Trump failed to mention his guiding document in his State of the Union
Published 12:30 pm Friday, March 6, 2026
Project 2025 is a book created by a conservative organization called the Heritage Foundation.
It was produced by “a team of right-wing ideologues, including former Trump officials… [It detailed] how a second Trump administration would put flesh on the bones of his authoritarian agenda. It was a hefty, 922-page tome…. [that] had something for every would-be strongman: stiff federal restrictions on abortion; detention camps for undocumented immigrants; replacing civil servants and objective experts in federal agencies with MAGA lackeys….It was a manual for uprooting the Deep State that Trump had railed against…” (Chris Whipple. Uncharted: page 77).
While presidential candidate Donald Trump denied any knowledge of it or its authors, President Trump has incorporated about 50% of it in the first year of his second term, according to factcheck.org.
Here’s where his policies align with Project 2025 according to Simon Pierce in his book, “Project 2025: A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership”:
Dismantling Federal Agencies
Environmental Deregulation—shared skepticism of environmental protections
Civil Service Reform—end of the “Deep State”, more political appointees
DOJ Reform—President Biden “weaponized the justice system”
Immigration—mass deportations and stricter border control measures
Social Issues: reinforcing biblically based definitions of marriage and family and attacking ?radical gender Ideology”.
Media and Communications—Using the FCC to block political opposition, and exert government pressure to force legacy media to get licensing approval
Education: Shutter DOE with its “woke education cartel”, end Critical Race Theory and give parents more control over education
LGBTQ+ Issues
In Trump 2.0, Trump was given four years to plan and retool his goals and policies. Project 2025 did a lot of groundwork for him from the first days of his administration. Appointees and hires were preselected with loyalty as the goal rather than service to We the People. “[The] Heritage [Foundation] had a list of ten thousand potential appointees in its database [after Trump was the president elect]” (David A. Graham: ”The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America”: p. 31).
In Trump 2.0, the President has focused on two departments to carry out the Project 2025 agenda’s conservative vision: the Office of Management and Budget, headed by Russel Vought, a chief architect of Project 2025, and the Department of Justice, run by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
According to Russel Vought: “We want to put them [Civil Service employees] in trauma.” The plan was to discourage them so that they would resign en masse. Federal employees were seen as villains. One of the chief goals of Project 2025 was to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy, cutting costs and diminishing regulation.
Vought’s goal was to convert the DOJ from being both non-partisan and non-political in order to ensure the enforcement of the President’s policies.
“‘The notion of an independent agency… like the Department of Justice—we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,’ Vought told NPR in 2023” ( Graham p.37 ).
In 2017, President told the New York Times he had an absolute right to “do what I want to do” with the Justice Department (Graham p.37).
“Project 2025 identifies a genuine problem—lack of faith by ordinary Americans in the DOJ’s impartiality—and proposes to solve it by make the department less impartial” (p.38).
“The department falls under the direct supervision and control of the President of the United States as a component of the executive branch” (Gene Hamilton, writer of the DOJ chapter in Project 2025: Grahampp.39-40).
Project 2025 also recommended getting rid of the 10-year FBI term which Trump did by firing James Comey and forcing Christopher Wray to resign before Trump’s second term.
Why did Presidential candidate Trump deny knowledge of Project 2025 when he ran in 2024? Why didn’t he mention it in his recent State of the Union Address? According to Chris Whipple in his book, Uncharted, quoted at the beginning of this column: “Project 2025 was so extreme, it was politically radioactive” (p. 77).
Who has benefited the most from Trump’s use of Project 2025 in his second term? Wealthy individuals and major corporations who are the major financial backers of the Heritage Foundation. All we have to do is “follow the money”.
