Project 2025 Leader Is ‘Ecstatic,’ Says Trump’s Cabinet Picks Are ‘Exceeding Our Expectations’

For months, Donald Trump denied any knowledge of or connection to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s far-right agenda for his second term. The 900-page policy plan details how to enforce a national abortion ban without passing any new laws, how to surveil abortion seekers, how to ban porn, execute a mass deportation campaign, and more—and, suffice to say, it was not popular. But Trump and JD Vance’s ties to it were inextricable; most of its writers were former Trump advisers, and Vance, himself, wrote the introduction to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ book. So, in August, with Roberts’ book just weeks away from being published with a glowing endorsement from Vance, he postponed its publication to… this week. It was a cynical, obvious ploy to mitigate controversy and attention on Project 2025.

But now that Trump has won, it appears there’s no need for anyone—not Trump, not his surrogates, and certainly not Roberts—to pretend Project 2025 isn’t very much real and all but inevitable. On Wednesday, Roberts appeared on the right-wing Steve Gruber Show to promote his book, and when asked about Trump’s recent cabinet appointments, the Project 2025 architect made it clear that everything’s going according to plan. “Honestly, I’m ecstatic,” he told Gruber. “I mean, this is exceeding our expectations and our expectations were high because President-elect Trump, of course, has a proven record.” Roberts even raved that “this has the making of one of the best cabinets in modern American history, and that is fitting because there is a lot of work ahead.” In turn, Gruber, a middle-aged man, embarrassingly gushed that the cabinet Trump is assembling is akin to “the Avengers.” 

Because Project 2025 is focused on policy changes that a presidential administration can make directly without help from Congress, Roberts’ suggestion that this could be “one of the best cabinets” in history is especially terrifying. So far, Trump has appointed an unhygienic Fox News host to be secretary of defense, right-wing provocateur Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence, noted war hawk Marco Rubio to be secretary of state, and, on Wednesday, alleged human trafficker and former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) to run the Justice Department. Gaetz holds an aggressively anti-abortion record and, as Project 2025 lays out, the DOJ can effectively ban the mailing of abortion pills in all states by enforcing the Comstock Act of 1873. 

Earlier this year, Trump said he’d look into restrictions on birth control after significantly cutting funding for family planning in his first term. The policing of not just abortion but all reproductive health, including birth control, is an obsession in Roberts’ new book, Dawn’s Early Light. “​​It’s true that contraceptives give families more control over when they have children,” he writes. “But the creators of the technologies wanted to go much further than controlling a natural process; they wanted everyone in our culture, regardless of their beliefs or choices about contraceptives, to believe that having kids is an optional individual choice instead of a social expectation or a transcendent gift.” This is the book that Vance, our new vice president-elect, wrote a foreword for and fully endorsed. 

Elsewhere in the book, which comes amid rising conservative attacks on IVF, Roberts criticizes the fertility service for having “the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.”

At a book party for Roberts earlier this week, the Intelligencer’s Sarah Jones tried to speak to conservative attendees about Project 2025; she said they found Trump’s connections to it “tenuous” and shrugged off the plan as typical liberal hysteria: “They made it sound like a conspiracy theory. Very silly,” one partygoer told Jones. Many of Project 2025’s writers formerly served in the Trump administration and were picked by Trump to write the 2024 Republican Party platform. In 2018, two years into Trump’s first term, the Heritage Foundation boasted that then-President Trump had implemented two-thirds of the agenda they wrote for him at the time. 

With the election behind them, top Trump allies and right-wing thought leaders are no longer being shy about their intentions with Project 2025. The morning after the election, Matt Walsh, the far-right podcaster who holds an unhealthy obsession with children’s genitals, tweeted, “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.” Benny Johnson, another far-right influencer who often collaborates with Republicans, tweeted that same day, “It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time.” A Texas Republican Party official said, “Can we admit now that we are going to implement Project 2025?”

Speaking to Gruber, Roberts compared Trump to a “great CEO,” because “the one thing that they do really well is appoint talented people to implement plans.” Unfortunately, there’s nothing “tenuous” about what’s likely to happen next.