If you managed to catch any prolonged stretch of last week’s Democratic National Convention, you probably came away with the impression that the Republican platform involves building a Death Star-like planet-destroying space station called Project 2025.
What will Project 2025 do? What won’t it do, to hear Democrats tell it. It was written by Donald Trump himself. It’ll ban same-sex marriage. It’ll hand NATO over to Vladimir Putin. It’ll inaugurate a nationwide ban on abortion. It will destroy Alderaan in the blink of an eye.
Actually, that last one is attributable to the Death Star, and it didn’t actually happen, since it took place in the “Star Wars” universe. It’s also the only one of those five things that I mentioned that the Democrats didn’t claim about Project 2025 from the dais at the DNC in Chicago.
They all have one thing in common, though: They’re all lies, at least in the real world, and not a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Before we begin our fact-check regarding the falsehoods spread about Project 2025 at the DNC, I think it might be helpful to lay out exactly what it is. This is important, because while the Democrats have mastered the art of intoning the title of Project 2025 in a manner that sounds positively apocalyptic, they’re rather dodgy on the specifics of the proposal.
Project 2025 did not originate with Donald Trump, any of his people, or the Republican Party. Instead, the 922-page report was published by conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation in 2023, and is described on its website as “a product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from around the country.”
The gist of it is that Democrats have been far better at wielding the levers of unelected bureaucratic power in Washington when they have the chance and that, when and if a Republican returns to the Oval Office, they need to be better prepared to play ball the same way the opposition does.
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“For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government,” wrote Spencer Chretien, associate director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project for the Heritage Foundation, in a 2023 piece.
“One reason is because the Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s. Beltway conservatives still prioritize supply-side economics and a bellicose foreign policy above all else. Belief in small government, strangely enough, has manifested itself in a belief among some conservatives that we should lead by example and not fill all political appointments. Belief in the primacy of the national security state has caused conservative administrations to defer political decisions to the generals and the intelligence community.”
Thus, the 922-page report is a non-binding blueprint — more a series of suggestions, in fact — for a future Republican president to wield the powers of the presidency the same way that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have, just for conservative aims. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, nor has the GOP adopted it as its platform in part or in whole.
But that didn’t stop hyperventilators at the DNC from scaremongering about Project 2025:
Trump’s policies are so solid his opponents have to concoct imaginary ones just to have something to bitch about.
Literally. https://t.co/CweOuTiYwp
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) August 23, 2024
Most of their claims were vague, sometimes merely brandishing the document in a binder as if it were some kind of satanic political bible. However, numerous speakers at the convention spread blatant falsehoods about what was contained in its pages.
For instance, take Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, currently running for Senate: “He has with his friends said the quiet parts out loud – but not only said it out loud, he wrote a book about it. What’s it called? Project 2025.”
Even CNN called her out on this one: “The claim that Trump ‘wrote’ Project 2025 is false. There is no evidence that Trump was personally involved in writing the Project 2025 policy document, let alone that it was his own ‘book.’ He is not among the document’s listed authors, editors and contributors, though dozens of people who served in his administration are on the list.”
CNN also called out Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who said that the document would ban same-sex marriage.
“Page 451 says the only legitimate family is a married mother and father, where only the father works,” Polis said at the convention, holding up what he said was a copy of Project 2025.
I doubt it was, because that’s not what page 451 says. Quoth CNN: “Though the Project 2025 policy document argues for the importance of the ‘nuclear’ family made up of a married mother and father, it does not say that this is the only ‘legitimate’ family – and it certainly does not say that a family with a working mother is illegitimate. Polis’ inaccurate claim echoes an online meme that was debunked last month by Snopes, USA Today and others.”
And then there was Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, who claimed that “Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would abandon our troops, abandon our veterans, our allies and our principles.”
“Trump plans to do Putin’s bidding by abandoning Ukraine and walking away from our NATO allies. In chapters two and three, he plans to fire our national security and military professionals and then replace them with MAGA loyalists,” he said.
The Associated Press noted, unsurprisingly, that this was false.
“In regards to the Russia-Ukraine war, Project 2025 lays out three schools of thought about U.S. involvement, one of them being that it should not continue. However, it does not advocate for any one over the other,” the wire service noted in its fact check.
“Crow’s claim that national security and military professionals will be replaced with Trump supporters does ring true. Among its recommendations are that senior CIA leaders ‘must commit to carrying out the President’s agenda and be willing to take calculated risks.’ It also states that the National Security Council should be made up of ‘personnel with technical expertise and experience as well as an alignment to the President’s declared national security policy priorities.’”
These are just a few of the lies. But, perhaps the most important lie was repeated over and over again, yet went unchallenged almost all of the time: “Donald Trump’s Project 2025.”
This is problematic, because not only did Trump not author Project 2025, he’s done everything in his power to specifically disavow it. In fact, he’s arguably done too much to distance himself from it, since the document is hardly a package deal and contains some worthwhile policy proposals.
But Trump has been clear: “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” he said on social media in July, Politico reported.
In the intervening weeks, he’s gone even further to distance himself from the policy paper, so much so that the director of the Heritage Foundation project that birthed Project 2025 resigned late last month.
Nevertheless, Democrats continue to repeat fact-free assertions about Project 2025 and how it relates to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Voters shouldn’t buy it — unless, of course, they’re naïve enough to believe the Republicans annihilated Alderaan, too.
