Project 2025 is a radical blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The plan calls for withdrawing approval for the abortion pill, banning pornography, slashing corporate taxes, abolishing the Department of Education, replacing thousands of experienced federal workers with political appointees, imposing a “biblically based… definition of marriage and families,” and placing the Justice Department and other independent agencies under the direct control of the president. 

These and other provisions of Project 2025 are quite unpopular. As Project 2025 has gained notoriety — thanks to actor Taraji P. Henson and others — Trump has sought to distance himself from the effort. On July 5, Trump posted on Truth Social that he knows “nothing about Project 2025,” has “no idea who is behind it,” and has “nothing to do with them.” 

This is false. 

The co-editors of Project 2025, Paul Dans and Steven Groves, both held high-ranking positions in the Trump administration. Under Trump, Dans served as Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management, the agency responsible for staffing the federal government, and was a senior advisor at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Groves served Trump in the White House as Deputy Press Secretary and Assistant Special Counsel. 

Project 2025’s two associate directors, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway, are also tightly connected with Trump. Chretien was Special Assistant to President Donald J. Trump and Associate Director of Presidential Personnel, “helping to identify, recruit, and place hundreds of political appointees at all levels of government.” Previously, Trump appointed Chretien to a position at HUD. Hemenway also served as an Associate Director of Presidential Personnel and previously worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and Trump’s 2016 transition team.  

Project 2025’s 922-page policy agenda has 30 chapters and 34 authors. Twenty-five of Project 2025’s authors served as members of the Trump administration. Another Project 2025 author, Stephen Moore, was nominated by Trump to the Federal Reserve but forced to withdraw “over his past inflammatory writings about women.” Further, William Walton, the co-author of the chapter on the Department of the Treasury, was a key member of Trump’s transition team. 

All told, of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition. In other words, while Trump claims he has “nothing to do” with the people who created Project 2025, over 81% had formal roles in his first administration. 

The chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States, for example, is written by Russ Vought. As president, Trump appointed Vought to his Cabinet as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, Vought authorized the rerouting of billions from the Pentagon to fund Trump’s border wall. In his Project 2025 chapter, Vought — a “self-described Christian nationalist” — calls for the abolishment of the Gender Policy Council, an entity focused on “economic security, health, gender-based violence and education—with a focus on gender equity and equality, and particular attention to the barriers faced by women and girls.” Vought is also drafting Project 2025’s “playbook” for the first 180 days of a Trump administration, which will not be shared publicly. 

Trump appeared at a Mar-a-lago fundraiser for Vought’s non-profit group, Center for Renewing America, in August 2022, and declared that Vought would “do a great job in continuing our quest to make America great again.” In addition to his key role in Project 2025, Vought is the policy director Republican National Committee’s platform writing committee and a top candidate for White House Chief of Staff if Trump wins in November. 

Gene Hamilton, a top aide to Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Justice. During the Trump administration, Hamilton drafted Trump’s infamous child separation policy. Hamilton currently serves as Vice-President and General Counsel of America First Legal Foundation, an organization run by top Trump advisor Stephen Miller. 

In Hamilton’s Project 2025 chapter, he advocates for the deployment of active-duty military to the southern border. Hamilton also calls for an elimination of the Department of Justice’s independence from the White House, saying a new Trump administration should “end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies.” (This would presumably include any cases against Trump himself.) He also proposes using the Office of Civil Rights exclusively to prosecute “state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” who have diversity initiatives. 

The Project 2025 chapter on the Agency for International Development was written by Max Primorac, the acting Chief Operating Officer for the same agency under the Trump administration. During a 2019 State Department conference on religious freedom, Primorac generated controversy by promoting Trump’s reelection. After Trump lost to Biden in November 2020, Primorac told agency staff not to cooperate with the transition. 

In his Project 2025 chapter, Primorac argues against providing international aid to combat hunger and starvation. Primorac says the key to ending poverty is encouraging more oil and gas production. He advocates renaming “the USAID Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) as the USAID Office of Women, Children, and Families” and putting an “unapologetically pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator” in charge of the office. 

Here is the complete list of the 31 authors and editors of Project 2025 that have formal connections to the Trump administration. 

Top members of Trump’s 2024 campaign are involved in Project 2025

In addition to a detailed policy agenda, Project 2025 also involves the training and recruitment of political appointees for a potential second Trump administration. One key component of this effort is the “Presidential Administration Academy,” which Heritage bills as “a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” 

Among the program instructors is Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for the 2024 Trump campaign and an assistant press secretary during the Trump administration. Leavitt co-teaches a video course on “The Art of Professionalism.” She also appears in a promotional video for the academy. 

Also appearing in the video is top Trump advisor Stephen Miller. Despite his role in the academy, Miller claims he has “never been involved with Project 2025.” Miller’s organization, America First Legal, is a member of the Project 2025 advisory board. 

The history of Heritage’s influence with Trump

Trump’s claim that he has “nothing to do” with the people behind Project 2025 is clearly false. But is it possible that Trump will simply ignore Project 2025’s recommendations? History tells us that is unlikely. 

Prior to the 2016 election, the Heritage Foundation created a similar project called “Mandate for Leadership.” The “Mandate for Leadership” contained “334 unique policy recommendations.” One year into Trump’s term, the Heritage Foundation announced that “64 percent of the policy prescriptions were included in Trump’s budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or under consideration for action in accordance with The Heritage Foundation’s original proposals.”

Seventy Heritage Foundation employees had already joined the administration, and other Heritage officials “briefed administration officials on the recommendations, provided additional insight and information, and advocated for reform.” 

In October 2017, Trump was the keynote speaker at a Heritage Foundation event, where he praised the organization as “titans in the fight to defend, promote, and preserve our great American heritage.”  He credited the organization with helping him confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch and “ending the war on beautiful coal.” Trump said that he needed “the help of the Heritage Foundation” to advance other priorities, including large tax cuts. He concluded by expressing his “gratitude” to “the dedicated scholars and staff at the Heritage Foundation.”

Now, in an effort to win the White House a second time, Trump is playing dumb. 

What do the people who know Kamala Harris best make of our 49th vice president? Why were some Jews willing to vote for Le Pen in France? And did a certain ’90s movie predict our current Biden disaster? All this and more in today’s Front Page from The Free Press. 

But first, the story everyone is talking about.

On Sunday afternoon, news broke that on a call of senior House Democrats, a number of top lawmakers said Joe Biden should announce his withdrawal from the race. If the reports are true—and New York’s Jerry Nadler and Joe Morelle, California’s Mark Takano, and Washington’s Adam Smith are pushing for Biden to end his campaign—it is a sign that the president is in for a long week. So far five Democratic lawmakers (Angie Craig, Raúl Grijalva, Seth Moulton, Mike Quigley, and Lloyd Doggett) have publicly called for Biden to step down. 

Who knows who will join their ranks by tomorrow morning when Congress is back in session?

All of this has happened in the wake of Joe Biden’s Friday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulous—an interview intended to quell voters’ fears that at 81, he is too old to run for reelection. The interview did little to halt those concerns—or the belief that he may be suffering from dementia, as The Free Press’s Emily Yoffe reports in our first piece: “Why Did a Parkinson’s Doctor Repeatedly Visit the White House?” Here’s Emily:

Has the reason for Joe Biden’s obvious physical and mental decline been hiding in plain sight? Two July 6 reports suggest the president has been seeing a movement disorder doctor for months.

On Saturday, the New York Post reported that a doctor at Walter Reed Medical Center with expertise in Parkinson’s visited the White House January 17, hosted by the president’s physician Kevin O’Connor. A second report, published by Alex Berenson on his Substack, Unreported Truths, revealed that the doctor visited the White House nine times between July 28, 2023, and March 28, 2024. (The logs run through March 31, 2024, and are available for anyone to access online.)

The doctor in question is Kevin R. Cannard, a neurologist and retired Army colonel. His physician profile page shows he is a neurologist and movement disorders specialist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center who researches treatments for early phase Parkinson’s disease. Berenson notes that Walter Reed “provides medical care to senior federal officials.” Read on for Emily’s argument on why the American people deserve to know the truth about our president’s health. 

As the Democratic Party openly revolts against Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris appears increasingly like the person who could replace him at the top of the ticket, polls continue to show she remains unpopular with voters. But maybe the voters just don’t know her well enough yet. Bay Area journalist Leighton Woodhouse wondered: What do the people who know her best make of our 49th Vice President? Here’s Leighton:

Kamala Harris has made a big deal out of being a native daughter of the East Bay. Born in Oakland, California, and raised in neighboring Berkeley, she worked for the Alameda County District Attorney’s office before being elected DA of San Francisco. In 2019, she kicked off her presidential primary campaign at Oakland City Hall and headquartered her West Coast operation in the city. 

Oakland’s reputation as a gritty town that played a central role in black radical political history has helped shape her public persona. So nobody is in a better position than Oakland residents—and in particular, black Oakland residents—to assess her authenticity.

Community organizer Seneca Scott and I took a walk in his neighborhood of the Lower Bottoms to ask Oaklanders what they think of a possible President Harris, and whether they think Biden should step aside for her. Click on the video below to see what they had to say.

Alex Thompson—one of the few Washington reporters to doggedly pursue the Biden age story before last Thursday—has another alarming scoop about the level of handling the leader of the free world requires. For the president’s events, staffers prepare “a short document with large print and photos that include his precise path to the podium.” (Axios) 

A growing number of Democrats are backing the idea, first suggested by (former?) close Biden ally Jim Clyburn, of a “blitz primary” to pick their candidate if Biden drops out. Delegates would pick the candidate using ranked choice voting before the Democratic convention, and candidates would run “positive-only” campaigns. What could possibly go wrong? (Semafor) 

Jonathan Chait thinks that’s a terrible idea. Instead, he argues that “a small group of party leaders—say, Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jen O’Malley Dillon—should decide on a new candidate over the next week.” Is it democratic? No. But hey, sometimes a smoke-filled room is just what you need. (New York) 

America has a courtier problem, with those around Joe Biden prioritizing their own proximity to power over the future of the country: “Had he not chosen to run, they would have lost their place in court. And that was all that they cared about.” (In My Tribe)

Investors cannot stop talking about politics, and their appetite for expert insight into world affairs has never been bigger. But is this just money managers wanting to be up on the news? According to the FT, it might be something more, as “many senior executives believe the world is going through not just a temporary bout of political volatility, but a structural shift that will have a long-term impact on the investment world.” (Financial Times) 

Has the Supreme Court, with its immunity ruling, authorized the release of death squads onto the streets of America? Hyperbolic claims like that have been a defining feature of the coverage of the court, but the truth is much less dramatic, says Jonathan Turley. (The Hill) 

New technology allows patients with amputations below the knee to control the movement of their prosthetic legs through neural signals. “The patients that have this neural interface are able to walk at normal speeds; and up and down steps and slopes; and maneuver obstacles really without thinking about it. It’s natural. It’s involuntary.” (IEEE Spectrum) 

A group of Sherpas and Nepali soldiers recovered four dead bodies and a skeleton frozen in ice on Mount Everest this year, as part of a cleanup that will take years to complete. Some 100,000 pounds of trash have been left behind by climbers near the mountain’s peak. Why people still want to climb Everest remains a mystery. (AP)

Henry Oliver laments the rise of the discourse novel, which “cannot get beyond repeating the platitudes of modern discourse. . . . The modern fashionable novel is not about the fashion of class, clothes, or cutlery, but of the limits of what you can and cannot say.” (The Common Reader)

America’s berries have never tasted so good—and it’s all thanks to Driscoll’s, the “Apple of berries.” Imagine not loving capitalism, a system that incentivizes super-smart scientists to figure out how to make your fruit taste even better. (Wall Street Journal) 

In the two weeks since the first round of the French parliamentary elections, France has been wondering: Can Marine Le Pen and her far-right National Rally party be stopped? The answer, delivered by the voters last night, was a resounding yes. Le Pen’s bloc went from being the largest in the first round to the third largest in the second round of voting yesterday. Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc is projected to come second, and in a stunning come-from-behind victory, the far-left group of Jean-Luc Mélenchon has come out on top. 

The result, a deadlock with no party close to the number needed for a majority, sets the stage for prolonged instability of the sort that was once a defining feature of French politics. It also throws Macron’s future into doubt: his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, tendered his resignation after the results landed Sunday night. 

For many of France’s Jews, the results underscore an awful predicament. Mélenchon, who in 2017 called Jews “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest,” has persistently fanned the flames of antisemitism. Moshe Sebbag, a rabbi for the Synagogue de la Victoire, is urging young French Jews to move to Israel, telling The Times of Israel: “it seems France has no future for Jews.” And the threat from the Mélenchon left, as antisemitic violence has surged in the country since October 7, has even persuaded some to do the once unthinkable and vote for Marine Le Pen.

Our Peter Savodnik is in France at the moment and found himself at a party in which many of the attendees were surprising themselves and voting for Le Pen.

Here’s Peter:

“The Jews will change the fascists” is not something one hears every day, but there I was, at this party, and the Frenchwoman opposite me was saying exactly that. She added that the old language—fascism, Nazi—was mostly meaningless now. These were words that partisans and their surrogate-drones lobbed at people they didn’t like. They bore little resemblance to their original meanings.

Continue Reading: Why French Jews Believed the Political Right Could Save Them—and France.

→ Keir Starmer’s underwhelming victory: While France’s voters delivered a shock on Sunday night, the British electorate were much more predictable three days earlier, when the Conservative Party was ousted after 14 years in power and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party secured the large majority everyone expected. It was a historically heavy defeat for the Tories. The party now has 121 MPs—the smallest number in its almost 200-year history.

But the election hardly showed massive enthusiasm for Labour. Turnout was way down, at 60 percent, the lowest level since 2001. And, at 34 percent, Labour’s overall share of the vote was actually less than the 40 percent far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017. So how did Starmer do it? Part of the answer is with the help of Brexit insurgent Nigel Farage, whose populist Reform party peeled off millions of voters, mostly from the Conservatives. 

If you want to go deeper on the UK election, start with Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who chews through the numbers on Labour’s “Potemkin landslide.” Then check out Peter Hitchens, in fantastically gloomy form, with a farewell to conservatism for UnHerd. On Substack, Neil O’Brien, a Conservative MP who clung on, makes sense of his party’s terrible showing with an “everything bagel theory of defeat.” From Politico, a look at why Keir Starmer’s victory isn’t necessarily encouraging for fellow center-left candidate Joe Biden. And The Times of London’s Will Lloyd (sadly hiding behind a paywall) dissects the class dynamics of the result, with Starmer’s “strivers” replacing the “chumocracy” of the Tory years. He asks: “Is the era of ‘posh boy’ dominance really over?” —OW

→ Kat Rosenfield on the movie that predicted the Biden debacle: Ever since the Great Debate Debacle—and its successor event, the Stephanopoulos Sit-Down That Could Have Gone Better—Joe Biden’s most fervent supporters have chosen one of two tacks. The first is full-on denial: the president is doing fine, they say! Amazing, even! Any blips in his performance were merely the result of poor preparation, or a cold, or some secret saboteur inside CNN who installed a “ghastly pallor and verbal incoherence” filter on the camera in front of him. 

But in the second camp, the one not completely disconnected from reality, an arguably more disturbing idea has emerged: that Biden’s fitness for office actually doesn’t matter and never has, because he has good people around him. 

Is the president sane? Competent? Entirely alive? You need not ask yourself these questions, because the president is not the president; he’s just a figurehead, more of a mascot, really—like the Geico Gecko of the executive branch. The actual presidency consists of somewhere between five and 50 people, whose identities may or may not be public knowledge, who stand behind or around or sometimes on top of the president and execute the duties of the office according to their collective wisdom. Did you think, when you pulled the lever for Joe Biden in 2020, that you were actually voting for Joe Biden the singular human being? You fool. You absolute imbecile. 

Needless to say, it has been quite something to see some of my fellow liberals, who have been arguing for years that democracy is on the ballot this November, now also insisting with a straight face that it’s ridiculous to expect our democratically elected president to, like, do the job. (Also: per news reports, the team of good and competent people currently advising the president is led by his son, Hunter, which is not exactly reassuring. It’s almost like the type of cognitive decline that affects a person’s presidential capacities could also affect his judgment about whose advice to trust.)

But if you’ve ever wondered if those folks are right—if Americans are in fact totally cool with a group of unelected officials pulling strings behind the scenes, while the man known as POTUS watches Dick Van Dyke reruns and drools contentedly into a bowl of creamed corn—may I direct your attention to one of my favorite movies, the 1993 Kevin Kline comedy Dave, in which some devious Washington insiders attempt to do exactly this?

The premise of Dave is simple. When the president has a stroke and ends up comatose, his chief of staff Bob Alexander secretly hires a body double—that’s Dave—to impersonate the president full time. Obviously, hijinks ensue (the scenes between Kline and Ving Rhames as his Secret Service agent are particularly fun) but for our purposes, what matters is Bob, a power-hungry schemer who takes advantage of the president’s incapacitation to veto bills and set agendas and generally keep his corrupt, conniving hands firmly on the levers of power. 

But that’s fine, right? After all, Bob is part of the team, handpicked by the president to do exactly this; surely it would trouble nobody to learn that he’d taken over the president’s duties. Except, of course, it’s not fine—as illustrated perfectly in the moment when Dave threatens to reveal their charade to the public.

“The whole press corps is right out there,” he says. “Should I go tell them, or do you want to?”

Bob doesn’t answer. He’s trapped, he knows it—and so do we. It is impossible to watch this movie, this scene, and not understand intuitively that he can’t tell the press what he’s done. That what he’s done is a bad thing. That the American people would absolutely not be comforted by the notion of a shadowy cabal secretly running the country, while the man they voted into office lies comatose in a basement room under the White House. 

That’s not what they voted for. That’s not what we vote for.
—Kat Rosenfield

Michael recommends All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren: It’s relevant to the current political situation, but the crux of the novel is the narrator’s character development and his eventual atonement. 

Gary recommends Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works and wishes our leaders had read its chapters on the physical systems and risks that underpin the modern world.

What do you recommend? Let us know: thefrontpage@thefp.com. 

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman. 

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Ever since the Great Debate Debacle—and its successor event, the Stephanopoulos Sit-Down That Could Have Gone Better—Joe Biden’s most fervent supporters have chosen one of two tacks. The first is full-on denial: the president is doing fine, they say! Amazing, even! Any blips in his performance were merely the result of poor preparation, or a cold, or some secret saboteur inside CNN who installed a “ghastly pallor and verbal incoherence” filter on the camera in front of him. 

But in the second camp, the one not completely disconnected from reality, an arguably more disturbing idea has emerged: that Biden’s fitness for office actually doesn’t matter and never has, because he has good people around him. 

Is the president sane? Competent? Entirely alive? You need not ask yourself these questions, because the president is not the president; he’s just a figurehead, more of a mascot, really—like the Geico Gecko of the executive branch. The actual presidency consists of somewhere between five and 50 people, whose identities may or may not be public knowledge, who stand behind or around or sometimes on top of the president and execute the duties of the office according to their collective wisdom. Did you think, when you pulled the lever for Joe Biden in 2020, that you were actually voting for Joe Biden the singular human being? You fool. You absolute imbecile. 

Needless to say, it has been quite something to see some of my fellow liberals, who have been arguing for years that democracy is on the ballot this November, now also insisting with a straight face that it’s ridiculous to expect our democratically elected president to, like, do the job. (Also: per news reports, the team of good and competent people currently advising the president is led by his son, Hunter, which is not exactly reassuring. It’s almost like the type of cognitive decline that affects a person’s presidential capacities could also affect his judgment about whose advice to trust.)

But if you’ve ever wondered if those folks are right—if Americans are in fact totally cool with a group of unelected officials pulling strings behind the scenes, while the man known as POTUS watches Dick Van Dyke reruns and drools contentedly into a bowl of creamed corn—may I direct your attention to one of my favorite movies, the 1993 Kevin Kline comedy Dave, in which some devious Washington insiders attempt to do exactly this?

The premise of Dave is simple. When the president has a stroke and ends up comatose, his chief of staff Bob Alexander secretly hires a body double—that’s Dave—to impersonate the president full time. Obviously, hijinks ensue (the scenes between Kline and Ving Rhames as his Secret Service agent are particularly fun) but for our purposes, what matters is Bob, a power-hungry schemer who takes advantage of the president’s incapacitation to veto bills and set agendas and generally keep his corrupt, conniving hands firmly on the levers of power. 

But that’s fine, right? After all, Bob is part of the team, handpicked by the president to do exactly this; surely it would trouble nobody to learn that he’d taken over the president’s duties. Except, of course, it’s not fine—as illustrated perfectly in the moment when Dave threatens to reveal their charade to the public.

“The whole press corps is right out there,” he says. “Should I go tell them, or do you want to?”

Bob doesn’t answer. He’s trapped, he knows it—and so do we. It is impossible to watch this movie, this scene, and not understand intuitively that he can’t tell the press what he’s done. That what he’s done is a bad thing. That the American people would absolutely not be comforted by the notion of a shadowy cabal secretly running the country, while the man they voted into office lies comatose in a basement room under the White House. 

That’s not what they voted for. That’s not what we vote for.

Kat Rosenfield is a columnist at The Free Press. Read her recent piece, “Harrison Butker Is Catholic. So What?” Follow her on X @katrosenfield.