Trump, Who Tried to Disavow Project 2025, Now Using It to Staff His Administration

Welcome back to Barf Bag. 

During the campaign, Donald Trump tried mightily to distance himself from Project 2025, the policy and personnel blueprint written specifically for his possible return to the White House. Trump claimed that the proposals in the Heritage Foundation-backed effort were “ridiculous” and “abysmal,” but also that he had “never seen” it and had “nothing to do with them.” After Project 2025 director Paul Dans stepped down in July, Trump’s campaign said the group’s demise “would be greatly welcomed.” And Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick even told CNBC in September: “I won’t touch them. They made themselves nuclear.”

But now that the election is over, Trump is nominating multiple people who worked on the playbook to serve in his administration, and using its database to staff thousands of lower-level jobs. The Washington Post explains:

Trump has named at least four other nominees who are credited by name in Project 2025, a product of the conservative Heritage Foundation: Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar”; John Ratcliffe, Trump’s planned nominee for CIA director; Brendan Carr, his selection to head the Federal Communications Commission; and Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s selection for ambassador to Canada. Homan, Hoekstra and Ratcliffe were listed as contributors to Project 2025’s 900-plus-page manifesto. Carr wrote an entire chapter on the agency that Trump now wants him to run.

Recent reporting also suggests that Trump is leaning toward nominating Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget, a role he held during Trump’s first term. Vought wrote a Project 2025 chapter on executive power and is the same guy who blabbed to undercover journalists that Trump had “blessed” their efforts. (For what it’s worth, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said last week that he was “ecstatic” about Trump’s cabinet picks.)

Meanwhile, Trumpworld has reportedly rejected Roger Severino—the author of the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, which outlines many, many ways to restrict abortion access—for deputy HHS secretary, with anonymous sources telling Politico that he was too hardline on abortion. Sure seems like the transition team is trying to look moderate on the topic, but Severino already wrote everything down for them!!

The Trump team is also using a Project 2025 personnel database to begin filling 4,000 positions across the government, with NBC News reporting that it’s reaching out to potential hires whose contact information was compiled by the Heritage Foundation freaks. “There’s a lot of positions to fill and we continue to send names over, including ones from the database as they are conservative, qualified and vetted,” a source who worked on Project 2025 told NBC. “Hard to find 4,000 solid people, so we are happy to help.”

So yeah Trump was lying about having nothing to do with this hard-right fever dream, and we bet he was lying about many other things, too.

Happy(?) weekend.

• Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, wrote in a 2020 book that Democrats winning the election would result in “some form of civil war” in which “the military and police…will be forced to make a choice.” It remains to be seen if GOP Senators will support this guy, who’s also accused of sexual assault! [The Guardian]
• Relatedly: Trump’s transition team has not agreed to put its nominees through the standard FBI background checks. [Associated Press]
• House Speaker Mike Johnson is joining Rep. Nancy Mace in the Genital Police, but it’s not clear how the Capitol will enforce a transgender bathroom ban. [The Hill/Axios]
• Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered a plot of ranchland on the U.S.-Mexico border to the Trump administration to carry out mass deportations. [Associated Press]
• The latest evidence that Vivek Ramaswamy is a piece of shit: wanting federal workers back in the office five days a week, 10 hours a day as a way to get people to quit. [Axios]
• The number of women in Congress has stalled for the first time since 2016. [NBC News]
• North Carolina Republicans voted to strip various powers from the incoming Democratic governor before they lose their veto-proof supermajority. [Washington Post]
• John Fetterman Watch: The formerly progressive Pennsylvania Senator claimed that “very hard-left, kind of ‘woke’” comments hurt swing-state Democrats, and said he’s open to confirming his former opponent Dr. Mehmet Oz as Trump’s head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. [NBC News/NOTUS]

This has been your weekly Barf Bag, thanks for reading!