Hannah Meredith Gardner | 07 October 2024
The United States Election is in full swing. With only a few days left in the campaign, one of the shortest US electoral campaigns in recent memory, US politics are swarming news feeds all over the world, again. One of the most talked about and discussed parts of the election, especially in liberal and left wing circles is Project 2025. Project 2025 is another name for the “2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”; a 922 page manifesto and policy planning document for the next Republican President by the Heritage Foundation. It is not Donald Trump’s official policy plan, that is Agenda 47, the 16 page official RNC platform, the policy page of his website and a series of videos. While this single blog post doesn’t have the space to fully dissect and compare the two, it will touch on some of the similarities and differences as Donald Trump tries to verbally distance himself from the better known Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 as a conservative think tank and, according to its website, has “led the way for reforms in every policy area-”. Their policies were hugely influential in Reagan’s presidency and also in Trump’s presidency. Many of Trump’s former employees and advisors are direct authors of Project 2025 and it is clear that Project 2025 was created in the hopes of a second Trump presidency. The 922 page document is only the first of the four listed pillars needed to complete their goals against the “ long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions” that, according to them, has taken over the US government and all aspects of life in the US since the first “Mandate for Leadership” was created for Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980. The four pillars are, according to the document;
I. The document itself, as a guide.
II. A personnel database where conservative candidates can put together a professional profile for future governmental positions.
III. The creation of the “Presidential Administration Academy” which will be an online program that will train these candidates with “experts from our coalition” on government work and governmental structures.
IV. “the Playbook” which refers to agency teams assembled by the Hertiage Foundation which would be ready to start their work as soon as the Republican Nominee swears in as the 47th president of the United States of America.
These pillars and the plans behind them are some of the biggest differences between Project 2025 and the RNC’s document. Project 2025 not only lays out their grievances with the current way the US government is run, it gives a solid plan of attack to defeat what they see as the threats that are coming for every single citizen and their families in the United States. These pillars also point to the main way that the Heritage Foundation plans to recreate the government in its image, through the removal of non-partisan political and bureaucratic roles in the government, filling them with the vetted and trained political actors as described in pillars 2 and 3.
Agenda 47 has a lot less detail than Project 2025 and is much more focused on the more noticeable and public parts of life in the US. While Project 2025 lays out 4 main pillars, Agenda 47 primarily lists it’s 20 “core promises to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” which include things like “SEAL THE BORDER AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION” (promise #1), “CARRY OUT THE BIGGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY” (promise #2), “MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINATE ENERGY PRODUCER, BY FAR!” (promise #4) and “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN” (promise #18).
These examples of Project 2025 and Agenda 47 show what I think may be one of the biggest differences between the two: tone. Project 2025 is smoother and uses more academic language than Agenda 47. It appeals to conservatives that hold the same beliefs as the Trump administration and Republican Party while appearing more “grown up”. The examples of Agenda 47 that are listed above are not editorialized to seem more radical or unhinged than they actually are. The entire 20 point promise on Trump’s campaign website is fully capitalized. It practically screams at you from the page and you can almost hear Trump’s voice in every single word. On the other hand, while Project 2025’s section headers are all capitalized, it also uses phrases like, “-a political Gordian knot”. Both of these projects are clear in their far-right ideologies and speak to what they see as the moral decline and potential ruin of the United States and how their plans would see a conservative government “set things right” but while Project 2025 is clearly written for conservative professionals who want to work towards this remaking of the United States of America, Agenda 47 is more targeted at voters who are interested in Trump’s campaign promises.
This difference can also be seen in the way that Project 2025 repeats the talking points of extreme Christian Nationalism, versus Agenda 47’s more populist lean. One of the biggest examples of this is how Project 2025 speaks at length about their definition of pornography (which includes most forms of sexual education) and their plans to punish anyone who “distributes” it; Agenda 47 only hints at this by discussing how they plan to “CUT FEDERAL FUNDING TO ANY SCHOOL PUSHING CRITIAL RACE THEORY, RADICAL GENDER IDEOLOGY , AND OTHER INAPPROPRIATE RACIAL, SEXUAL, OR POLITICAL CONTENT ON OUR CHILDREN” (promise #16).
While Project 2025 is often described as Trump’s political platform, it is so much more. It is the working of a smooth political machine from one of America’s most right-leaning think tanks. While Trump may be publicly moving away from it, his administration’s fingerprints are all over this work, and it is safe to bet that it will be brought to fruition if he is elected.
Keywords: #UnitedStates #Election #PresidentalElection2024
Hannah Meredith Gardner is a Lund University master’s student in the Human Rights Studies program. Her focuses are on the intersections of human rights, food, the arts, and colonialism. She is originally from the United States and did her undergraduate degree in Political Science at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.
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