no sympathy for those that lack empathy. Everyone that touched that document is a douche, and I hope it stains their careers for decades. Shoestring staff or not, it’s still a terrible document that spells the death of this nation as we know it now. If anything this article makes me despise the people working on it more, due to the fact that they are working on it against such odds means they believe this is Gods mission for them to get this thing live. We will see this thing morph into actual policy in a decade unless we stop now and shame everyone that thought any of it was a good idea.
There’s nothing about this that’s a “mirage”. It’s what these people actually think and want to implement.
I don’t think anyone every thought conservatives would become ‘ultra-disciplined’ because of 2025. I don’t know where they get that notion.
No the fear was that it would facilitate a legal version of the fake electors scheme via unitary executive theory… Which if you look at the Wikipedia for Project 2025, is the theory that it’s trying to implement.
just because p2025 people are allegedly incompetent and wasteful at being evil scheming fuckers doesn’t absolve them of responsibility or consequences of being evil scheming fuckers
