Kamala Harris’s campaign warned Democrats not to be fooled by statements from the Trump campaign after the director of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” policy effort announced that he would step down.
While two top advisers to the former president claimed victory in a statement that blustered about the fates of any Republican who falsely claimed to speak for Donald Trump, the Harris campaign and even the Heritage Foundation said that the bulk of Project 2025’s work would continue.
Begun by the Heritage Foundation in concert with countless other conservative groups, Project 2025 is a wide-ranging blueprint for instituting major right-wing policy platforms and radically reshaping the federal government to fit a conservative vision. It calls for the removal of whole agencies, major reductions to the federal workforce, and other changes including the erosion of the Justice Department’s political independence from the White House.
On Tuesday, the project’s director, former Trump administration personnel official Paul Dans, resigned from his position at Heritage as the think tank announced that the project would end its’ active policy work.
Shortly after, Trump campaign heads Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles issued a joint statement warning that Dans and others associated with Project 2025 were trying to “misrepresent” Donald Trump’s views.
“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” they said.
“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign— it will not end well for you.”
But a statement from the Heritage Foundation’s director Kevin Roberts quickly assured the project’s supporters that the group’s work would continue, even with Dans stepping aside: “P25 is not shutting down.”
“Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.”
The Harris campaign, meanwhile, warned that the former president’s efforts to distance himself from the political blowback surrounding Project 2025 “should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding,” as campaign officials maintain that the lengthy blueprint for policy changes was “his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country”.
The announcement, which caught some Heritage staffers by surprise, came after months of bad press for the right-wing project which generated anger from the Trump campaign over reporting linking Trump and the former Trump administration officials involved in the project to the unpopular policy proposals detailed in its’ 900-plus page manifesto, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.
Dans himself said in an email to colleagues announcing his departure that he was leaving his post to focus on helping conservatives “win bigly” during the upcoming general election.
The group’s work included contributions from multiple ex-Trump administration officials and staffers, many of whom maintain ties to Trump’s campaign and political operation today.
Dans’ ouster was the project of a pressure campaign mounted against Heritage by LaCivita, the Trump campaign boss, in an effort to close off what has become a potent line of attack against the ex-president.
For months, Harris, President Biden, and other top Democrats have been citing Project 2025 as a clear and present danger to American democracy while reciting a litany of policy ideas detailed in its pages as reasons for Democratic voters to turn out to vote against Trump and other Republicans this fall.
Kyle Herrig, the executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project — one of the Democratic groups that has been highlighting Project 2025’s implications for voters — called Dans’ exit a mere fig leaf that “does not change a thing” about the threat posed by the project.
“Unfortunately for our country, Paul Dans’ resignation is not going to stop MAGA Republicans. Convicted felon Donald Trump and his lackey JD Vance support the extreme Project 2025 agenda and his resignation does not change the fact that they want to impose it on the American people. Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow MAGA Republicans in Congress have been pushing policies outlined in Project 2025, all while doing everything in their power to try to get Donald Trump back into the White House,” he said, adding that “Americans are still threatened” by it.