No one expected the 922-page policy document to go viral.<\/p>\n
The conservative Heritage Foundation quietly began working on Project 2025 in 2022, pulling together a wish list of far-right policy proposals the group hoped former president Donald Trump would enact if he won back the White House. The report was published with little notice in 2023.<\/p>\n
Then, in March, the Biden-Harris campaign began attacking the conservative initiative through a coordinated push on social media timed to President Joe Biden\u2019s State of the Union address, warning the public that Project 2025 was a blueprint for the extreme and dangerous agenda a second Trump term would usher in.<\/p>\n
In June, comedian John Oliver devoted an entire episode of his popular HBO show to the policy initiative, and actress Taraji P. Henson used her high-profile role as host of the BET Awards to raise alarms about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cPay attention! It\u2019s not a secret: Look it up!\u201d Henson told the audience, in a clip that was viewed more than 8 million times in 48 hours. \u201c\u2026 The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time Trump took to Truth Social on July 5 to personally disavow the initiative \u2014 \u201cI know nothing about Project 2025,\u201d he wrote, adding that some of the proposals were \u201cabsolutely ridiculous and abysmal\u201d \u2014 the topic had already exploded on social media, and Democrats had alighted on a potent message that could damage Trump politically.<\/p>\n
How an obscure Heritage Foundation policy tome emerged as a defining Democratic attack of the 2024 election is a story of fortuitous mentions, organic online momentum, an ominous-sounding name and a document that captures the myriad fears many Democratic voters have about what another Trump presidency could mean.<\/p>\n
The sweeping policy document lays out how the next president could concentrate power in the executive branch and remove civil service protections for legions of federal workers to replace them with loyalists. It provides detailed plans for executing some of Trump\u2019s most controversial ideas, such as eliminating the Department of Education; moving the Justice Department under presidential control; shuttering the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, and rolling back other environmental protections; and launching mass deportations, including of immigrants who came to the United States as children, often known as \u201cdreamers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The document also includes other policies that Trump has not embraced, including a call for the elimination of the popular Head Start program, rescinding Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone \u2014 a key abortion medication \u2014 and using an 1873 law to prevent shipments of abortion medication through the mail, which he recently told CBS News he would not enforce.<\/p>\n
A line-by-line review of the Project 2025 document by CBS News identified 700 policy proposals and found that at least 270 of them matched Trump\u2019s past or current campaign proposals. The review also found that at least 28 of the project\u2019s 38 primary authors \u2014 nearly 75 percent \u2014 worked in the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
Jef Pollock, whose firm, Global Strategy Group, is one of the pollsters for Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s presidential campaign, said the forward-looking nature of Project 2025 \u2014 articulating in granular detail what a hypothetical second Trump term could look like \u2014 helped crystallize voter fears in a tangible way.<\/p>\n
\u201cVoters understand that this is an actual, written plan for extremist and dangerous ideas that are going to be implemented,\u201d Pollock said. \u201cWe know that voters have some Trump amnesia. They don\u2019t remember all the bad things he did as president. Now it\u2019s like, \u2018Well, even if you\u2019ve forgotten about what he did before, what he wants to do now is even worse.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the best efforts of the Heritage Foundation, there was little fanfare when the conservative think tank first published the Project 2025 document, titled \u201cMandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,\u201d in April 2023.<\/p>\n
But as soon as Project 2025 began getting a sliver of mainstream media attention months later, Trump and his campaign tried to distance him from the document, even though many of his former top aides \u2014 including former Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and former personnel chief John McEntee \u2014 advised or contributed to the effort.<\/p>\n
In November, Trump advisers released a statement saying that while such outside efforts were \u201ccertainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful,\u201d they were merely \u201crecommendations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another statement came in December, when the same advisers wrote that the outside suggestions were not officially sanctioned and were \u201can unwelcomed distraction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s campaign has also redirected voters to the former president\u2019s own Agenda 47 \u2014 a 20-point missive outlining his priorities \u2014 as well as the Republican Party platform, which his campaign carefully streamlined before adopting it in July.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s literally the definition of the \u2018big lie\u2019 theory \u2014 that if you say the same thing over and over and over again enough times, you can persuade people it\u2019s true and they\u2019ve attempted that,\u201d Trump spokesman Brian Hughes said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only person deciding what President Trump will say or what President Trump will do as president is Donald Trump,\u201d Hughes continued. \u201cWhat\u2019s most ironic is that while they are spending all this time trying to lie about what policies President Trump has or will advocate for as president, we still have a Harris website that has a half-dozen or more donate buttons but no policy tab.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heritage Foundation officials have also tried to counter what they view as misinformation, launching a new website \u201cto counter the left\u2019s worst lies about Project 2025,\u201d Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts told members in an email Friday morning.<\/p>\n
Privately, some Heritage members blame the Trump campaign for elevating Project 2025 by responding to Democratic attacks.<\/p>\n
By pushing the Project 2025 agenda as Trump\u2019s blueprint for a second term, Democrats have often inaccurately portrayed some of the document\u2019s policy positions as Trump\u2019s own. They also benefited from the former president\u2019s muddled stances on issues such as abortion and from Trump\u2019s comments that fueled the narrative \u2014 like his claim that he would be a dictator on \u201cday one\u201d or his frequent calls for retribution and vengeance on his enemies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe power here, again, is it confirms things that voters already suspected and had maybe hoped, \u2018Well, maybe he\u2019ll just focus on the stock market and business,\u2019 and now it\u2019s like, \u2018He\u2019s the same person he always was and surrounded by extreme people,\u2019\u201d said Patrick Toomey, a partner at BSG, a Democratic research and strategy firm.<\/p>\n
Buoyed by social influencers and celebrities taking up the cause, the Biden campaign seized on the theme and hammered away.<\/p>\n
In February and March, Democrats began more frequently blending their descriptions of Trump\u2019s second-term agenda and the plans outlined in Project 2025 in their daily messaging, arguing at one point that the proposals outlined by both Trump and Project 2025 would create a modern-day \u201cHandmaid\u2019s Tale\u201d in \u201cTrump\u2019s America\u201d by rolling back LGBTQ rights and abortion access.<\/p>\n
The Harris-Walz campaign has also held more than 60 volunteer trainings focused on Project 2025 in battleground states, a campaign official said.<\/p>\n
As pieces of the document started circulating on social media, it caught the attention of voters like 27-year-old Tayla Cochran of Sterling Heights, Mich., a disappointed former Biden supporter who was at first \u201csuper undecided.\u201d What she saw on her social media feeds about the threats Project 2025 could pose to birth control and abortion access reengaged her interest.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole Project 2025 thing \u2014 I don\u2019t know how true that is,\u201d Cochran said in an interview this summer. \u201cBut it just sounds crazy. \u2026 They\u2019re really relentless with trying to strip us of every bit of freedom we have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Democrats picked up on those themes and made them a through-line of programming at the Democratic National Convention last month in Chicago. Many of the prime-time speakers mentioned it \u2014 Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) joked that it was \u201cProject 1825\u201d and \u201cProject 1925,\u201d an allusion to its perceived regressiveness. Comedian Kenan Thompson and several Democrats, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, lugged oversize copies of a Project 2025 book onstage, with Thompson joking that it was the rare document that could \u201ckill a small animal and democracy at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking in broader terms in her keynote speech on the final night of the convention, Harris said Americans \u201cknow what a second Trump term would look like. It\u2019s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers.\u201d<\/p>\n
And last week, Harris\u2019s campaign released a 60-second ad in battleground states focused on Project 2025, featuring dark and grainy footage of Trump as a narrator ominously intones that the document argues for \u201coverhauling the Department of Justice \u2014 giving Trump the unchecked power to seek vengeance; eliminating the Department of Education and defunding K-12 schools; requiring the government to monitor women\u2019s pregnancies,\u201d among other things.<\/p>\n
Matt Canter, a Democratic pollster, said he and fellow Democrats were \u201cstunned\u201d this summer when voters in focus groups began mentioning Project 2025 unprompted.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery single focus group I\u2019ve done since June, respondents have brought up Project 2025,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have a significant majority of swing voters in these focus groups knowing what it is and having extremely unfavorable opinions of it. It is a very credible manifestation of what voters fear about the new face of the Republican Party and what Trump might do in a second term.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a poll by the Economist\/YouGov in early August, 28 percent of adults said they had heard a lot about Project 2025, while 43 percent said they had heard \u201ca little\u201d about it. Nearly half \u2014 46 percent \u2014 said they had an unfavorable view of the effort, while only 15 percent had a favorable view.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, it took the Biden-Harris campaign and outside Democratic groups several months of pushing this message before it finally took off.<\/p>\n
John Oliver\u2019s point-by-point, 29-minute HBO presentation in mid-June of many of the policies outlined in Project 2025 helped amplify the conversation. In his monologue, which has been viewed online at least 9.4 million times, Oliver described Trump during his first term as \u201ca hamster in an attack helicopter\u201d who wanted to \u201cbathe the world in blood and terror\u201d but didn\u2019t \u201cknow what buttons to press.\u201d The Project 2025 document, he said, would change that.<\/p>\n
Two weeks later, on the last day of June, Taraji P. Henson drove another spike in Project 2025 search traffic with her BET Awards speech. Harris\u2019s team had worked closely with her before the awards show to produce a scripted video call, paid for by the Biden-Harris campaign, featuring the vice president and Henson from her dressing room.<\/p>\n
Searches for Project 2025 peaked between July 7 and July 13, according to Google Trends data, the same week Biden criticized Project 2025 during a rally in Detroit \u2014 accusing Trump of lying by trying to distance himself from it and highlighting the fact that the project\u2019s authors would seek to criminalize the shipment of abortion medication.<\/p>\n
Attention to the document only continued to climb. Project 2025-related posts averaged 2.5 million views total per day in June, 27.7 million views per day in July \u2014 a 10-fold increase \u2014 and 11.3 million per day in August through Monday, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal advocacy organization that has helped push warnings about Project 2025.<\/p>\n
By then, Canter said Democrats had achieved the near-impossible: They made an attack against Trump stick.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the first time we\u2019ve actually been successful in holding him accountable for his policy positions,\u201d Canter said.<\/p>\n
Project 2025 means different things to different voters, which is part of its power, according to Democratic strategists and campaign aides.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the reasons it\u2019s been so successful is because you can talk about every issue \u2014 abortion, housing, climate change, immigration,\u201d said Navin Nayak, president of the Center of American Progress Action Fund. \u201cEvery group that has a threat they were worried about has been able to use Project 2025 to animate that threat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last week, for instance, Latino groups launched a bilingual campaign against Project 2025, with more than a half-dozen Latino leaders and advocates convening a Zoom call to warn of the threat the plan poses to their communities.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cruel agenda of Project 2025 seeks to separate families, deport dreamers, and it undermines the economic security and opportunities for working-class people,\u201d said Katharine Pichardo-Erskine, executive director of Latino Victory Project.<\/p>\n
Democratic strategists and Harris campaign advisers testing these lines of attack said some messages have stood out as especially effective: the curtailing of reproductive rights and access to abortions; the idea that Trump would weaponize the Justice Department; tougher immigration policies that could include raids at playgrounds and churches; and allowing employers to cut overtime pay for hourly workers, among others.<\/p>\n
More broadly, the voters who know about Project 2025 generally have negative views of it, perceiving the effort to be scary and shadowy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been telling people what MAGA would do if they got into power, and Project 2025 became the plot and it felt like something nefarious to the American people \u2014 that there is this somewhat secret D.C. document that is the game plan for how to take over the federal government for their own use,\u201d Navin said.<\/p>\n
The Heritage Foundation says on its new website that the document is \u201cnot partisan, nor is it secret\u201d and that it \u201cdoes not speak for any candidate or campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n
A key aspect of Project 2025 that has allowed Democrats to wield it as a cudgel is that it is a document that voters can read themselves. Toomey, who holds a lot of focus groups with undecided voters, described them as \u201cthe most skeptical people on earth,\u201d whose first response to any potential political attack is, \u201cWell, if that\u2019s true, I don\u2019t like it, but I\u2019ll have to Google it for myself, I\u2019ll have to do my own research.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd now we just get to say, \u2018Google it. Do the research. Don\u2019t take our word for it,\u2019\u201d Toomey said.<\/p>\n
Parker Butler, director of digital rapid response for the Harris campaign, said the ability of voters to personally delve into the document helped launch it on social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw this as a sticky thing really early on, especially on TikTok, and it was happening from independent creators who were just putting out content,\u201d Butler said. \u201cIt really took off among the crowd that was very skeptical of the traditional news media, people who were very much the do-your-own-research type of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of those voters was Renee Richardson, a 28-year-old activity director for seniors from Sterling Heights, Mich., who discovered the document through social media this spring and read with alarm about proposals such as eliminating the Education Department \u2014 one of the suggestions Trump does agree with.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re not talking about it, but if he was to take office, that stuff goes into effect. So people really need to read it over and see what they\u2019re going to have to fall in line with,\u201d she said during an interview earlier this summer. \u201cNot many people know about it, and I\u2019ve been trying to spread the word.\u201d<\/p>\n
Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Jeremy Merrill contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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