RESOURCES
Project 2025 *is* the GOP platform
Don't let them fool you.
JUL 18
A scene from night three of the RNC on Wednesday. (Alex Wong/Getty)
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Project 2025 — the right-wing template for a second Trump term — is so exhaustively evil, so vast in scope, that it feels impossible to fully comprehend it.
However, as the GOP faithful gather in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention this week, the mainstream media has finally startedexploring who is behind the project and its contents.
Perhaps sensing normal people don’t find a 922-page manifesto that envisions dragging America back a century all that appealing, Trump has scrambled to distance himself from the document. It’s a farcical ploy given that at least 140 of his former staffers are involved in Project 2025, but the manifesto’s level of detail is dangerous to Trump as the GOP rolls out a stripped-down, vague official platform.
That vagueness allows the GOP to mask the full horror they’re planning on unleashing under a Trump presidency, a bit of plausible deniability as they court swing voters.
The GOP platform is for low information voters. Project 2025 is for right-wing ideologues.
Over the last 50 years, GOP platforms have ranged from 23,000 to 40,000 words, but 2024’s platform clocks at a mere 5,201. To be fair, that’s 5,201 more words than the GOP platform of 2020, which adopted the 2016 platform verbatim.
The short 2024 document shows a party wholly in thrall to Trumpism rather than putting forth actual policies. Indeed, as CNN pointed out, this year’s platform even reads like a Trump social media post, complete with random exclamation points and capitalization. In contrast, Project 2025 purports to be a serious policy document, and while the policies it proposes are unhinged, it must be taken seriously as a statement of intent.
Broadly speaking, the GOP platform and Project 2025 cover many of the same things, but the platform gives most issues no more than a couple of sketchy and poorly drafted sentences. Everything in the platform reads like a Trump rally speech — nothing but soundbites and lies — while Project 2025 buries the reader in detail.
Take, for example, the platform’s section on K-12 education. It’s a repetitive list of culture war talking points rather than policies. Here’s the entirety of the entry on parental rights: “Republicans will restore Parental Rights in Education, and enforce our Civil Rights Laws to stop schools from discriminating on the basis of Race. We trust Parents!” This doesn’t detail any steps and finishes with an anodyne statement that can’t be argued with — who doesn’t trust parents?
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In contrast, Project 2025 is full of details about what Trumpers actually want to do to education. Schools could not teach that America is systemically racist, nor can any teacher use a name or pronoun other than that which appears on the student’s birth certificate unless parents give written permission. Taxpayer money would go to private schools — including religious ones. Parents would be given the right to sue schools if they felt their rights were denied and to recover attorney fees and costs if they prevail.
Since both the GOP platform and Project 2025 call for the Department of Education to be eliminated, this would shift enforcement of education civil rights laws from the federal government to random parents who are mad about critical race theory.
The GOP platform also brags about how Trump vowed “he will not cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security.” There’s no explanation about how that would work despite it being impossible not to touch entitlement spending while still insisting on deep tax cuts. This omission is no doubt deliberate. It allows Trump and the party to look like they’re drawing a line in the sand, even though GOP legislators have continued to push for massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
The Project 2025 authors know better than to come out and say directly they want Medicare cuts, so instead we get statements about how patients are the best able to determine the value of health care services. There’s some invisible hand of the market stuff here, with the Project declaring that “prices are best for patients when determined by economic values rather than political power.” In other words, using the political process to get seniors better Medicare deals is bad, so the solution is to remove the government’s massive purchasing power and influence and just leave everything to the free market, where it will magically cost less.
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Project 2025 also says it will use artificial intelligence to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. That seems unlikely unless a conservative crony needs a well-padded no-bid contract to pretend to provide AI services to the Trump administration. As it happens, there’s a South African billionaire who is used to having the government give him money, hasrecently decided his car company is an AI company, and just pledged to donate $45 million/month to a pro-Trump super PAC. We can’t wait for Elon Musk or another of the PayPal Mafia to control Medicare if Trump wins.
Further, if Trump prevails in 2024, Project 2025 has already teed up massive changes for Medicare, which rely upon privatizing much of it. Patients would be forced to default enroll in Medicare Advantage plans, which are private plans. Then, seniors would have “direct control” of how they spend their Medicare money, which has always been one of the hilariously false pretenses behind the pushes for healthcare privatization — that healthcare is like any other commodity and people can comparison shop to find a good deal.
Trump’s vague boast that he will never cut entitlements, the absence of details in the GOP platform as to how this will work, and the detailed explanations of what Project 2025 would change are not in tension or contrast with one another. Trump’s bluster and the lack of specificity in the platform help reel in low information voters who will latch on to statements about entitlements being protected without interrogating how that would work. In the event of a Trump victory, Project 2025 stands ready to fill in all those blanks with reorganization and privatization that is designed to enrich private companies while making Medicare harder for everyone to use.
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Project 2025’s abortion restrictions would make a national ban superfluous
Nowhere is it more evident that Trump and the RNC would like to obscure the full scope of their policies as when discussing abortion.
Conservatives worked for decades to get Roe v. Wade overturned and made it the centerpiece of their political efforts. So imagine their collective surprise upon finding out people were not thrilled with skyrocketingpregnancy complications, medical professionals declining to apply to work in states with bans, and the gruesome, heartbreaking specter of people forced to carry pregnancies to term knowing the baby would die. Additionally, conservatives have learned that when abortion is on the ballot at the state level, anti-choicers keep losing.
All of this is likely why Trump and the GOP are being incredibly cagey about plans for a nationwide abortion ban. On an interview with Fox News that aired on Monday, Trump trotted out the fiction that he believes Project 2025 has “gone, really, too far” on abortion and that he would leave it up to the states. In turn, the GOP removed the call for a national abortion ban from the RNC platform for the first time in 40 years.
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What Trump and the GOP are trying to draw attention away from is Project 2025’s detailed plan to render abortion unavailable nationwide, even absent a nationwide ban.
Project 2025 proposes a radical expansion of surveillance of pregnant people, and would mandate that states where abortion is legal (or what Project 2025 calls “abortion tourism”) would be forced to report extensive details about every abortion performed, including the state of residence of the pregnant person. Project 2025 also demands the FDA reverse its approval of medication abortion drugs or, should the drugs remain available, require in-person visits rather than telehealth.
The Project also proposes a complete ban on funding to Planned Parenthood even though no federal funding to the nonprofit goes toward abortion, as federal funding for abortion has been banned since 1977. States where abortion remained legal would lose all Medicaid funding if they required insurers to cover abortion. Government funding of training of medical professionals could not be used for instruction on abortion. Pharmacists would not be required to dispense medication abortion drugs if the pharmacy or pharmacists had religious or moral objections.
These proposed restrictions do not leave things up to the states. They use the might of the federal government to make abortions difficult to obtain even in states where it would remain legal. A nationwide ban becomes superfluous if the federal government has already made it nearly impossible for most people to get an abortion.
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Project 2025 lets the mask slip by saying it wants the Department of Health and Human Services to state that it furthers the health of Americans “from conception to natural death.” That’s the language of fetal personhood — the idea that a fetus has the same rights as a person. This is also where the platform tips its hand, saying, “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those rights.” If the 14th Amendment applies to fetuses — something the Alabama Supreme Court has already held, banning in vitro fertilization in the process — then abortion would be unconstitutional, period.
The author of Project 2025’s HHS chapter, detailing myriad abortion restrictions and proposing to upend Medicare, is Roger Severino, who was the director of the Office of Civil Rights at HHS during the Trump administration. He spent decades working to overturn Roe. He isn’t a bit player in the anti-choice movement, and he wasn’t a bit player in the Trump administration.
Hardline anti-choicers helped propel Trump to the presidency in 2016, and he rewarded them with Supreme Court appointees who were guaranteed to overturn Roe. The post-Roe landscape, though, has not proved as bright as conservatives expected. That’s why Trump is trying to thread a difficult needle, but Project 2025 wouldn’t exist without Trump, and there’s absolutely no reason to let him off the hook for it.
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