Donald Trump would like his association with Project 2025 to disappear, but his top executives have no problem bragging to anyone who will listen about their access to the former president.
In secret recordings produced by the Climate Reporting Center, Russell Vogt, one of the authors of Project 2025, talks about his ties to the Trump campaign, and claims to be close enough to the former president to personally deliver proposals prepared by Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation.
According to the full texts of the recordings submitted to Rolling StoneThe 2025 project “contains about 350 different documents that are regulations and things like that that we’re planning for the next administration,” Vogt says. The plans — which include draft executive orders — are kept “in a very confidential place” away from the public, Vogt says.
Vogt reassures undercover reporters posing as potential donors that he is unfazed by Trump’s public denial of any connection to the 2025 project, and that his focus is on ensuring Republicans are prepared for Trump’s return to office. “President Trump is not going to spend any time thinking or contemplating what a transition might look like,” Vogt says. “He’s not thinking. We make battle plans and then we execute them ourselves.”
“He was in our organization, he raised money for our organization, he blessed it,” Vogt adds.
Beyond plans to hit the ground running once Trump wins in November, Vogt is forthright about his views on specific issues dominating the Republican platform in 2024.
At one point, Foot told interviewers: “I want to make sure that we can say, ‘We are a Christian nation.’ My view is mostly that I am probably a ‘Christian nationalist.’ That’s very close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.” Foot then added that it was time to “rehabilitate Christian nationalism,” as part of a mission to embrace the country’s “Judeo-Christian world value system.”
Vogt points out that while Trump may defer to individual states on the issue of reproductive freedom—and highlights exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of a pregnant person in his discussions of abortion restrictions—he disagrees with those exceptions, and does not believe Trump will stick to his current position if elected.
“I don’t actually believe in these exceptions, but I understand them from an electoral perspective,” he says.
What I told people is [that Trump] “He had the most pro-life record ever. Every decision he came to, including decisions that I thought would go against us — we had a decision that was very controversial about banning fetal tissue research, and he went to life based on that,” Vogt adds, emphasizing that Trump is the president “who repealed Roe v. Wade“And then, even in this, they asked for two things, and he gave them both. Let the man rest a little, and trust him.”
Vogt explains that much of the work they do revolves around exploiting immediate culture war issues in order to obscure the party's larger, longer-term goals, citing the creation of right-wing panic around critical race theory as an example.
“At the national level, we’re going to be managing this momentum in a complex way. You know, what is the specific bill that we want? What is the regulation? And at the state level, we’re going to focus on where we want to be. [it’s] “It’s a strategy. And at the local level, it’s basically just a resource,” he explains. “In our first year, our biggest priority was critical race theory. There were others in the field that we were close to. But we were the ones who made politicians feel comfortable talking about it from a racial perspective.”
“Then invasion was our strategy for [the] In the second year, and in the third year—which was last year—I was fighting every budget battle and reframing it around what I thought was bureaucracy. [That] “He's awake and armed.”
Vogt is confident that Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s work will have a tangible impact on a second Trump administration. “Everyone knows what we’re working on, but again, this is an election they have to win,” he says. “So we don’t tell people anything like that.”
However, they do have very frank conversations with strangers who offer them money.
