by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann
Linking Donald Trump to the 2025 Project is the latest desperation tactic by Democrats. But it will likely backfire. It could end up creating a up-to-date generation of conservatives.
Last year, the Heritage Foundation published Mandate for Leadership assembled by a consortium of individuals and advisory groups called Project 2025. It’s a compilation of long-standing conservative policy recommendations for the next Republican administration. The group Project 2025 says the document is “a unified effort by the conservative movement to be ready for the next conservative administration that will be in power at noon on January 20, 2025.”
This absolutely terrifies progressive Democrats.
As we look through part of the 900-plus-page compendium, we see that it contains policy suggestions that have been embedded in the conservative agenda for more than six decades. We also note that statements from right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation are routinely attacked from the left as “radical” in nature and “out of touch” with ordinary Americans. This is nothing up-to-date. The left and progressives, in particular, see this as the latest scare tactic to motivate the base as Biden’s candidacy spirals out of control.
What’s up-to-date here is a strange tactical decision by the Biden-Harris campaign demonize the Heritage Foundation and link the organization’s activities to Donald Trumpwhich has nothing to do with Legacy and was not involved in Project 2025. It is quite doubtful that Trump even knew about Project 2025 until the Biden-Harris campaign decided to refer to it as “Donald Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda” as “something every American should fear.”
When we first saw references to Project 2025, we knew it wasn’t organic. When all the usual suspects —MSDNC, CNNthis New York Timesthis Washington Post, Axial, Political, NPR, Media Matters for Americaand dozens of them image memes flood your Facebook timeline—we knew it wasn’t a coincidence. As they say, there are no coincidences in party politics.
Calling it “Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda” is just another drop in the endless ocean of lies from the Biden administration and its leftist supporters. Here is another example obvious disinformation coming from the left (click on the link to see how incredibly unbalanced these people are).
While some of these points are true (e.g., ending the Department of Education, using public funds for private religious schools, increasing oil drilling in the Arctic), more than 90 percent of these claims are complete lies, many of which are not even mentioned in the document. Project 2025 he responded with a numbered list 30 “myths vs facts.”
This attack on the 2025 Project and the attempt to link their agenda to Trump seem to have a very strange appeal to unwitting Biden-Harris voters. Before that, almost no one, even among Republican and conservative political nuts, had heard of Heritage Foundationa relatively unknown, center-right institution that has never been considered a radical fringe organization. The huge majority of Americans are now hearing about Heritage for the first time.
What could actually happen is that citizens would become more aware of the Heritage Foundation and its conservative work, who otherwise would not have learned about it if the Biden-Harris campaign had not generated such a huge buzz. Voter curiosity will lead them to check out Project 2025, which includes five key policy pillars to restore the Constitution as the primary guide to governing the country. Here are five very specific policy proposals that we have summarized as follows:
First, and probably most importantly, “The President must enforce the Constitution and laws as written, rather than unilaterally promulgating new ‘law.’ In a republic, laws are made by the legislature, not the executive.” (Because SCOTUS is controlled by the current conservative majority, this it’s just scary (To far-left progressives.)
Second, “We must rediscover and honor the Founder’s wise division of war powers, according to which Congress, the most representative and decisive branch, decides whether to go to war; and the executive branch…decides how to conduct it once it begins.” Our generations of experimentation with presidentially initiated wars show that “we depart from our constitutional design at our peril.” For the huge majority of our history, especially in the 20th century, this has been Congress’s Declaration of War in which the United States entered World War II, and this did not happen through a presidential declaration of war.
Third, the president and the State Department must “stop circumventing the Constitution’s treaty-making requirements and stop enforcing ‘agreements’ that have not been ratified by the Senate, as the Constitution requires, as if they were proper treaties.” Republicans and Democrats alike are guilty of this. Is it any wonder that no up-to-date wars have broken out in the four years of the first Trump administration?
Fourth, “the Senate has been extraordinarily lax in carrying out its constitutional duty to confirm presidential nominees.” As a result, unconfirmed “acting” officials have been serving in the executive branch for months or years without Senate approval. To avoid placing all blame on the Democrats, the Senate has delegated its war powers The executive power, starting with George W. Bush and continuing through the Obama and Biden administrations. Our growing involvement in the Ukraine conflict serves no real U.S. political agenda beyond keeping deep state warmongers like Victoria Nuland satisfied under both Republican and Democratic governments.
Fifth, the Justice Department must “respect the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech, rather than trying to control speech.” Oh my God, where do I begin? The First Amendment violations began under Bush with the Patriot Act after 9/11, and have accelerated since then, especially under Obama and Biden. Biden’s Justice Department in particular, it used the deep state to abuse police powers against ordinary citizens, such as many participants in the J6 demonstrations, as well as journalists who did not toe the administration’s line.
Each of these five points is a limitation, not an expansion, of presidential power. The Biden-Harris campaign is making efforts to characterize Project 2025 because allowing the president to take power is a classic case of projection.
Trump’s connection to cultural heritage is a lost cause, suggesting a campaign desperately trying to change the subject after a complete and utter breakdown in the wake of Biden’s disastrous performance in first debate and his subsequent interview with a former Bill Clinton aide, George StephanopoulosAs you might expect, this will backfire and could lead to a broader acceptance of conservative principles among the American population.
Good job, Democrats!
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Richard Truesdell is a former consumer electronics retail executive and automotive photojournalist. Over the past 25 years, he has traveled to more than 35 countries on six continents. A former high school history teacher with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Waynesburg University, he is a born moderate conservative who has turned his thoughts and keyboard to political commentary and popular culture. A cross-section of his writings can be found at Found here.
Keith Lehmann is a retired consumer electronics executive who has written extensively on technology, transportation, and international travel. Having lived in Southern California for more than fifty years, he has a first-hand grasp of left-wing social and cultural events and offers a decidedly realist, conservative perspective, many of them can be found on his Substack.
The painting “Project 2025” by Heritage Foundation / Project 2025.
