On a Thursday morning in early June, I hopped off a train at Washington’s Union Station and walked a few blocks east to get a glimpse into the headquarters of one of the most secretive — and most hyped — organizations in America: Project 2025, tucked away inside the main offices of the Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill.

My visit came at an opportune moment: For months, journalists and liberal watchdog groups had been poring over Project 2025’s 900-page policy book — titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — which purports to be a “comprehensive policy guide” for the next Republican administration, including recommendations to restrict access to medical abortion, remove civil service protections for some federal workers and banning pornography. If you’ve heard a Democrat talking apocalyptically about Project 2025 in the past few months, this document is probably what they have in mind.

Over the course of my visit, I came to see that the emptiness of the Project 2025 offices at Heritage headquarters was a good metaphor for the project as whole. On both the left and the right, Project 2025 had been portrayed as a vast and well-orchestrated operation — either to rationalize and systematize Trumpism, according to some conservatives, or to undermine democracy and implement an ultra-disciplined reactionary regime, according to some liberals.

Instead, what I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership. Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House.

  • Sunforged@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    The relatively low-budget feel of the database and the training academy has prompted some of the project’s partners to wonder what, exactly, Dans and his team have done with the $22 million that the Heritage Foundation initially pledged toward Project 2025. When I asked Dans how the budget had been used, he reached for one of his folksy aphorisms.

    “I remember this Old Milwaukee [beer] ad from the ’80s … and there was the one guy who was in charge of the beer fund, and [he and his friends] were all happy and they’re drinking ‘Old Mill,’ and [one of them] said, ‘Well, what did you do with all the monies that you were putting into the beer fund?’ And then you see the guy behind them with a big yacht.”

    “We’re drinking ‘Old Mill’ here,” he added.

    So not all of the $22 million that had been earmarked for the project had actually been allocated to it? I asked.

    Dans nodded. “We’re much more [low] budget over here than what people [operating] in the caverns of the liberal mind would like to believe.”

    “I got my yatch!”