Project 2025: Trump’s Undeniable Ties To Them

Introduction to Project 2025 hello and welcome to project 2025 a warning I'm Molly Jang fast writer podcaster and person you occasionally see on cable news and in this episode we're going to speak to the top experts on how project 2025 the Heritage Foundation and its allies are advancing an agenda for Trump's second term that would radically remake America as we know it but let's get you up to speed the influential right-wing Think Tank Overview of Project 2025 the Heritage Foundation unveiled project 2025 which instructs the entire federal bureau rcy including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice to be placed under presidential control this basically gives the president a lot more power than previous presidents have had but don't take my word for it let's hear from the brilliant Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer who authors the newsletter democracy Americano which has done a definitive overview of project 2025 project 2025 is the name of a massive planning operation on the right it's spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation it was launched about 2 years ago in the spring of 2022 and it has brought together much of the right-wing Machinery of think tanks and lobbying groups and political institutions with the goal of making sure that the next Republican presidency would be a much more effective much more roofless right-wing regime I think it's best to understand uh project 2025 as the American rights declaration of war on the idea of a multi-racial pluralistic diverse Society project 2025 is a plan to execute what amounts to a comprehensive authoritarian takeover of American government and transform government into a machine that serves only two purposes first exacting revenge on what they call the woke leftist globalist enemy and secondly imposing a minoritarian reactionary vision of white Christian patriarchal order on society and I know you might be thinking this sounds a little crazy and like something one of your ants who reads too much Facebook sends you but the Heritage Foundation developed and then linked the Heritage Foundation's Radical Agenda project 2025 mission statement right from their website the plan is titled mandate for leadership 2025 the conservative promise and they're not trying to hide it in fact they go on television and brag about it and what they brag about is a plan to reshape America in the craziest conservative Vision possible Heritage and the Allies who endorse project 2025 have plans to end no fault divorce end the Affordable Care Act give additional tax breaks to corporations and the 1% enact a complete ban on abortions without exception cut Social Security end climate protections cut Medicare defund the FBI and Homeland Security ban sexual orientation and gender identity education ban some contraceptives and greatly limit and regulate inv vitro fertilization ban pornography and imprison anyone who disobeys ban Muslims from entering the country elimination of unions and worker protections ra ra the retirement age raise prescription drug prices eliminate the Department of Education ban African-American and gender studies at all levels of Education use the military to break up domestic protest end Birthright citizenship and despite how crazy this all sounds it's only the tip of the iceberg now you may be thinking the Heritage Foundation isn't Donald Trump's presidential campaign or the Republican party after all Donald Trump Trump's Disavowal and Political Maneuvering has disavowed project 2025 like some on the right severe right came up with this project 25 and I don't even know I mean some of them I know who they are but they're very very conservative just like you have they're sort of the opposite of the radical left okay you have the radical left and you have the radical right and they come up with this I don't know what the hell it is it's project 25 he's involved in project and then they read some of the things that they are extreme I mean they're seriously extreme but I don't know anything about it I don't want to know anything about it but what they do is misinformation and disin Donald Trump you know nothing about it but you disagree with it which is it CU our country is going to hell the critical job of Institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork and Heritage does such an incredible job with that and I'm telling you with uh with Kevin and the staff and I met so many of them now I took pictures with among the most handsome beautiful people I've ever seen I didn't like that picture if you could could lose that picture please would you Kevin but this is a great no he says I won't do that but this is a great group and they're going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America and that's coming that's coming Trump fired project 2025 author and Trump campaign staffer Paul dance from the Trump campaign after this bad project 2025 polling came out but what Trump didn't say was that the project 2025 policy pillar is already written the Recruitment and potential Staffing for the Trump Administration is still actively going and here's Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts being caught on audio saying Trump is only distancing himself from Heritage for political reasons to win the presidential race well I I think it's the the sign of a great leader who understands he's in a a terrific political news cycle he's run a really good campaign from start up to this point and the left's Mis mischaracterization of project 2025 had become a liability I think we've seen that really turn around in the last few days since that statement so no hard feelings from any of us at project 2025 about the statement because we understand Trump is the standard Bearer and he's making a political tactical decision there but back to Heritage the Heritage Foundation has been the laboratory for many horrible government policies that have set our country back and Heritage Foundation has been the place that much of Republican policy comes from but don't take my word for it here's Senator Marco Rubio and it's good to see you and thank you to Heritage for inviting us here giving us this opportunity and for all the scholarship that they do here that really serves as a guidepost for a lot of the public policy we choose to make these policies are drastically unpopular and Trump has tried to cover up his ties to it let's talk about those ties self-proclaimed Christian nationalist Russ bot he's one of the many authors of project 2025 he also serves as the policy director of the Republican party's platform writing committee you know the policy that was rolled out at the Republican convention in Milwaukee you may remember the RNC it's the organization Trump's daughter-in-law runs that pays many many of his legal bills and the platform sure has a lot in common with project 2025 and while Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025 he's not doing a very good job he's talked about hiring project 2025 author and former acting ice director and an adviser for the family separation policy Tom Homan in the next Administration to over the Mexican border she was given the responsibility of the Border I have Tom homman lined up we have the greatest people and you may remember right-wing dating app entrepreneur John mckinty who was Trump's bodyman and nicknamed Deputy president joined project 2025 to write the database for who the Trump Administration should hire and Trump's own insiders say that he will be a big part of the next Trump Administration tell us what you're doing hereis you two are now working together these guys are coming up with the plan that on the victory the SE the third Victory the second term we hit the deck plates Runner right there's 4,000 appointees by a president 4,000 to run the entire government 1,000 of those I think have to be Senate confirmed but 3,000 can start work day one walk through what you guys are doing I know and I keep asking do you work for Johnny or Johnny work for you right both I definitely work for John that's so what we're doing with project 2025 is we're Recruitment and Staffing for 2025 recruiting the Maga America First Republicans right now so that we can take DC by storm in 2025 we're not going to go in like we did in 2017 where the establishment took over and co-opted much of the Personnel of President Trump's Administration we're more prepared this time we're recruiting Grassroots conservatives and we want all of you if you want to serve in the next White House next state department next Pentagon we want you to sign up tell tell your sons tell your daughters tell all your friends it's project 202.org so Johnny okay you heard that if you guys want to serve you've got to get engaged now you've got to be involved now because one of the big parts of this is networking it's not just training people up but those networks that we do with Grassroots organizations with other organizations walk through tell me what the plan is so we're collecting resumés we're getting as much information as we can now to save the transition time on the back end as you know when a president wins or president-elect wins things happen very quickly and you have a short amount of time to staff an entire Administration it's also looking beyond the 4,000 and what we can do with the bureaucracy itself so we're thinking of creative policy things as well that will integrate with this but Trump's clearest tie to Heritage and project 2025 is his choice of JD Vance as vice president an abortion hardliner who seems gleeful at the idea of taking away women's rights and funny enough the Associated Press reported Kevin Roberts the president of the Heritage Foundation said at the organization's policy Fest in Milwaukee that he is good friends with Vance and that the Heritage Foundation had been privately rooting for Trump to choose Vance as his running mate but a clear sign of Trump's tether to project 2025 is that Trump's name appears in the document 312 times these two things are in fact one in the same and just as project 2025 is a complex web of organizations and expertises they fall into an ecosystem that will influence Trump here's UC Davis School of Law law professor and author of row the history of a national Obsession Mary zler one is that project 20125 is a coalition effort right so Heritage LED this but it got Buy in from over a hundred other conservative groups so this really reflects the best ideas that a big cohort of people on the right have had not just Heritage the other really interesting thing is that a lot of the people who work at Heritage now or who wrote project 2025 are very close to Donald Trump and I think there's a a clear understanding on the part of Heritage that getting influence in a potential second Trump Administration is not just about having the smartest people in the room it's about having the people that Donald Trump will listen to in the room and so a lot of what you see in Project 2025 is being offered by people who worked in the first Trump Administration and I think on the that these are people Donald Trump is much more likely to bring back or at least you know entertain than lots of other people who are conservative so I I mean I take project 2025 not like I didn't take Heritage seriously or they didn't have influence in the past they did but I think project 2025 I view as being in a kind of different category for all those reasons and the reason to take it so seriously is that with project 2025 it will get even easier to get the craziest policies enacted it's as if they have have figured out that part of it is figuring out what you can get past but part of it is figuring out how you can speak to Donald Trump totally yeah and I think that's a big part of because I think that's a big a huge huge part of it because um the anti-abortion movement in the before dos was all about figuring out how you speak to the Supreme Court and that's still going on but the Heritage now project 2025 you can read it as like how do you convince like how do you find in the ven diagram the thing that will convince Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh at the same time right that's like the sweet spot right now and if that didn't convince you here's Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and he's going to show you just how serious they are we are going to win we're in the process of taking this country back no one in the audience should be despairing no one should be discouraged we ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday and in spite of all of the Injustice which of course friends and audience of this show of our friend Steve know we are going going to Prevail well that sounds threatening we are in the process of the second American Revolution which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be hm I'm starting to think they may be very serious about making this happen Roberts also said that he saw heritage's role as institutionalizing trumpism adding the Trump Administration with the best of intentions simply got a slow start and Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated and if you aren't scared yet Roberts admits the worst of what's in his plan isn't in the public version the basis of the plan is public you can see that at project 2025. org there are parts of the plan that we were will not share with the left the executive orders the rules and regulations just like a good football team we would don't want to tip off our Playbook to the left so now that we've established this is the plan that Trump will use to reshape America that will be even more insane than his last rule over this country here's Thomas Zimmer to explain the diagnosis from which they start from which all of these planning efforts on the right start is that they see the first Trump Administration as a failure like they are very clear that they weren't ready Trump World wasn't ready in 2017 they had no plans they had no Personnel to implement whatever plans they didn't have and they had very little understanding of the vast and powerful machine that is the American government and again no one understands this better than they do and they think that they were because they didn't have personel they they had to rely on these people like normal lawyers and bureaucrats and like normal people right and they see they think these people sabotage them and so this time again they feel like we're going to have plans we're going to purge the American government from all these people who sabotaged Us in in the the first time around we're going to replace them with an army of thousands of loyalists and ideological conformists who they are looking actively looking for that is part of project 2025 the policy agenda is only one part of project 2025 the overall planning operation goes far beyond that they're again they're looking for thousands of people that they can put into government into these positions what would that amount to I mean look the first thing it would amount to is a vastly worse government because a lot of these people just these are government jobs they're not artisan and so you're removing people like from the EPA which they hate the EPA but you still want to make sure water doesn't have Leed in it right I mean there are certain small that things that will be [ __ ] up that we can't even sort of quantify right yes I think again this is probably the point s maybe talk about how extreme the vision of sort of a purge is that they want to Institute here right they want to come in and look there's about 4,000 political appointees in American government right and every Administration uh when they come in they look at all these political appointments these are people sort of at the higher end of all these uh departments and agencies and every Administration looks at them and every Administration um replaces you know the number fluctuates but usually about a thousand people or so right so every Administration brings in about a thousand people but other than that they let these normal people bureaucrats civil servants they let them do their job because that's the whole point about the Civil Service is you have people who are insulated from direct political control and they are experts they know their jobs they do their jobs right so so so untouched by you know oh there's a new Administration uh going to replace the whole Personnel now project 2025 wants to do something entirely different they want to come in and convert tens of thousands of Korea civil service positions into Political appointments starting with anyone they say in sort of a policy adjacent position or a policy advisory role but these terms really don't mean anything the goal is to strip all these people of their Civil Service Protections in order to make them firable and then fire them because again if you have Civil Service protection you can't just be fired for no reason but they want to convert them into Political appointments fire them and then replace them with an army of loyalists and ideological conformists they're talking about numbers again fluctuate but something like 50,000 people they want to come in fire replaced by their own people but think about who they want to bring in here these would be people whose sole qualification is that they are ideologically on board with the trumpist project these wouldn't be experts right these wouldn't people with many years even Decades of experience in these again highly specialized highly technical jobs these would just be ideological conformists and again this would make government so much worse it would make government vastly less functional right even Beyond just the fact that it would turn government into s this authoritarian Revenge machine it would just function worse right because you have people who just have no idea what they're doing and Heritage itself has been one of the organizations taken over by a more radical element of the right here's Rhode Island Senator Sheldon White House to explain it brings the um long history of far-right billionaires trying to meddle in our politics together with the dark money apparatus that the coch brothers specialized in creating after citizens united now uh rebooted in mega format I think probably to kind of nudge the Koch brothers operation out of the Republican political space and take it over with mega Trump people and he believes a deal was broker that allowed this to happen but it's that same dark money smelly billionaire funded operation that is now rearing its head through project 20125 and here is representative Jared Huffman of California's second district who heads the Democratic task force on Project 2025 and how to stop it even some of the seemingly innocuous parts of project 2025 like bringing the FCC uh under direct Presidential Power ending the Independence that many of these agencies have typically had what's that about well it's about President Trump having basically singular power over which corporate mergers go through and how we control the media it's important to understand project 2025 is made of The Four Pillars of Project 2025 four pillars the reason they picked four pillars is because they want the Trump Administration to be able to remake America as quickly as possible this is their own terminology the first pillar is a policy agenda that is spelled out in their 900 page mandate for leadership a conservative promise the second pillar is a personal database intended to build an army of loyalists these loyalists will replace public servants the third pillar is what they call a training effort that currently consists of online courses so that these loyalists can be very effective in implementing their rightwing agenda they call it the presidential Administration Academy and here is Thomas Zimmer again to explain the fourth pillar now this fourth pillar this Playbook this sort of emergency playbook for the first uh six months in power at this point is still distinctly vague it seems to exist only in the form of sort of an announcement of future action so that has not been published yet they're working on this um that's not out hi I just want to stop for a second the reason we put this on YouTube for free is we want to spread the word as much as possible it would really help us if you comment click like and send this to a friend or three thank you so much okay back to the video but it's important to understand that while I think this is an organization plotting The Right's Counter-Revolutionary Project to destroy what so many of us love about America it is actually a movement that is a reaction to What so many of us actually love about America the one thing they can all agree on is first of all they hate the left more regardless of how much they and by left they really mean like any attempt at leveling s of discriminatory hierarchies of race gender religion and wealth right that's what they call the left um so this is not like a a narrow sense of the American left and like a you know something that maybe you and I would call the left broadly it's like any attempt to make this into anything but a society that is defined by white Christian patriarchal domination that's the left um they are convinced that they are under siege by this leftist egalitarian project they are convinced that ququ left has basically managed to overtake all institutions of American life including the American government they really believe this by the way they really believe in these sort of conspiratorial ideas of a vast leftist communist socialist walk it doesn't matter they just use these terms interchangeably for them again anything that levels discriminatory hierarchies is just left Socialist Communist W doesn't matter and they really believe there's this vast conspiracy that has taken over all institutions of American life and so they're all convinced and when I say all I mean all these different factions on the right they are convinced that s of quotequote normal conservatism is just not enough to sort of save their understanding of quot unquote real America and so they Lust For This sort of more radical politics and what they now openly and sort of aggressively refer to as a counterrevolution and that's how they Define their project as s of a counterrevolutionary project against the supposed leftist takeover of America and now they are even rhetorically openly Weaponizing the State: A New Conservative Strategy aggressively throwing all that overboard and are basically saying no we need to weaponize the state we need to weaponize government mobilize the coercive powers of government against our enemies and they're giving themselves permission by basically saying look the left has already gone much further everything we do is only in reaction to a radicalized leftist woke globalist whatever enemy that has already started its revolutionary assault on America they truly believe that they are sort of Under Siege they see themselves all of these people and you see this when you read project 2025 they have completely given up on this idea completely given up completely accepted the fact that they are in the minority and that only ever more authoritarian measures can keep them in power that's precisely sort of the big shift that has happened here and here is Paul Dan who directs heritage's 2025 presidential transition Project 2025: A Radical Shift in Governance project saying what we actually already know this is really projection 2020 on behalf of the left it's not project 2025 so whatever they're saying you know pointing at us with their finger they have four fingers pointing back at them remember everyone who died from covid remember that disastrous pull out in Afghanistan even remember what happen on Saturday all these are products of this deep State and we need to reinus political control over this bureaucracy and that's the importance of project 2025 and here's Harvard sociologist and political scientist Thea Scotch pole who Trump's Influence and the Rise of Authoritarianism is the author of the tea party and the remaking of Republican conservatism discussing how these motivations came to being when Trump took power Donald Trump personally is what social scientists call an intervening variable he didn't cause the various tensions in society and politics that he has known how to maximize and exploit and if he for example becomes president a second time it's very clear he's going to be obsessed a hundred times more from what he was always obsessed with which is what can I personally and my family milk out of the federal government in the way of wealth and how can I use the federal government to put on a show and play out my angers and resentments against people I consider to be enemies but he has assembled around him a set of forces I would say he plays a personal role and has always in kind of signaling to large numbers of Grassroots people some of whom came out of the party tea party networks some of whom are very U Conservative Christian right people others of whom are gun people these are networks some of which have an organizational base to them and he knew how to knit them together and to highlight their issues and their angers and to tell them that he would be the enemy of the people he says are their enemies so his ability to communicate with and create a kind of resonance with a lot of angry and fearful people is a potent political ingredient that he personally has brought to it and now he's wielding in the form of threats of humiliation and violence against people so I'm not saying that's not crucial but I am saying that it's incomplete because the real issue isn't Donald Trump so much as the entire Republican party and sets of organized Elite groups that believe they can ride this tiger to the goals they want without the tiger consuming them and here she is explaining how this will change America I think they'll Impact on Immigration and Women's Rights concentrate on key agencies they'll concentrate on the ones that Trump feels can carry out what he wants which is to enrich himself and his family and get rid of the legal cases and that organized groups led by the likes of Steven Miller want to pursue which is to purge immigrants they know surely what we should all keep in mind which is immigrants are not neatly sorted into documented versus undocumented they come in families hardworking families that have some members who are in one category some in another entire families will leave move uh either in the United States or even leave the United States they'll leave the dairy industry in the midwest they'll leave the construction industry in Florida which is already happening health care for old people will suffer terribly uh all of these things will not be popular as their economic implications play out one of the animating forces behind project 2025 is that they don't like confident women making their own choices their animosity towards women's rights and women's progress is something they practically advertise but one of the things to understand here is that the Mandate for leadership creates the ideas that ultimately trickle down to State legislatures the Heritage Foundation becomes an incubator for some of the worst and dumbest conservative policy that in worst case scenario Rises all the way up to the Supreme Court and becomes laws for the entire nation here's law professor Mary zler states The Supreme Court and Reproductive Rights are introducing new banss even as they already have existing BS we're starting to see more interest in conservative States in limiting travel for abortion we're seeing conservative efforts to introduce a kind of backdoor Federal ban on abortion through the Comstock act that they're hoping a potential Trump Administration would enforce and we're also seeing I think leakage or slippage between the concepts of contraception and birth control that could have a lot of consequences too so I mean big picture you know the US Supreme Court when it overturn roie Wade was essentially saying well sure you know everybody's going to lose this fundamental right and that's kind of too bad but on the bright side the abortion conflict will simmer down because the real problem was roie Wade so once we the Supreme Court like exit stage left everyone is just going to get along better and this conflict is not really going to exist anymore and it turns you know it turns out that that's not true right um and it turns out that not only that but the US Supreme Court has more abortion cases than ever before not fewer so the kind of General picture is sort of is chaos and one of the reasons you see people like Steven Miller and Donald Trump running away from Project 2025 is because a lot of the legislation it proposes is wildly unpopular I mean the most kind of revealing quote about this was when Jonathan Mitchell was talking to the New York Times and he said you know it's better if you know right to lifers don't talk about this at all until after the election and I hope Donald Trump doesn't know what the comto is act is because I don't want him to run his mouth and one of the core tenants that Heritage is using to claim Conservative Push Against Contraception Reproductive Rights is fetal personhood the idea that a fetus is a human person just like anyone else and killing a person is murder and that is how they attack IVF and contraception if you look at the the Heritage documents there's no even pretend there's just like why don't we regulate IVF let's not regulate Exxon cuz oil companies are fine let's not regate at cigarettes let's not regulate but we have to regulate IVF so I mean there two there are two things going on here right one is that if you buy the argument that fetus isn't embryos your persons then IVF might be weird to you right because you'll see anti-abortion people saying well we can't put children in freezers and we can't donate children for research and we can't destroy children so once you kind of go down that road that's part of what's going on I think the other thing that's going on in the background is that often beliefs about personhood travel alongside beliefs about gender sex sort of the idea that there are god-given gender roles that those are necessary to human flourishing and I think there's always been a subset of people within the any abortion movement who are disturbed by IVF because they see it as sort of antithetical to the idea that children are only born when straight married people have sex or that it's sort of is used in ways that subvert their their beliefs vis a gender and sex right you have lots of of queer families that use ibf you have single parents single women who use ibf so I think it's both about personhood but also about this kind of constellation of beliefs that often travel alongside personhood and the heritage's advisors who backed project 2025 are the same people who at the state level continue to push contraceptive banss so with close proximity to the planning of the next Trump Administration it's easy to see where this is all going so part of the the push back against contraception is a definitional thing like another interesting feature is that um since dos several states have um reformed their definitions of abortion to remove language that excludes contraceptives right so um that's created some kind of gray area they haven't you know said that contraceptives are a wor patients either they're just leaving that to the imagination the other thing I think that's happening is that again many conservatives have been uncomfortable with contraception going back sometime too viewing you know separating sex and reproduction as immoral or as encouraging promiscuity or as unnatural or as contrary to their religious teachings so we're starting too to see some conservatives Mount efforts to criticize contraception not as abortion but just to say contraception is bad as contraception the most obvious at the moment focus unsurprisingly on on minors right so saying minors shouldn't be able to access contraception and their parents don't want them to we' started to see some arguments that kind of parallel ones we saw about abortion where you're hearing them say well contraceptives are dangerous and they increase the risk of depression and cancer kind of the same thing we saw with abortion and we're seeing I think one of the interesting things too is you know a lot of kind of behind the scenes efforts to defeat right to contraceptive bills even when conservatives are not always putting out front why they oppose contraception they don't want right to contraception bills either and the Supreme Court is already at work clearing the way to ban abortion and ban abortion travel here's Slate's senior Judiciary's Role in Project 2025 editor and author of Lady Justice Dalia lithwick this is the plan and we are seeing it I mean it's 900 Pages there's a lot to chew over but huge parts of it are already being you know previewed and kind of built into the law even before 2025 is put into action and so one huge part of it you're exactly right Molly is the sort of dismantling the regulatory state right whatever was it Grover norquist who was like we're going to shrink government d down to the size that we can you know drown it in a bathtub and this was the Steve Bannon wish list right this was the dream that we're going to end the administrative State as we know it and that is all absolutely in the pages of project 2025 and the other stuff that's in the pages of project 2025 the court has absolutely hand delivered whether it's you know making it harder to vote whether it's cracking down on immigrants I mean the court is embodying an enthusiasm for project 2025 that really belies the idea that we're kind of having in the conversation now of like is next year going to be project 2025 or not it's already happening it's just happening in the Judiciary one of the things that project 2025 wants to do is to dismantle a bunch of government agencies including the Department of Education you can't do these things unless you empower the Judiciary to rubber stamp them right right I mean project 2025 a lot of it can exist without the Judiciary right A lot of it is going to be you know seize Biden regulatory attempts to make abortion accessible and flip it on its head and use it to make abortion inaccessible right so a lot of it is going to flip what agencies do you know we're going to do away with food stamps and we're going to do away with you know all sorts of ways of amiliar poverty and stuff so part of it is going to happen by Fiat by way of agencies but you're exactly right that once you have conferred on the judicial branch the power to decide whether or not that is lawful then you're exactly right the the the judicial branch becomes the rubber stamp I think it's important to note here that project 2025 is supported by a coalition of over a 100 conservative organizations there are many factions but this looks to get them all working together here's Thomas Zimmer again this is actually interesting so Steve Bannon is not project 2025 right so he's not involved directly in this in this project nor is Trump right so it's really important to understand understand there are different factions on the right Trump and Trump campaign being one of them but there are others and they're all involved in some kind of planning operation and project 2025 is one of those it stands out because it has of United so much of the right-wing Machinery but there are different factions what is interesting about so these other parts Trump himself or banon so referring to project 2012 2025 is that I think it would be a really big misunderstanding to look at this and say oh it's not Trump and Trump doesn't care about these big plans and like okay they can put out like a thousand page policy report who cares Trump's not going to read it I think that would be a big misunderstanding these people who are involved in Project 2025 they are well connected to other parts of the right they are well connected to the right-wing even the most extremist Fringe some of the key actors behind project 2025 again they are closely connected to Bannon they go on bannon's podcast they talk to him but they also closely connected to the circle around Trump partly they're even even officially part of s Trump campaign efforts so these these are all connected efforts they're not all the same and they're even rivalries between these different factions they don't all like each other you know they will in case Trump were to win the election I'm sure they would be sort of fighting over influence and power you know that's that's you know that's just how that stuff goes but again this is deeply and intimately connected to all parts of the right and the most important thing is they really fundamentally agree on the broad outlines of what they want to do with power so even if you want to say oh this isn't exactly the right thing that the Trump campaign is putting out there in Broad Strokes they are very much in agreement about what they want to do with power if they get back to the White House and when Thomas mentions people going on bannon's podcast and boldly discussing their plans to jail journalists and exact revenge on anyone who holds them accountable for breaking laws here's Bannon with Asal who Trump insiders believe will run the CIA do you feel conf confident that you will be able to deliver the goods that we can have serious prosecutions and accountability and I want the morning showe producers that watch us and all the producers to watch us this is just not rhetoric we're absolutely dead serious we're not you you cannot have a constitutional republic and allow what these uh deep Staters have done to the country the Deep State the administrative State the fourth branch of government never mentioned in the constitution is going to be taken apart Brick by Brick and the people that did these evil deeds will be held accountable and prosecuted criminal prosecutions uh cash I I know you're probably going to be head of the CIA but do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in pretty short in a pretty short order the first couple of months so we can get rolling on prosecutions yes we got the bench for it banon and you know those guys I'm not going to go out there and say their names right now so Radical leftwing Media can terrorize them but excuse me the one thing we learned in the Trump Administration the first go around is we got to put in all America Patriots top to bottom we will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media yes we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rake presidential elections we're going to come after you whether it's criminally or civil we'll figure that out and many people have claimed this is hysterical an overreaction that the guard rails have guarded against things like this before and there'll be massive Pro protest in the street but they have plans for that too here's Thomas Zimmer again clearly one of the big regrets that they have and I mean they meaning Trump himself but also the people behind project 2025 is that they didn't invoke the Insurrection act in the summer of 2020 to go into these blue cities and oppress uh the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd very clearly and very openly they say that was a mistake that was a mistake because we were listening to these lawyers in an the White House who had s of qualms about legality and president and norm and all that good stuff and they think that was a big mistake that's what Trump means when he says there was a big Time Magazine piece where there had of long interviews with Trump and it started with uh a trump quote saying I was too nice the first time around that's exactly how this project 2025 people also feel we were too nice we were listening to these people who said to us you should not invoke the Insurrection act which would have allowed owed them to send federal troops into like Washington DC to oppress protests and so when they say 80-day Playbook like emergency measures like that's the stuff that's on the table here right like how about we we invoke the Insurrection act to conqu restore order which means oppressing protests and all of this is to say when Trump says he'll be a dictator on day one he's making a promise not making a joke and again Christians get out and vote just this [Applause] time you won't have to do it anymore four more years you know what it'll be fixed it'll be fine you won't have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians I love you Christians I'm a Christian I love you get out you got to get out and vote in four years you don't have to vote again we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote but please don't despair there are things you can do I know some of you have friends who are thinking about sitting this vote out out or even think things should get worse before they get better but the damage in this plan and Trump's second term will leave America unrecognizable call your Congress person Dark Money and Climate Change and tell them you support the disclose act which will make money in our politics more transparent and discourage the rich from donating to nefarious organizations as well as help us finally slow down climate change here's Senator Sheldon White House disclose Act is very important so that Americans can see who's funding their politicians basically the Supreme Court said we're going to allow unlimited amounts of money in politics in citizens united because it's all going to be transparent so the voters are never going to be fooled they'll know who's spending the money and they can take that into account well of course that wasn't true they went running off into the 501 C4s and the Supreme Court has tellingly never bothered to enforce that supposed part of its decision so now you've got all this enormous amount of money coming through but under the Supreme Court 's decision Congress can regulate that we could require disclosure because the Supreme Court actually said there would be disclosure so we have a bill to do that over $10,000 in a race and you've got to disclose who you are and not just the first level of the Russian nesting doll you got to go all the way back to the true beneficial owner so if you applied that it would take away the ability of a billionaire to run let's say $100 million through donor's trust into a 501c4 and onto a super back without anybody knowing ever who that billionaire was you'd actually have the ability to track back any money spent in elections to the real actual true donor and then frankly to have the IRS get back up on its you know feet and dust itself off and start investigating 501c3 and 501c4 mischief and make referrals to the Department of Justice which has the ability to actually prosecute fraud and false statements and things like that one other fact that your listeners should know is that back when I got to the Senate we were doing bipartisan climate work all the time John McCain carried the Republican Banner into the presidential race with a terrific climate platform citizens united January of 2010 killed all bipartisanship on climate and it has never revived since only on incc little bills that make no real difference cuz the oil companies had too much power then Bingo they stepped up they were the first ones to take advantage of the unlimited money and of the 501 C4 secrecy and they went into the Republicans and said hey guys look what we can do now to help you we can crush the Democrats we can bomb them with negative advertising a year ahead of the election which they did uh but if you want that kind of money if you want that kind of bombardment to support you you're going to have to tell all your Republicans to knock it off on climate change that has to become a partisan issue and a second Trump Administration will be an unmitigated disaster for slowing climate change here's representative Jared Huffman again don't have time to wait for the market to uh realize all of that uh we've got a climate crisis that is compelling us to to speed up and that's where project 2025 in the clean energy and environmental space isn't necessarily anything new we've seen this right-wing agenda for years but the fact that they're proposing to run out the clock on another four to eight years could be the endgame for our ability to confront the climate crisis and if you want change you need to let your lawmaker know that you support getting money out of politics if you look behind the climate CL denial operation you find dark money if you look behind the operation that captured the Supreme Court and turned it into a tool of the right-wing billionaires you find dark money and the dark money operation is now very widespread in politics you look behind creepy super Pacs and there's uh dark money controlling voters through uh news that is not leavened by knowing who the source is so I think that the the evil that makes so many other evil possible is the enormous power of huge special interests and creepy right-wing billionaires to hide who they are and meddle in politics in ways that a make them a Fortune they're not doing this just ideologically they are making big money off of this and B to accomplish what they could not accomplish through regular democracy and Democratic processes so to me dark money is the root of all these evils and the sooner we can rid our politics of it and figure out who's behind 5011 c3s and 501 C4s and all of that the better off we'll be that puts citizens back in charge of their democracy they're no longer being fed nonsense by people they can't even identify and I think that'll make for a much better America much better democracy the pressure will come down when people aren't being bombarded in their TVs by groups that they know are phony nobody ever bought a product from Americans for peace and puppies and prosperity whatever the hell these groups are called please please please show this to a friend who is considering Call to Action: Preventing a Radical Reshaping of America not voting sit down and talk to them make it clear to them that project 2025 will reshape America in ways that are so horrible and so enormous that it's hard for any of us to fully realize get them to register to vote and even take them to the polls take the day off and make a day of it if you can we need everyone we can to vote against Trump Heritage and the radical reshaping of America here's representative Jared Huffman again the most definitive way to stop this is to win the election that's the point that we're really trying to make here is the American people have an opportunity to kill this in its tracks and we got to do that because yeah we'll keep fighting if we don't win but there are no guarantees thank you so much for watching this episode we made this series so that you can educate others in your life about the very real threat to America that Trump's second term would pose project 2025 will remake the federal government and it's really important that you share this with a friend click like on the video and comment so it spreads to more people on YouTube if you want more interviews like this subscribe to fast Politics on your favorite podcast app thanks for watching