David A Graham doesn’t say he read Project 2025 so you don’t have to, but it might be inferred.
The Atlantic staff writer’s new book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America, is a swift but thorough overview of the vast far-right plan for a second Trump administration that achieved notoriety last year. Over just 138 pages, a passing dream next to the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page doorstop, Graham considers the origins of Project 2025, its aims and effects so far.
There’s a reason Project 2025 came out so long.
“They’re looking at a 100-year timeframe,” Graham said. “They’re looking at things from the New Deal and saying, ‘This is where the government went wrong, and we need to fix these things. We need to change them permanently and reframe what the government does and what its relationship with every American is.’”
The New Deal is the name given to the vast expansion of the federal government under Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression and laying the foundation of the modern US state.
Project 2025 was published in 2023. As the 2024 election loomed, Democrats raised alarms about its hardline policy recommendations on issues including climate, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive healthcare and more. Incendiary rhetoric raised awareness too. Kevin Roberts, Heritage president and author of the Project 2025 foreword, said he and his allies were “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”, then peppered his own book with images of fire and destruction. In praise of Roberts, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, said it was time to “load the muskets”.
To Graham, such bellicose rhetoric was “terrifying” but also, in retrospect, a clear signpost to things to come. “To say that publicly before the election is really a strange public relations choice. It’s such a chilling thing to say. But you know, it told us what they wanted.”
Amid controversy, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and its authors. But then he won the election. At the outset of his second term, he duly unleashed slashing cuts to federal staffing and budgets and a barrage of executive orders advancing policies directly linked to Project 2025 or firmly in its spirit.
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Graham is an award-winning reporter, used to working fast. He started writing The Project “at the very end of November”, weeks after Trump defeated Kamala Harris, “and turned the book in in mid-January”.
He wrote the book, he said, because “we the press, we the American public, had talked a lot about Project 2025 during the election, and it felt like it had kind of gone away – but it remained really relevant. And I felt like there was a lot in it that I didn’t understand, and a lot that had been missed.”
During the 2024 election, experts did indeed advise that such policy plans for possible administrations have existed for decades but have rarely been enacted. The sheer size of Project 2025 might also have lulled some into a false sense of security. Like many reporters, Graham “had dabbled in parts of it”. Unlike many, he found “it was a different experience to read the whole thing altogether.
“I think it is both more radical in some ways than it came across – like, when you’re just reading atomized policies, you don’t get what a social program it is – [but] one of the other things that I think is interesting is how there are ideas that I think are either [only] fairly objectionable or might have widespread appeal, right next to ones that are totally out in right field. You’ll be in the same paragraph or in the same chapter.
“And the third thing I think is interesting is the way there are disagreements within the text, either between the authors or between the authors and Donald Trump. Those cleavages within the right I think are worth paying attention to now.”
Trump opponents looking for cleavages will not find them in the influential office of management and budget, now directed by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist, advocate of “traumatizing” political enemies, and Project 2025 co-author. The original director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, fell victim to political necessity in 2024, forced out of the Heritage Foundation as Trump came under pressure – but remains a true believer, recently declaring Trump’s actions in office to be beyond his “wildest dreams”.
But there is also Elon Musk. The world’s richest man has led Trump’s so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge, in attacking federal agencies and departments with startling speed and recklessness.
“This is one of the places I have been most surprised,” Graham said, “because I think the methods that they lay out [in Project 2025] are really important. I thought that an important part of this was going to be how deeply people like Russ Vought had thought about, ‘OK, how can we work within the bounds of the law to achieve these things? How can we rework the bureaucracy?’ And in fact, Musk came in and just blasted right through it and made it a lot easier for them, and a lot faster. I certainly didn’t expect that. It’s not contemplated in the book or in the original document.”
Nor are Trump’s beloved tariffs much loved by Project 2025 and its free-trade-loving authors.
Graham said: “There are these big differences within Project 2025. The most obvious place is the chapters on tariffs … they [also] disagree with Trump on Ukraine. They’re much more hawkish on Ukraine, and anti-Russia. You have this sort of standard, ‘We stand up for Israel, We oppose Iran,’ sort of thing, but foreign policy is barely mentioned. It’s all about China. And Trump talks the talk on China, but then many of the things he’s doing, like tariffs, which are discussed in Project 2025 but not as a major priority, are alienating the rest of the world, which makes it very hard to take on China.
“But then, even something as small as how to handle childcare, you have different people having different views [within Project 2025]. One of the things that jumps out at me is they did a really good job of figuring out how to meld these longstanding social and religious conservative priorities on to Maga. They find places where they can work with Trump.
Trump is very interested in talking about trans rights and Democrats, and men are very interested in fighting back much more broadly on gender norms, LGBTQ+ rights, and so … Project 2025 becomes sort of like a tip of the spear to get Trump’s attention. They care about “wokeness”, and DEI, maybe for different reasons than he does, but they’ll attack that, and it gets him onboard.
On another key issue of Trump’s second term, Graham sees the White House and the ideologues of Project 2025 much more closely aligned.
Project 2025 is “very focused on illegal immigration, but also on legal immigration. Overall, the point is to have fewer people who are born overseas in the US, by whatever means necessary. And so they talk about mass deportation, and they talk about detention centers, but they also talk about reducing the number of visas that people get and trying to … find people who have lied on their citizenship applications, to revoke citizenship, denaturalization.
“There are things where you see maybe not a direct correlation but the same spirit. So we see in Project 2025 an argument that we need to crack down on student visas from quote, unquote, unfriendly countries, and use student visas as a sort of tool of political warfare.”
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Trump may not be implementing Project 2025 word for word but its authors have much to delight them. Conversely, Graham’s book is sprinkled with lines that prompt grim laughter.
Consider the case of James Sherk, a Trump adviser on civil service and labor issues in the first term who drafted “Schedule F”, a proposal to reclassify about 50,000 civil service jobs as political, thereby allowing a president to fire such people at will. Under Joe Biden, Schedule F was shelved. Ahead of Trump’s second term, Project 2025 advocated putting it swiftly to use.
Last year, Sherk spoke to ProPublica. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap your ability to implement your agenda.”
Under Trump, more than 260,000 government workers have been fired, taken buyouts or retired early.