Project 2025: Trump’s Missed Opportunity

How the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 became a bête noire for both the Trump campaign and their Democrat opponents would make a good book project for some aspiring conservative writer, but a deep dive into the personalities, miscommunication and outright lies about Project 2025 is beyond the scope of our work today.

Today, we wish to merely introduce the missed opportunity entailed by Trump world’s abrupt rejection of any association with the project.

Let’s start with an understanding of what and who Project 2025 is or at least was. Back in February it was announced that over 100 conservative organizations – representing pretty much the entire organized conservative movement – had signed on as coalition partners and supporters of the Project’s four pillars: A policy agenda, personnel recruitment, training, and a 180-day playbook to kick off the next (presumably Trump) Republican administration.

At the time, Paul Dans, who was heading the Project for Heritage called getting 100 organizations on board a historic moment for the conservative movement, and he was right.

Dans, easily one of the hardest working and smartest guys in the conservative policy world, not only put together a hitherto unheard-of coalition, but he got those 100 coalition partners actually doing the hard work of producing a conservative policy agenda for the next Republican administration.

You can read their entire work product through this link.

History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute the passage of that agenda 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 the election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late.

For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start well in advance of the election, so that a new conservative President could be armed with the best ideas and advice the conservative movement had to offer.

This worked in 1980 when conservatives, through a similar project sponsored by the Heritage Foundation gave President-elect Ronald Reagan the now-famous Mandate for Leadership report.

Such a report seemed like not only a good idea, but crucial to the new administration’s success, given how the first Trump administration’s agenda was often stymied by lack of organization and support on Capitol Hill – to say nothing of the fact that the Make America Great Again movement lacked (and still lacks) a solid intellectual undergirding that could be presented to legislators and opinion leaders.

Project 2025 aimed to – and does if one takes the time to read it – remedy those deficiencies.

Unfortunately, it became increasingly apparent that some inside the Trump campaign were not exactly interested in any unsolicited outside advice.

Having worked in over 300 campaigns we get the resistance to ideas “not invented here” and the desire of the paid campaign team to run the campaign their way, and to avoid inheriting the enemies of unrelated third parties.

However, it is an extremely discouraging commentary on the lack of communication between Trump world and the conservative movement that Project 2025 was met with such overt hostility. And it begs the question, if Team Trump is not going to rely on policy advice and expertise from the 100 most influential organizations in the conservative movement, who are they listening to?

After all, the text of the document was composed by or with the input of many conservative alumni and alumnae of the first Trump administration. Is their advice no longer valued or trusted? And if it isn’t, who is going to be advising President Trump in his new administration?

At the end of the day Project 2025 was never going to be – and was never intended to be – the Trump campaign’s platform (although to our mind it is better than the platform adopted at the Republican National Convention). Project 2025 was always an aspirational document for the conservative movement to communicate to the campaign what conservatives were looking for out of the next Trump administration, and it remains so even after the public smackdown it got.

The good news for conservatives, and for those who invested so much in the creation of Project 2025, is that much of what it recommends requires legislation, and it stands on its own as a blueprint for legislative action on the MAGA agenda.

Our suggestion to our conservative friends who worked on Project 2025 is to hang on to your copies of the books and take them straight to the new conservative majority in Congress that we are working hard to elect so that President Trump can implement his agenda.

• 2024 Election

• Democrat contributions

• Marco Rubio

• 25th Amendment

• ActBlue donations

• Donald Trump campaign

• Kamala Harris campaign

• Kamala Harris senate record

• Project 2025

• Donald Trump campaign

• Heritage Foundation