Trump Just Pulled a Streisand

The rules of the Streisand Effect dictate that Project 2025 is now back in the news and a bigger story than ever.

On Tuesday, the Trump campaign announced that it would “welcome” any reports of Project 2025’s “demise” and warned anyone trying to “misrepresent” the Project’s influence with Trump that “[i]t will not end well for you.”

What appropriately sinister words to demonstrate how you want to run away from a blueprint for authoritarianism.

There’s one big problem with this dodge. As Lincoln Project member Rick Wilson astutely noted, they forgot about the “Streisand Effect.” That’s an evergreen social phenomenon where, as is common in presidential politics, the cover up only makes things that much worse.

Babs herself learned this when, back in 2003, her lawyer tried to suppress publication of a photo of her California mansion. The Streisand Effect says that the very act of trying to hide your connection to something renders it all the more irresistible to the press and the public. Now millions have seen Barbra Streisand’s tone-deaf piece of sky monstrosity in erosion-prone Malibu.

Project 2025 was just starting to fade from the news, given the hubbub around Joe Biden’s withdrawal and the meteoric rise of Kamala Harris because, well, happy days are here again. But now the Trump campaign, in its infinite wisdom, has thrust it back into the spotlight by lying openly about its clear ties to it. So I’ll do my part and amplify those here once again.

In today’s piece, I’ll walk quickly through all the ways Trump is connected to Project 2025. Feel free to cite these ties to anyone who questions Trump’s connection. Then I’ll discuss what the departure of Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, definitely does not mean. You’ll likely conclude, as I did after piecing together what is really going on, that Project 2025 is very much not dead. On the contrary, it is very much alive and merely lying in wait.

Trump owns Project 2025

In many respects, Trump’s furious efforts to put distance between himself and the radioactive waste that is Project 2025 are somewhat comical. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observed,

The point is that Project 2025 always WAS the Trump transition team, both for policy and personnel. Everyone in political journalism and politics knows this. And the Trump campaign bragged about it. Until it started driving bad headlines.

So, what kind of fool does he take us all for? Let’s walk through the evidence we already have of his deep connection to Project 2025.

Exhibit One: Trump’s fingerprints all over the 900+ page document:

• Trump’s name appears in the document over 300 times. 

• It’s called Project 2025 because that’s the year he would become President. It’s not called Project 2029 or Project 2034, or some other unspecified year.

Exhibit Two: Trump’s deep connection to the people behind it. He wasn’t just left in the dark. I did a whole piece on this earlier, but here’s a recap of the way we were with these folks:

• Project 2025’s authors and advisors include 140 people from his administration, including six former cabinet members.

• The policy director of the Republican National Committee, Russell T. Vought, was also Trump’s former budget director and wrote the section on executive orders. The RNC is controlled by Trump.

• A key senior advisor to Project 2025 is John McEntee, the former White House personnel chief who cleaned house after Trump elevated him. (He was once literally Trump’s bag boy.)

• Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, wrote the foreword to a new book by The Heritage Foundation’s president. In it, he wrote, “The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” Whoops!

• Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and his former senior advisor and speech writer, Stephen Miller, appeared in recruitment videos for the “Presidential Administration Academy.”

Exhibit Three: Numerous statements and appearances tying his administration to the work of the Heritage Foundation.

• Trump spoke glowingly about the plans at a dinner sponsored by The Heritage Foundation in April 2022, saying: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” 

• The Heritage Foundation’s president openly claimed his mission was to “institutionalize Trumpism” and that they learned the lesson of Trump’s first year in office: The “Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”

• Per reporting by the Guardian, Trump “gave the signature speech at a Heritage conference after Kevin Roberts took over the foundation. When Roberts was tapped for the role, Trump said he would be ‘so incredible’ and ‘outstanding.’”

Project 2025 didn’t die

Despite the characterization of the project’s “demise” by the Trump campaign, who by now probably truly wish it would die, Project 2025 is not going to suddenly disappear just because its director, Paul Dans, has been pushed out, no doubt at the insistence of the Trump campaign.

Indeed, Dans’s departure won’t change anything. It comes after the project “completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people,” said Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in a statement. 

But here’s the thing to know. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters pointed out, the policy work is just the first in a four part plan to take over the government. The fact that the policy work is already done simply means the rest can proceed.

What are the other steps? Personnel, training and playbook. As Jonathan Swan of the Times noted, 

Project 2025 has become inconvenient for the Trump campaign but it has produced nearly all the policy it was ever going to & owns the central personnel database in the conservative movement. Trump doesn’t yet have a functioning transition team & will likely need its resources.

That’s right: Any new Trump administration is still a bunch of people who need people.

With policy finished, the personnel, training and playbook parts have yet to come. If Trump wins the election, he’ll inevitably turn to that database of people to hire from, already vetted and trained by The Heritage Foundation via Project 2025. From there, they can begin their playbook, which includes a massive attack upon the civil service by replacing thousands of experienced, career government employees with MAGA loyalists.

As Carusone further notes, the playbook covers “the first 180 days of a new Trump administration that details specific actions that need to be taken to implement P25’s policy.” He also reminds us that “This book is being kept secret” and is in the hands of (checks notes) Russell Vought, Trump’s former budget director who is also now policy director of the Trump-controlled RNC.

Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project, who is known for his colorful descriptions and complete lack of filter, tweeted of Trump and Project 2025, “Donald Trump is losing his shit over Project 2025, which was created for him by his former staffers and which is still the roadmap for a second Trump term.” He warned that Trump “can’t escape it” because “[i]t’s a drug-resistant political STD and you’re not getting rid of it.”

Dear media and Dear Democrats: Trump has signaled, in no unclear terms, that he wants to kill all stories about his connection to Project 2025. Per the inviolable rules of the Streisand Effect, you know what must happen next.

Here are some questions you might want to ask folks involved:

• Is Project 2025 still hiring and vetting personnel? 

• Who controls the personnel database? 

• Are Project 2025 applicants receiving any training in the “Presidential Administration Academy”?

• Does Russell Vought as RNC policy director consult regularly with Trump?

• Isn’t Vought also writing the Project 2025 playbook? Can we see a copy?

• If dozens of people are still working on the other three pillars, Project 2025 isn’t dead, right? 

• And it’s still the blueprint for Trump back in office, correct?

Trump may have told Project 2025 not to rain on his parade. But those storm clouds were already gathering in force, and now that he’s tried to Streisand this all away, we just gotta move on it.

(Hat tip to all the Barbra fans out there, whom I hope I have made smile throughout my piece today.)