Former President Donald Trump is once again denying any knowledge or involvement with the controversial far-right Project 2025 initiative written by the Heritage Foundation.
In a post to his Truth Social account Thursday, the 45th president of the United States posted yet another vehement denial of both Project 2025 and the people behind it. This is the second time he has publicly distanced himself from the authoritarian strategic document pushed by both Heritage and well over 100 of his previous administration’s advisors and staffers.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump wrote. “The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part. By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING!”
However, the Lincoln Project — a prominent anti-Trump Republican group — countered that post with a video clip showing Trump speaking to the Heritage Foundation in 2022. The former president appeared to acknowledge Heritage’s policy work, calling them a “great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
At the heart of Project 2025 is its 920-page playbook entitled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” which six of Trump’s former cabinet secretaries either helped write or contributed in other ways via collaboration with the playbook’s other authors. Some of the more extreme policies listed in the playbook include cutting veteran and active duty military benefits, permanently banning abortions and fertility treatments, removing LGBTQ+ individuals from the list of federally protected classes and making it easier for them to be discriminated against, converting public education infrastructure into a for-profit system and defunding the FBI and the Department of Justice, among others.