Politics

Project 2025: the blueprint behind Trump's radical polices

A political initiative to reshape the US government in favour of right-wing policies is said to be Trump's second-term blueprint. Al Majalla explores its vision of "a new future for conservatism."

Sebastien Thibault

Project 2025: the blueprint behind Trump's radical polices

Bryn Haworth
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In the summer of 2024, during a campaign stop in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump addressed his ‘beautiful’ Christians. He assured them that he too was a Christian and, in a tone of tender solicitude, urged them to "Get out and vote! Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote anymore."

It was a sibylline utterance. Did he mean the audience would have everything they wanted by then? Or was he making a veiled promise that he would terminate democracy once and for all?

There were so many uncanny moments in that campaign that it was hard to keep up. That same month, Trump disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025. When he alluded to this bulky blueprint for his second term in the White House, which runs into over 900 pages, it was to dismiss it as ‘seriously extreme’: “Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25,” he said. “They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left.”

When Kevin Roberts, one of the Project’s authors at the Heritage Foundation, completed a book called Dawn’s Early Light, he was similarly hesitant. The book was only published after Trump’s victory was assured. Even then, its subtitle would suffer an alteration in tone. ‘Burning Down Washington to Save America’ became ‘Taking Back Washington to Save America.’

It's just possible that the author compensates, habitually, for having a forgettable name. He certainly isn’t the most talked-about influence on this new administration. So, although the subtitle had to be toned down somewhat, Roberts did nothing about the fiery language between the covers. There, he dismisses a whole range of institutions as ‘decadent and rootless’ serving only as ‘a shelter for our corrupt elite,’ concluding that ‘For America to flourish again, they don’t need to be reformed; they need to be burned.’

The list includes every Ivy League university, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Chinese Communist Party, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the Boy Scouts of America. To justify this conflagration, he quotes Gustav Mahler’s opinion that tradition is “the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes.”

Back in October, Roberts’ choice of language was even criticised by the former director of Project 2025, Paul Dans. Roberts had made headlines when he told Dave Brat, a former Republican congressman who was presenting Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Many took this as inflammatory and blamed it for Trump’s disavowals. “If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down,” Dans told the Washington Post, “we have to do our part as well. There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.”

Yet Roberts can’t help himself. He has referred to the old-fashioned ideologues of his own Heritage Foundation, back in the days when it powered Reagan’s policies, as ‘wax-museum conservatives’, claiming that their stale views are contributing to ‘the euthanasia of the nation.’ And then, of course, there’s the left.

In a National Conservatism (NatCon) event in London, he ranted: “The new left, greedy, elitist, woke and globalist, has foresworn every principle their ideological predecessors once espoused: democracy, equality, diversity, justice. It abhors religion, and Christianity especially, as well as the nation state, political accountability and even objective truth. Their goal is not to win political contests but to end them altogether—to sweep away dissent.”

The source of all this truculence is a religious vision of America. In yet another outburst of verbal pyrotechnics, he writes that institutions which are “contemptuous of public prayer” should probably “be burned down”.

What's behind this vehemence? Along with his Catholic faith, there is also his relationship with Opus Dei. This organisation has long been regarded by some people inside the Church as insufficiently transparent, even sinister. Outside the Church, Gareth Gore has accused it of a variety of crimes, including human trafficking and the grooming of minors.

In an interview, Gore was asked about its membership in the States: "Now, this is a Catholic organisation, so you would expect those members to be concentrated in cities with large Catholic populations...But the largest community of Opus Dei members is actually in Washington, DC, which I think tells you everything you need to know about the way the organisation operates and the type of people that it seeks to recruit. Eight hundred of the 3,000 Opus Dei members are in the DC area. That’s the result of decades of Opus Dei pumping its resources into penetrating the city. It’s always sought to infiltrate the corridors of power."

In a speech last September, Roberts acknowledged that he has visited the Catholic Information Centre—a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington—on a weekly basis for mass and “formation”, or religious guidance.

For America to flourish again, they don't need to be reformed; they (the elite) need to be burned.

Expert from Kevin Robert's 'Dawn's Early Light'

The key to the organisation is its name: Work of God. Its founder was a Spanish priest called Saint Josemaría Escrivá, who taught his flock a notion of daily holiness based on the dignity of work. His beguiling style can still be glimpsed on YouTube.

He tells a joke about two gypsies which he excuses as fictional: "There was this Andalusian gypsy stretched out on the ground, taking his siesta, and at his side his boy, also stretched out in the sun. And his father says to him, "Son, pass me the water-jug." The boy says, "I can't, cos I'm tired!" And his dad replies, "That's my boy!" 

The relaxed laughter of the adoring audience is clear evidence of Escrivá's special gift for communicating. But more to the point, the joke hinges on the perceived laziness of the gypsies. Work is the implied answer.

Pope Paul VI summarised the 'extraordinariness' of Escrivá's sanctity in this way: "He is one of those men who has received the most charisms (supernatural gifts) and have corresponded most generously to them." 

John Paul II, another papal admirer, said: "Saint Josemaría was chosen by the Lord to announce the universal call to holiness and to point out that daily life and ordinary activities are a path to holiness. One could say that he was the saint of ordinary life."

Roberts has made speeches about Escrivá's inspirational leadership but doesn't share his jocular style. In his bid to re-spiritualise America, Roberts has said he wants 'to impose religion on a porn-addled, lazy, feckless nation.' It's fair to say he rarely betrays a sense of humour. Nor, for that matter, much in the way of charisma.

But the emphasis on work is certainly there in his policies. He holds the housing crisis, low wages and insecure work partly responsible for low family formation rates. He has called for the removal of the automatic privilege that a university degree confers in order to hand power to those who went to work after high school.

Despite the libertarian reputation of Project 2025, with its 'small state' implications and plans for a bonfire of the bureaucrats, Roberts himself would not call himself a libertarian. This differentiates him from, for instance, Peter Thiel. Roberts prefers the term 'conservative' and emphasises what he calls the common good, though he's slightly vague about what that means.

Back in November 2024, he actually told his interviewers at The Texas Horn: "It's imperative that we not just argue with the libertarian understanding of a definition of freedom but eliminate it."

This doesn't sound like a matter of nuance, though it may be yet another instance of a weakness for overstatement. Perhaps the libertarian philosophy is just too unstable. Even Robert Nozick, the pioneer libertarian thinker, was not consistent in its defence. Towards the end of his career, he became increasingly uncomfortable with his concept of the 'night watchman' state, a much-reduced provider of law and order, and not much else.

Along with Roberts's support for the working class goes a strong dose of religious conservatism. Roberts believes that outlawing birth control is the "hardest" political battle facing conservatives in the future, requiring "radical incrementalism" to bring the American people to see the error of their ways.

Incremental is not the first word that springs to mind in relation to Trump's administration. But in calling for an end to diversity and an increase in government support for "fertility awareness" programmes, like ovulation tracking and practising periodic abstinence, instead of more reliable contraception, Roberts is instantly, recognisably on-trend.

There's also a hint of JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy in the references to work and the lack of it. In that book, Vance documented the degradation that came from unemployment and drug addiction. The devil makes work for idle hands. Vance, as a fellow Catholic, would concur wholeheartedly with that adage.

It was appropriate, then, that in his foreword to Dawn's Early Light, Vance should aver that "never before has a figure with Roberts's depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism". Yet even some people in the Republican party were queasy about the kind of rhetoric Vance employed. His call to "circle the wagons and load the muskets," for instance. It seemed he had caught the addiction to violent rhetoric from the Opus Dei man.

But why so faint-hearted? The new future is a populist Christian nationalism, a destructive, fire-breathing conservatism, something Vance has called "offensive conservatism". Arguably, he has by now surpassed even the man from the Foundation when it comes to being offensive.

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