Project 2025 Is No Match for MAGA Dysfunction

If any two beliefs are shared by both critics and admirers of former President Donald Trump, they are these: His whims were frequently hamstrung by the people who surrounded him during his first term in office, and that won’t be allowed to happen again.

Trump’s victory in 2016 appeared to surprise his campaign as much as anyone. He boasted during the campaign that he hires “only the best people,” but that was easier said than done. Bereft of institutional backing, with no serious plans for a postelection transition, the 45th president had no choice but to turn to the “Beltway establishment” to​​staff his administration. “When I first got to Washington,” he lamented in April to Time, “I knew very few people.”

Trump was supposed to be a repudiation of “Conservatism, Inc.”—not just in tenor but in substance. Out were the commitments to limited government and free trade, the insistence on fiscal belt tightening and entitlement reform, and the largely sunny orientation toward immigrants associated with previous Republican leaders such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan. In were hardball politics that pulled no punches, minced no words, and had no qualms about a “muscular” state that interferes at will in people’s lives.

But Trump had trouble getting the rest of the governing apparatus to line up behind him. Unfavorable court rulings bookended his presidency, overturning his Muslim travel ban in 2017 and rejecting his election fraud claims in 2021, with other losses along the way. After he left office, the conservative America First Policy Institute released a report complaining that “career bureaucrats resist[ed] Trump Administration policies” by withholding information, slow-walking priorities, and otherwise refusing to carry out work that didn’t align with their ideological preferences.

Worse, Trump’s own advisers and appointees often seemed to be working at cross-purposes. “His White House was hastily staffed by a mix of underqualified true believers, opportunistic hacks and experienced but disloyal swamp creatures who colluded with journalists and permanent bureaucrats to undermine the president’s populist agenda,” wrote Sam Adler-Bell in The New York Times in January, summarizing the MAGA view. “The solution, then, should be simple: Find, vet and train the right people, and everything will be different.”

And so, almost immediately after Trump left office in January 2021, conservatives in Washington began mobilizing to prepare for his return.

The conservative Heritage Foundation has been releasing presidential policy blueprints, known as Mandate for Leadership, for decades. This time around, under the “Project 2025″ banner, it announced a plan to supplement its policy work with a personnel database: a “conservative LinkedIn” that would “provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration,” the think tank explained.

Meanwhile, veterans of Trump’s first term launched the aforementioned America First Policy Institute, a rival group with much the same mission. Similar entities have been proliferating and expanding ever since: the Conservative Partnership Institute (led by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint), American Moment (which focuses on identifying Trump-friendly young conservatives), the Society for American Civic Renewal (a spinoff of the Claremont Institute, home to attorney John Eastman, who is currently under indictment for helping Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 election), a new Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, and on and on.

A general telos unites many of these groups: to ensure, if Trump wins again, that his vision for America won’t be stymied by personnel who don’t fully embrace it. As Paul Dans, the director of Heritage’s Project 2025, put it on C-SPAN, “It’s incumbent on us to get the right people and make sure they have the right ethos.”

That strategy was on display in July with Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate. The pick stood in contrast to 2016, when Trump chose then–Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to balance the ticket and calm any misgivings that evangelical Christians and other traditional conservatives might have had about voting for a philandering TV star. Today, the only truly important qualification is loyalty. After the 2020 election, Pence refused an order from Trump to interfere with Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Vance, a power-hungry populist who once mused to a friend that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” later said publicly that he can be counted on to do what his predecessor would not.

This explosion of activity has caused agita in Democratic circles and among the press, and there are a number of real causes for concern in these developments. Yet a clear-eyed analysis of the situation offers at least one source of comfort: Many of the things that prevented Trump from putting his worst impulses into action during his first term would likely do the same in a second one.

Be Afraid

The last public address Tucker Carlson gave before Fox News ousted him in April 2023 was a keynote speech at a dinner celebrating Heritage’s 50th anniversary. Hailing Carlson as a hero, Kevin Roberts, the foundation’s president, noted afterward that “if things go south for you at Fox News, there’s always a job for you at Heritage.”

Carlson by that time had earned a reputation for dabbling in conspiracy theories, racially tinged and otherwise, and questioning the free markets that Heritage had long claimed to defend. His appearance at the gala, alongside other changes then afoot at the think tank, caused many observers to wonder what in the world had happened to the once-staid Heritage Foundation.

I spoke with multiple people formerly associated with Heritage, from research fellows to senior staff. They painted a picture of an organization that has, in the 14 years since launching its lobbying arm, Heritage Action for America, come to care less about getting conservative policies into law and more about getting friendly Republicans into power. During the Trump era, that has increasingly meant defending the 45th president and attacking his enemies, full stop, no matter what.

Standing by Trump after the events of January 6, 2021, was apparently a bridge too far for some Heritage insiders. Then-President Kay Coles James and then–Executive Vice President Kim Holmes announced their resignations in March of that year. Many more departures would follow—some voluntary, others less so.

In contrast, Roberts, who succeeded James in late 2021, has seemed unbothered by Trump’s continued insistence that the 2020 vote was stolen. Asked in a January interview with The New York Times whether he believes Biden won that election, he was quick to say “no.” This, mind you, was after Trump declared that “a Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Heritage under Roberts has embraced a decidedly authoritarian rhetorical style. “The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America,” one staffer wrote in a blog post about Project 2025. “More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of ‘keeping the government out of it’ will lose every time to the left’s vast power.”

“This is our moment to demand that our politicians use the power they have,” Roberts told The American Conservative last year. “This is the moment for us to demand of companies, whether they’re Google, or Facebook, or Disney, that you listen to us, rather than ram down our throats and into our own families all of the garbage that you’ve been pushing on us. This is our time to demand that you do what we say. And it’s glorious.”

More recently, the Heritage president said on the War Room podcast that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”—a remark one longtime conservative foundation leader described to me as “grotesque and dangerous” and evidence that Roberts “lacks the judgment and maturity to lead the Heritage Foundation or any other institution in our movement.”

Offered a chance to clarify, Roberts passed along a statement asserting that Americans “are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box. Unfortunately, it’s the Left that has a long history of violence, so it’s up to them to allow a peaceful transfer of power.” It made no mention of January 6.

Even sharp departures from positions that Heritage has championed for decades don’t seem to faze Roberts. At the 2022 National Conservatism Conference, he astonished onlookers by proclaiming that “I come not to invite national conservatives to join our conservative movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.” Though the Heritage mission statement lists “free enterprise,” “limited government,” and “individual freedom” as core values, national conservatism seeks to concentrate power at the national level and is comfortable with many government interventions into the economy, such as industrial subsidies and tariffs.

Admittedly, some responses to the policy components of Project 2025 have been overwrought. Opponents claim the agenda would limit access to contraception, for example—verbiage that suggests a desire to throw up legal barriers to the purchase or use of birth control. What it actually says is that a conservative president should allow religious organizations to opt out of paying for contraceptives and not force employers to cover “potential abortifacient” drugs, two pre–Trump GOP views supported by many if not most Americans. The bulk of the program is just this sort of run-of-the-mill Reaganism: deregulation, welfare and entitlement reform, “drill, baby, drill,” etc.

Yet there are disquieting aspects of Project 2025, and of Heritage leadership’s broader decision to cozy up to hardline anti-liberal elements on the right. This summer’s National Conservatism Conference, where Roberts also spoke, included sessions repudiating the idea of separation of church and state; promoting “mass deportations” as necessary to “decolonize America”; calling on Republican officials to criminally prosecute their political opponents (“unfortunately, we’re going to have to use banana republic means,” warned the former George W. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo); and supporting laws “governing the internal affairs of corporations” to ensure they’re run in accordance with a right-wing understanding of the common good.

The latest Mandate for Leadership also departs from prior iterations by taking a Trumpier approach to immigration (proposing “the civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate”) and wavering on international trade.

If it looks as if the contemporary Heritage Foundation has become primarily a vehicle for ensuring Trump’s will is realized, whatever that will might be at a given moment, Roberts doesn’t seem to disagree. In the same New York Times interview where he refused to say that Biden’s election was legitimate, he described Heritage’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

That switch from standing for a set of principles, regardless of who espouses them, to standing for a candidate, regardless of his principles, has put Heritage in bed with some unsavory characters, from Steve Bannon to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

At an institutional level, consider the Bull Moose Project, a startup run by edgy young activists with a history of posting such statements as “White lives matter” and “Libertarians contribute nothing of use to the conservative movement.” In 2023, Heritage sponsored the Bull Moose Leadership Summit even after critics pointed out that one of the group’s executives had proudly defended “blood and soil” nationalism and allied himself with the antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes. (Veep hopeful Vance was an advisory board member for the group at the time of the conference as well.)

What was the Bull Moose worldview that a Roberts-led Heritage was keen to bolster? “National populism is the future of the Right. All other competing philosophies will be eliminated,” tweeted former Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini beside a photo of himself with fellow summit attendees. Or as former Bull Moose staffer Gabe Guidarini said at a different conference a few months later, “We have to build a conservative movement that doesn’t shy away from achieving victory by any means necessary.” Behold the will to power.

After Fox sent Carlson packing, Roberts released a statement claiming that “no one in America has demonstrated more courage in speaking truth to power than Tucker” and that “the entire Heritage family is deeply upset.” A year later, after Carlson traveled to Russia and then released a series of bizarre propaganda videos glorifying life under Vladimir Putin, Reason asked Heritage if it wished to distance itself from its onetime keynote speaker. The think tank did not respond. But in June, Roberts announced that he would appear with Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) at an event this fall.

Recall that the avowed purpose of Project 2025 is “to get the right people and make sure they have the right ethos” to serve in the next Republican administration. If this is the ethos that groups like Heritage will be looking for as they offer staffing advice, it’s hard not to be afraid.

But Don’t Panic

The regnant narrative on the right is that the first Trump administration suffered from being populated by a combination of establishment conservatives who weren’t truly devoted to implementing the president’s vision and Kool-Aid-drinking MAGA warriors without the know-how to get things done.

By all accounts, the various groups preparing to staff a second Trump administration are laser-focused on solving the first problem by demanding absolute fealty to the big man and his desires. Saurabh Sharma, the youthful head of American Moment, “is prescriptive about what gets a person on his list,” reported Axios‘ Jonathan Swan in 2022. “He wants applicants who want to cut not just illegal but also legal immigration into the United States. He favors people who are protectionist on trade and anti-interventionist on foreign policy. They must be eager to fight the ‘culture war.’ Credentials are almost irrelevant.”

John McEntee, a veteran of the Trump White House’s personnel office who went on to advise Heritage, takes a similar view. “A red flag went up if a prospective employee answered ‘deregulation and judges’ when asked to name their favorite Trump policies,” Swan wrote, also in 2022. “It was a sure sign the applicant could be a weak-kneed member of the establishment.”

But the solution to Trump’s first problem—ensuring his new staff is fully ideologically aligned with him—pulls against the solution to his second. He can have people who are true believers or he can have people who are competent; he probably can’t have both, because there are simply too few of them. Stacking the government with folks from outside the establishment, without relevant experience, leaves you with a work force that is unlikely to be effective at implementing an agenda.

“The best way to describe these lists is it looks like they’re looking for incompetence as the chief qualification,” says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Firey. “The bureaucracy, whether you love it or hate it, is an extremely complex machine that is extremely hard to operate….It’s like giving my 8-year-old the keys to a steam shovel. Nothing’s going to happen but a disaster.”

Much press coverage has focused on “Schedule F,” shorthand for an executive order that could in theory allow a president to fire as many as 50,000 members of the permanent bureaucracy and replace them with his own political cronies. The effort has been described in apocalyptic terms, as something very like a coup, by mainstream and left-of-center outlets.

In June, the Associated Press reported that a new group called the American Accountability Foundation, with funding from Heritage, had begun “digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security.” Its aim is to identify figures hostile to Trump’s goals—described by Heritage as “anti-American bad actors”—who could be targeted under Schedule F.

The issue is a tricky one to approach from libertarian first principles. The bloated and biased executive bureaucracy, and the “civil service protections” that make it almost impossible to get rid of lazy federal workers—these are longstanding and legitimate complaints of limited-government types. On the other hand, Congress did statutorily establish the civil service system with an eye to shielding career employees, who are supposed to be nonpolitical subject matter experts, from rank electoral considerations. If things haven’t worked out as intended, it ought to be Congress’ responsibility to pass a structural fix. There’s something unsettlingly Soviet about the image of a president hunting for thought criminals to cast into the darkness.

But wherever you come down on the appropriateness of Schedule F, it probably won’t matter much in practice. “Given Trump’s frequent vows to deliver ‘retribution’ against his critics and political opponents if he returns to office, it is unnerving to think of a federal bureaucracy of loyalists carrying out his commands,” wrote Firey in a recent Cato report. “But a Trump restoration of Schedule F and takeover of the federal bureaucracy is unlikely to play out the way either he or his critics imagine.”

Presidents already have the ability to make some 4,000 political appointments. Trump could not manage it last time—and many of the people he did appoint turned out to be insufficiently sycophantic for his taste. (It seems most folks do have some lines they’re unwilling to cross.) The idea that Trump’s team could fill tens of thousands of additional openings with workers who are even mostly aligned and minimally competent beggars belief. “I think a lot of these positions are just going to sit empty,” Firey says.

Yes, a whole brood of groups, new and old, have positioned themselves to help a second Trump administration do better. But there are reasons to be skeptical that they’re up to the task. Behind the scenes, the various organizations are busy squabbling among themselves and jockeying for prominence. And several of them are gimcrack enterprises headed up by 20-somethings whose biggest claim to fame is acting out online via inflammatory social media posts.

There’s also an incredible amount of money sloshing through and around these efforts, which makes them an inevitable magnet for grifters—the kind of political operatives who specialize in lightening donors’ pocketbooks rather than actually accomplishing things. A May New York Times exposé found that the Conservative Partnership Institute, which contributed to Project 2025, had paid millions of dollars “to corporations led by its own leaders or their relatives” in a pattern of “insider transactions” that “raise concerns about self-dealing.” People just looking to get paid are not exactly known for their ability to tackle complicated strategic and administrative challenges.

Finally, there’s the problem of Trump himself: that even as he demands unswerving loyalty from his subordinates, he exhibits zero hesitation about throwing those around him under the bus when doing so suits his interests or his mood.

Multiple groups have gone all in on backing the 45th president. If they hoped for gratitude, they must be feeling disappointed. Initially, Trump seemed to stand behind the work being done at places like Heritage and the America First Policy Institute. But over the last year, his campaign managers have issued a series of escalating bulletins warning that “unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”

In July—following bad press regarding the Heritage policy agenda and Roberts’ “bloodless revolution” comments—the former president apparently decided he’d had enough. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on his Truth Social platform. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

A campaign aide went further, telling Semafor that “if you’re an organization that is purporting to be pushing ‘Trump policies,’ it’s probably the last organization that we’ll take references from for personnel.” That smackdown by the Trump team, Semafor added, could “signal to conservative donors that Heritage, a power inside the movement for more than 50 years, would have less clout in a second administration.”

A few weeks later, Project 2025 chief Dans announced his departure from the think tank. “Reports of Project 2025′s demise would be greatly welcomed,” the campaign said in a statement, “and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump.”

It’s hardly certain that, push coming to shove, a future Trump White House would turn away help from groups such as Roberts’; staffing the executive branch may necessarily be an all-hands-on-deck effort. Still, the episode typifies the chaos that seems ever to follow in Trump’s wake.

Democrats are trying hard to paint Project 2025 as part of a “playbook for Trump to achieve his dream of being a dictator on day one.” Yet the former president isn’t even disciplined enough to play nice with a guy who sold out a venerable conservative policy institution in order to put it entirely at the disposal of Trumpian whims. The will to power is strong in MAGA world, but the dysfunction may be stronger.

The post Project 2025 Is No Match for MAGA Dysfunction appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2024/08/29/only-the-best-people/