For more than 40 years before he first ran for president, Donald Trump was in the business of persuading people to buy things. And not in some idealized, best-of-American-capitalism sense: He sold real estate in New York City, which is a bit like selling used cars anywhere else. Eventually, he just sold himself and his name, which was less anchored to reality and a good jumping-off point for seeking elected office.<\/p>\n
We can see how he sold real estate and the Trump brand in how he sells his candidacies. He offers few details and sweeping assertions, little in the way of specifics and a lot in the way of promises. He tells people what he thinks they want to hear, often trying to tell people different things at the same time. The goal is to make the sale, dealing with complaints once the money or the vote is in hand.<\/p>\n
You can see it at work in his effort to distance his campaign from the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Project 2025, a road map for a Republican president to overhaul the federal government that has become a point of attack for Trump\u2019s critics.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,\u201d Trump wrote on his social media platform. \u201cI disagree with some of the things they\u2019re saying and some of the things they\u2019re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
He knows nothing about it \u2026 and disagrees with some of it. He thinks they are doing ridiculous things \u2026 and wishes them luck. If you are a Trump supporter, you see this as a way to slice off problematic components of the project\u2019s proposals. If you are an undecided voter, (Trump presumably hopes) you will see this as Trump putting the plan at a distance from his campaign \u2014 so all those news reports about the extreme components of Project 2025 get bucketed at some distance from Trump himself.<\/p>\n
There are just two problems with that bucketing. The first is that Project 2025 is obviously intertwined with Trump\u2019s universe of allies and staff. And the second, related problem is that a second Trump administration will depend on those allies and that staff to run the government.<\/p>\n
The conservative site Daily Signal \u2014 an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation \u2014 began promoting Project 2025 more than a year ago. It noted the involvement of Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump\u2019s administration. It highlighted an interview between Heritage\u2019s president and John McEntee, who joined the Project 2025 effort in May 2023 to continue work he began under Trump: maximizing the number of Trump loyalists in government.<\/p>\n
In November, the Trump campaign first tried to distance itself from Project 2025. Senior staffers noted that \u201cnone of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign.\u201d That\u2019s technically true. Trump has his own scattershot set of policy proposals, ones heavily responsive to the state of the Republican presidential primary when they were published in 2022 and 2023. But the idea that Trump\u2019s campaign has no overlap with Project 2025 is a fiction.<\/p>\n
For instance \u2014 as President Biden\u2019s reelection campaign pointed out over the weekend \u2014 longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller is shown in a video promoting Project 2025\u2019s \u201cPresidential Administration Academy.\u201d Miller dismissed it as \u201can advice video for students,\u201d though the hefty Project 2025 \u201cMandate for Leadership\u201d document sits on a table next to him. (That video also features the Trump campaign\u2019s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.) Miller\u2019s organization, America First Legal, is also listed as a member of Project 2025\u2019s advisory board.<\/p>\n
Vought would almost certainly play a significant role in a second Trump administration, potentially White House chief of staff. So would McEntee, who said in a podcast this year that \u201cwe\u2019re going to integrate a lot of our work with them\u201d \u2014 the \u201cour\u201d being Project 2025 and the \u201cthem\u201d being the campaign.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut,\u201d he added, \u201cI think keeping the two separate is actually the most beneficial way to go about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the point. It is useful for Trump and his allies to maintain the perception of a barrier between what Project 2025 documents \u2014 the desired outcomes of conservative and right-wing activists \u2014 and what the guy on the ballot says he himself will do. Trump wants voters to assume that he won\u2019t simply implement what conservatives and the right-most elements of his party want to see. He then intends to be elected and staff his administration with people who will do precisely that.<\/p>\n
In that sense, Project 2025 is quite useful. Since Trump won\u2019t explain what he plans to do as president with any specificity, there\u2019s little recourse but to figure out what his appointees might do. And the Heritage Foundation compiled a 900-plus-page tome that gets a lot of potential appointees on the record. Its Presidential Administration Academy aims specifically to aggregate r\u00e9sum\u00e9s from less-well-known people who might be tapped to fill in the lower levels of a Trump administration, all of them briefed on Project 2025\u2019s desired outcomes.<\/p>\n
\u201cPersonnel is policy,\u201d Morton Blackwell observed back when Trump was still selling condos in Manhattan. It remains true \u2014 especially for a candidate who abhors policy specifics. Project 2025, then, isn\u2019t an outline of how Trump would run the federal government but, instead, a delineation of the views of the sorts of people that would be in charge of running it.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no reason to think that Trump agrees with everything that\u2019s in Project 2025. But identifying those specific things that are \u201cridiculous and abysmal\u201d means endorsing everything else. It means outlining his policy proposals in detail, which he doesn\u2019t want to do. And so he\u2019s saddled with the proposals made by people who want to and eventually may work for him \u2014 if their proposals don\u2019t first drag down his candidacy.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
For more than 40 years before he first ran for president, Donald Trump was in the business of persuading people to buy things. And not in some idealized, best-of-American-capitalism sense: He sold real estate in New York City, which is a bit like selling used cars anywhere else. Eventually, he just sold himself and his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5864,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}