In response to yet another desperate attempt by Donald Trump and JD Vance to hide their deep ties with Project 2025, DNC Rapid Response Director Alex Floyd released the following statement: 

“Project 2025 has always been and is still Donald Trump and JD Vance’s extreme MAGA blueprint. There is nothing that the Trump-Vance ticket can do or say to change the fact that they are fully backing Project 2025’s dangerous plans to rip away freedoms by banning abortion nationwide, threaten our democracy by gutting checks and balances, and rig the economy for billionaires and big corporations at the expense of working families. Americans know that Project 2025 is ‘undeniably a Trump-driven operation,’ and they will reject the Trump-Vance ticket and their out-of-touch, far-right platform in November.”

FACT: Donald Trump and his campaign are closely aligned with Project 2025 – it is “undeniably a Trump-driven operation.”

Axios: “This is undeniably a Trump-driven operation. The biggest tell: Johnny McEntee — one of Trump’s closest White House aides, and his most fervent internal loyalty enforcer — is a senior adviser to Project 2025. One of the most powerful architects is Stephen Miller, a top West Wing adviser for the Trump administration.”

Politico: “Many of the authors of the blueprint are former Trump officials, and the Heritage Foundation has spent the past year-plus recruiting people to implement the plans within the administration, Scott said.

“‘So they don’t just have a long, sprawling policy document,’ he said, ‘they also have a growing list of staff who are being tested to see if they are loyal to Trump and if they are willing to administer this in his potential administration.’

“While groups like Heritage have put forward conservative policy proposals in the past, Scott said Project 2025 is distinct in that it’s so comprehensive and far-reaching.

“‘It has so many groups contributing to it. It’s the whole conservative policy movement gathered together,’ he said.”

The Week: “Many of Trump’s indicated plans for a second term fall in line with the Project 2025 outline.”

New York Times: “Roberts told me that he views Heritage’s role today as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’ This includes leading Project 2025, a transition blueprint that outlines a plan to consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system that Roberts views as stacked against conservative power. The lesson of Trump’s first year in office, Roberts told me, is that ‘the Trump administration … simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.’”

FACT: Trump and Vance are backing the same policies in the Project 2025 agenda from banning abortion nationwide to loyalty tests for civil servants to cruel mass deportation schemes to tax handouts for billionaires – no matter what they call them.

Rolling Stone: “Inside the MAGA Plan to Attack Birth Control, Surveil Women and Ban the Abortion Pill”

“GOP operatives have already crafted an expansive blueprint, 887 pages long, laying out in painstaking detail how they intend to govern, including plans to leverage virtually every arm, tool and agency of the federal government to attack abortion access.”

Rolling Stone: “Trump Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide: Report”

Trump: “There of course remains a vital role for the federal government in protecting unborn life. And it’s very important.” 

Trump on if he would sign a six-week national abortion ban: “I’m looking at all options.”

CNN: “JD Vance said in 2022 he ‘would like abortion to be illegal nationally’”

“During a podcast interview in January 2022, then-candidate JD Vance said he ‘certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally’ and was ‘sympathetic’ to the view that a national ban was necessary to stop women from traveling across states to obtain an abortion.”

The Atlantic: “At the top of Vought and Dans’s must-do list for the next president: reissuing an executive order that Trump signed during his final months in office—and which President Joe Biden promptly reversed—that would allow the government to remove civil-service protections from as many as 50,000 federal jobs. The move would create a new class of employees known as Schedule F whom the president could fire at will.”

Associated Press: “Trump-era conservatives want to gut the ‘administrative state’ from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.”

Trump Campaign: “President Trump has announced a ten-point plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption:

1. On Day One, re-issue 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats.”

Vox: “If I was giving him one piece of advice” for a second term, Vance said on a 2021 podcast:

“Fire every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

CNN: “Project 2025’s proposals for reforming the country’s immigration laws appear heavily influenced by those who helped execute Trump’s early enforcement measures. Former acting US Customs and Border Protection chief Mark Morgan and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan – the faces of Trump’s polarizing policies – contributed to the project, as did Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, one of the policy advisers pushing to end certain immigrant protections behind the scenes.”

Mother Jones: “On the Anniversary of Family Separation, the Heritage Foundation Hosted the Policy’s Intellectual ‘Father’”

“Homan is also helping lay the groundwork for a potential second Trump presidency’s mass deportation plans.”

New York Times: “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans”

“To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.”

Education Week: “Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy agenda that proposes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, has become a dominating force in the 2024 election campaign as President Joe Biden and Democrats use it to make their case against former President Donald Trump.” 

Trump Campaign: “President Trump pledges to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and to send all education work and needs back to the States.”

Project 2025: “The corporate income tax rate should be reduced to 18 percent. The corporate income tax is the most damaging tax in the U.S. tax system, and its primary economic burden falls on workers because capital is more mobile than labor.”

CBS News: “Millions of low- and middle-class households would likely face significantly higher taxes under the Project 2025’s proposals.

“He estimated that a middle-class family with two children and an annual income of $100,000 would pay $2,600 in additional federal income tax if they faced a 15% flat tax on their income due to the loss of the 10% and 12% tax brackets. If the Child Tax Credit were also eliminated, they would pay an additional $6,600 compared with today’s tax system, Duke said.” 

Washington Post: “Trump and his advisers have discussed deeper cuts to both individual and corporate tax rates that would build on his controversial 2017 tax law. … Trump’s advisers, though, have discussed proposals to make deeper cuts to the overall corporate tax rate, potentially to as low as 15 percent, or to use the revenue from the proposed tariffs to pay a dividend to U.S. households. Further cutting corporate taxes … would primarily benefit large firms.”

FACT: JD Vance also has deep ties to Project 2025 and has praised the extreme MAGA agenda as containing “good ideas.”

Vance: “I’ve reviewed a lot of [Project 2025]. There are some good ideas in there.”

Vox: “Vance is on record supporting these [Project 2025] ideas. Last year, he signed a letter demanding that the Justice Department prosecute physicians and pharmacists ‘who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws.’ In 2022, he said he was ‘sympathetic’ to the idea that the federal government should stop efforts to help women traveling out of their states to get abortions. … The second controversial area where Vance is sympatico with Project 2025 is centralizing presidential power over the executive branch.”

The New Republic: “Project 2025 Leader Is Overjoyed by Trump’s Vice Presidential Pick”

Nick Corasaniti, New York Times: “[Heritage president Kevin Roberts] reacted to the news [of Vance’s VP selection] ‘with a broad smile on my face’ and said that ‘privately, we were really rooting for him.’”

Gram Slattery, Reuters: “Vance is very close to Heritage and even wrote the forward for a book from the think tank’s president. Project 2025 is of course organized by Heritage.”

Vox: “Kevin Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the driving force behind Project 2025, told Ward that ‘[Vance] is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.’”

Vance: “I want to thank especially Kevin Roberts and all the Heritage Foundation for 50 years of incredible work on conservative policy.”

Vance: “I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, is fire every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant… replace them with our people.”

Politico: “The résumés of Vance’s senior staffers read like a phone book for the New Right ecosystem in Washington: the Claremont Institute, American Compass, the Conservative Partnership Institute, Hillsdale College.”

Politico: Project 2025 author and RNC Platform Committee Policy Director Russ Vought is a “close ally of Vance.”

Washington Post: “Vance urged DOJ to enforce Comstock Act, crack down on abortion pills”

FACT: Americans are learning more and more about the Trump-Vance ticket’s extreme and unpopular Project 2025 agenda – and rejecting this dangerous and out-of-touch MAGA blueprint.

Navigator Research: “Project 2025 Has Become Significantly More Unfavorable Since Trump Attempted to Distance Himself From the Plan”

“Project 2025 has seen a significant increase in both awareness and unfavorability since our last survey in June. 54 percent of Americans report being familiar with Project 2025… Among those familiar with the Project 2025, just 11 percent view it favorably, while 43 percent view it unfavorably.”

“When people are asked what negative news they have heard recently concerning Donald Trump, mentions of Project 2025 have dramatically increased. … A plurality of Americans believe Project 2025 accurately represents what Trump stands for.”

Navigator Research: “Americans oppose all the key elements in Project 2025, with the greatest concerns around health care, worker’s rights, and dismantling federal programs. Over four in five Americans oppose an array of policies proposed in Project 2025 such as ‘allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime’ … Additionally, four in five oppose ‘allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry.’”

“Americans’ overall opposition to Project 2025 increases after reading about its specific policy goals.”

“Three in five Americans say Project 2025 would benefit the wealthiest Americans, CEOs, and corporations.”

Miami Herald: “As Americans learn more about Project 2025, they become more opposed, poll finds”