Project 2025 Co-Author Says It’s Time to ‘Rehabilitate’ Christian Nationalism
Donald Trump is wishing his attachment to Project 2025 would disappear, but its top brass has no problem bragging to anyone who will listen about their access to the former president.
In undercover recordings produced by the Centre for Climate Reporting, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought touts his connections to the Trump campaign, and claims that he is close enough to the former president to hand-deliver the proposals concocted by Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation.
According to the complete transcripts of the recordings provided to Rolling Stone, Vought says that Project 2025 has “got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that we’re planning for the next administration.” Vought says that the plans — which include draft executive orders — are being kept in “very, very close hold” from the public.
Vought reassures the undercover journalists, posing as prospective donors, that he’s unfazed by Trump’s public denials of a relationship with Project 2025, and that his concern is ensuring Republicans are prepared for Trump’s return to office. “President Trump will want to spend literally zero amount of time thinking or contemplating what a transition will look like. It’s not how he thinks,” Vought says. “We create battle plans and then we start to implement them ourselves.”
“He’s been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it,” adds Vought, who’s also the president of the Center for Renewing America.
Beyond the plans to hit the ground running if Trump wins in November, Vought speaks in candid detail about his views on specific issues dominating Republicans 2024 platform.
At one point, he tells his interviewers, “I want to make sure that we can say, ‘We’re a Christian nation.’ And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be ‘Christian nationism.’ That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.” Vought then adds that it’s time to “rehabilitate Christian nationalism,” as part of the mission to embrace the country’s “Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”
Vought makes clear that while Trump may be deferring to individual states on the question of reproductive freedom — and highlighting exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of a pregnant person in his discussions of abortion restrictions — he doesn’t agree with those carveouts, and he doesn’t think Trump will stick to his current position if elected.
“I don’t actually believe in those exceptions, but I understand it from an electoral standpoint,” he says.
“What I’ve told people is [that Trump] had the most pro-life record ever. Every decision that got to him, including ones that I thought would go against us — we had one where it was very contentious over banning fetal tissue research, and he went with life on that,” Vought adds, affirming that Trump was the president “that overturned Roe v. Wade. And then, even in this, they asked for two things, and he gave it to them. Cut the guy some slack, trust the man.”
Vought explains that much of the work they do is structured around the exploitation of immediate culture-war issues in order to mask the larger, long-term goals of the party, citing the creation of a right-wing panic around critical race theory and a migrant invasion as examples.
“At the national level, we will intricately manage that momentum. You know, ‘What is the specific bill that we want? What’s the regulation?’ At the state level, we will zoom in where [it’s] strategic. And at the local level, it’s primarily just a resource,” he explains. “Our first year, our biggest priority was critical race theory. And there were others in the space that we were close to. But we were the ones that got politicians comfortable with talking about it from a race standpoint.”
“Then the invasion was our strategy for [the] second year. And then third year — which was last year — was making every budget fight and reframing them around what I think is the bureaucracy. [That] it’s woke and it’s weaponized.”
Vought seems confident that Project 2025 and the work of the Heritage Foundation would have a tangible impact on a second Trump administration. “Everyone’s aware of what we’re working on but again this is … they have an election to win,” he says. “So yeah we’re not briefing people or anything like that.”
They are, however, having very candid conversations with strangers offering them money.
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