Trump’s Wild Crackdowns and Project 2025: Spot the Difference
For someone who insisted he had never heard of Project 2025, Donald Trump is doing a spot-on job of bringing the right-wing playbook to life.
In the two weeks following his inauguration, Trump has already ticked off some key deliverables in the conservative blueprint to overhaul the executive branch.
The pathway for the next Republican president has turned out to be a roadmap—and Trump is following the route with unerring accuracy.
Measures on DEI, immigration, finance, and FEMA are so close to the right-wing roadmap’s suggestions that Elon Musk could probably stick a DOGE stamp on it and make it official.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump told a nationwide TV audience during the debate with Joe Biden that kyboshed any hopes the then president had of a second term. Later, Trump would say that Democrats kept raising the extreme measures contained in the 900-page plan to scare voters but he hadn’t read it.
Fast forward and Trump was already instituting some of the project’s recommendations the day he was sworn back into the West Wing.
CNN claimed two-thirds of Trump’s opening orders mirrored recommendations in Project 2025.
“They’re home runs,” former Project 2025 director Paul Dans told CBS News. “They are in many cases more than we could have even dared hope for.”
In his introduction to the project, Dans wrote: “History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days.
“To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. In recent election cycles, presidential candidates normally began transition planning in the late spring of election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late.”
Dans was unavailable to comment to the Daily Beast, but sources in the Trump White House suggest the blueprint crafted in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation may well have a bigger role to play in the right-leaning revolution the president is spearheading.
The program runs through every department from the White House down, making recommendations on how it believes they could be improved. In some cases, such as with the Department of Homeland Security, it suggests doing away with it, altogether.
While Project 2025 is public, the project also includes a “fourth pillar”—an unpublished document plotting Trump’s first 180 days in office. The president may be using it as a brief. He’s certainly not saying.
Here’s how Project 2025 and Trump 2.0 line up:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Programs
It took Trump no time at all to make good on his pledge to go to war on DEI. He signed an executive order on his first day ending all federal government DEI programs. “Nondiscrimination and equality are the law; DEI is not,” says Project 2025, which called for the termination of the Biden administration’s “wrongful and burdensome ideological projects.”
Immigration and Border Security
More troops to the border, more immigrant detention centers, more stop-and-search regulations, and a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Project 2025 has all these things down on paper. Trump actually did them.
Funding Crackdowns
The president should “use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government… Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.” That was Project 2025. More specifically, it was written by Russell Vought, now working as Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget. Enough said. USAID frozen, federal assistance frozen (briefly), defunding the Department of Education. Need we go on?
Global Warming
It was a no-brainer for Project 2025—quit the Paris Climate Agreement. Done by Trump on the first day.
Drill, Baby, Drill
Project 2025 blames the energy crisis on the nation’s “extreme ‘green’ policies” and calls for all of America’s energy resources to be unleashed. Trump has declared a national energy emergency and urged the nation to “drill, drill, drill.”
America First Foreign Policy
Trump was quick to back out of the World Health Organization (for the second time) after settling into the White House. He threatened countries like Colombia, who rebuffed his demand to take illegal immigrants, following the same tack as that recommended by Project 2025 to “quickly and aggressively address recalcitrant countries’ failure to accept deportees by imposing stiff sanctions until deportees are in fact accepted for return (not just promised to be taken).”
Transgender Rights
“Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.” Trump may or not have been listening, but he has banned transgender people from serving in the military. While he was at it, Trump barred the use of federal cash for gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. Project 2025’s Dept. of HHS chapter demands the removal of “all guidance issued under the Biden administration concerning sexual orientation and gender identity.”
FEMA
Leave it to the states and save the money and aggravation, said Project 2025. Trump has instituted a FEMA review and said he could dump the emergency agency. “That’s what states are for, to take care of problems,” he said.
Anti-Vaxx Troops
Give the troops who refused to take their COVID-19 jabs their jobs back, said Project 2025. Done, said Trump (although he has never read the document!).