As the Republican National Convention continued in Milwaukee on Tuesday, Biden campaign surrogates were also in Milwaukee speaking out against Project 2025.
The nearly 900-page plan for former President Donald Trump’s second term has been trending on social media and grabbing national headlines.
Project 2025, which was produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, states it is the work of more than 400 scholars and policy experts.
Among its priorities are “restor[ing] the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect[ing] our children” and “Dismantl[ing] the administrative state and return[ing] self-governance to the American people.”
As for family policy, the plan states, “conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade. -- but the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.”
It also says, “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
READ: Project 2025′s Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise
Democrats are making Project 2025 a campaign issue.
“These ideas aren’t just bad -- they’re dangerous. They’re dangerous for our country,” said Wisconsin Democratic Chair Ben Winkler. “Donald Trump and JD Vance want to ransack the public treasury to hand out massive tax cuts to billionaires and stick working Americans with the bill. We know that they want to strip Americans of their basic freedoms, like access to reproductive health care.”
Trump has distanced himself from the plan, writing on social media, “I know nothing about Project 2025. 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. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
However, his name appears in the text of Project 2025 more than 300 times, including in the bios of many former staffers in his administration who helped author Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation says it has produced a transition blueprint for conservative presidents every four years going back to the Reagan Administration, and their 2016 plan “earned significant attention from the Trump Administration” and “After his first year in office, the Administration had implemented 64% of its policy recommendations.”
FSCJ political science professor Daniel Cronrath said he believes Trump is distancing himself from Project 2025 because of the backlash it’s received, but the GOP base will be pushing for its proposals.
“Voters should be taking Project 2025 very seriously,” Cronrath said. “President Trump is going to potentially find himself where he’s going to have a Republican House and Republican Senate, and his core base in those first two years of his second term, before the Democrats could perhaps, you know, get back into office in one of those chambers…they’re going to be very, very hard pushing him, similar to his conservative Supreme Court appointees, similar to his large tax cuts that President Trump passed in the first term of his administration. There’s going to be a lot of pressure applied on the president and on the White House to actually make good on the promises that these conservative groups who have authored Project 2025 want to see.”