Project 25 co-author says the quiet part on tape
Russ Vought is confident that Trump will come through once again for anti-choice Republicans.
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Over the last several weeks, Donald Trump has desperately been trying to distance himself from Project 2025, the 922-page blueprint for a second Trump term put together by the Heritage Foundation with help from no fewer than 140 former Trump staffers.
After the project director, Paul Dans, announced he would be stepping down late last month, Trump’s campaign managers issued a statement declaring that “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Considering that Project 2025 is the Republican platform, the Trump campaign statement isn’t persuasive. And the task of providing cover for Trump became more difficult thanks to new audio of Project 2025 co-author and former Trump administration official Russell Vought. Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, was caught bragging on tape about how Trump has “blessed” his clandestine work drafting regulations, memos, and executive orders, and said Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”
Programming note from Aaron: I put together a comprehensive thread covering night one of the DNC, including the emotional speeches from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, that you can check out here (or here if you don’t have a twitter account). I also posted choice clips on my Threads, Bluesky, and Substack Notes accounts. The event ended too late to cover in today’s newsletter, but we’ll have bigger picture coverage of the DNC later in the week.
When Vought was talking to British journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting who were posing as relatives of a wealthy donor, he couldn’t help but boast that he has the inside track on what Trump would do about abortion, a topic Trump has tried to be very noncommittal about.
While Trump is currently saying he would defer to states regarding abortion, particularly exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the pregnant person, Vought, who says he “do[esn’t] actually believe in those exceptions,” claimed Trump will discard his position if elected. Instead, Vought said that conservatives should “cut the guy some slack, trust the man,” because Trump agreed with Vought on every decision related to abortion. (You can watch the footage below.)
Vought isn’t the only part of Project 2025 Trump will have difficulty shaking off.
There’s the fact that JD Vance is such a superfan of Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and the self-described head of Project 2025, that he wrote the forward for Roberts’s new book. That book’s release date got pushed back from September to the week after the election just a day after Dans announced he was stepping down. Next, Trump’s attempt to claim he had no real connection to Roberts fell flat once photos emerged of Trump and Roberts together on a private plane en route to a Heritage Foundation conference.
But nowhere is the hardline conservatism of Project 2025 more of a problem for Trump than when it comes to the topic of abortion.
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“Trust the man”
In 2016, Trump explicitly ran on a platform of overturning Roe v. Wade, pledging to nominate justices who would get rid of the constitutional right to abortion. During his 2020 run, Trump spoke at the March for Life, the enormous anti-choice rally in DC, and talked up his achievements, such as blocking family planning funding from any group that even provides referrals for abortions, and told his usual lies, such as that Democrats want to execute babies after they are born.
Conservatives generally — and Trump in particular — seem to have been caught flat-footed by the fact that people strongly support legal abortion and oppose a national federal ban. They also seem surprised that pregnant people don’t love the idea that they have to come close to death to get abortion care or that there is now a huge spike in infant mortality. And clearly they didn’t expect that every time abortion has appeared on the ballot since the fall of Roe in June 2022, the anti-choice side has lost.
That’s why Trump has been running around insisting he wouldn’t sign a federal abortion ban despite having said he would when he was president. It’s also why Sen. Lindsey Graham is declaring that the 2024 election is not going to be about abortion. Given that abortion is already literally on the ballot in eight states in November —Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota — and there’s a possibility there will be ballot measures in Arkansas, Montana, and Nebraska as well, Graham’s statement is wishful thinking.
Make no mistake: Project 2025’s vision of reproductive rights is as grim as it gets. It starts with the assertion that abortion is never health care. It calls for the FDA to reverse approval of the drugs used in medication abortion because “the politicized approval process was illegal from the start.” It also calls for a ban on telehealth and sending abortion medications through the mail.
Funding for Planned Parenthood and any other clinic that provides abortions should be ended, with funding redirected to “health centers that provide real health care for women.” Conservatives mostly like giving money to unregulated “crisis pregnancy centers” that often misrepresent themselves as legitimate health care clinics and refuse to discuss contraception or sexually transmitted diseases, none of which sounds like “real health care.”
Project 2025 would also impose a massive and intrusive data collection scheme, requiring states where abortions remain legal to report how many of them take place, at what gestational age, for what reason, and the pregnant person’s state of residence. Why? Because “liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism.” This one is especially tough for the campaign to get away from because JD Vance has already called for a “federal response” to stop people from traveling out of state to get an abortion.
Project 2025 also proposes that states that require abortion insurance in private health care plans receive no Medicaid funds and that the government cut ties with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) because ACOG is pro-abortion. Of course, all major medical organizations support access to abortion, which is why conservatives have to have hastily-assembled shell groups that look and sound like medical organizations but really just exist to bring lawsuits against abortion rights.
It would also substitute ideology for science, demanding that the government do an investigative review of the literature on the effect of abortion on breast cancer. The notion that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, but Project 2025 would make sure your tax dollars go to ginning up the opposite conclusion.
Not content to strip people of abortion rights, Project 2025 would also drag sex education back to the dark ages, giving “Sexual Risk Avoidance proponents” grant money for teen pregnancy prevention. Abstinence-only programs are notoriously ineffective at preventing teen pregnancy or transmission of STDs, but they are really good at instilling in teenagers a sense of fear and guilt about sex. Absurdly, Project 2025 warns against sex education being used to “provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics.”
Project 2025 also proposes several attacks on the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, all of which boil down to conservatives being furious that birth control exists. They want to eliminate Ella, an emergency contraceptive, from the contraceptive mandate because they believe it actually causes abortions. It would allow pharmacies to refuse to dispense birth control.
Earlier this month, Trump indicated, in his vague know-nothing fashion, that he would consider banning mifepristone, one of the drugs used in medication abortions. When asked if he would ban it, he stated that “there are many things on a humane basis that you can do outside of that” and that “you also have to give a vote” to people regarding abortion.
This is word salad, of course, and ignores the fact that Republicans really do not want people to vote on abortion. It also contradicts what Trump said back in his debate with Joe Biden in June. Then, Trump stated, incorrectly, that the Supreme Court had “approved the abortion pill” and went on to say he agreed with the decision and “I will not block it.” Two days later, JD Vance was left cleaning up the mess, now saying Trump just wants to make sure the drug is safe but wants individual states to decide.
The politics of deception
Meanwhile, despite its ostensible demise, the work of Project 2025 continues.
Vought informed the undercover journalists that Trump’s disavowal of the project means nothing because he’s so close to Trump that he’ll be able to get his drafts of regulations, memos, and other transition documents directly to him. However, the public will never see these documents. They’ll be drafted and shared in secret before Trump officially takes office so they could never be subject to a freedom of information request.
Vought also told the journalists that Trump could enact many of these draconian abortion restrictions via executive powers, rather than legislation. All Trump needs to do is say one thing to the voting public and then turn Vought loose in private: “I want to get to abolition. But I also– we’ve got to win elections … And so, I think the president’s actually come up with a strategy that works, so long as you are giving people like me in government the ability to block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for fetal tissue research.”
There’s never any reason to take Trump at his word, but especially when it comes to abortion. He will happily run out the election season clock with nebulous, unintelligible statements about the right to choose and vague promises of leaving it to the states. But behind the scenes, people like Russ Vought will be busy ensuring that a second Trump term is even worse than the first one when it comes to reproductive freedom.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
I daresay Lindsay Graham and other politically literate Republicans want the election not to be about abortion but I don't think Kamala Harris will see to it that it is and I find it hard to believe most women of reproductive age won't realize that this is an important topic to consider when they vote too.
Their project is insane and their front men are not terribly bright it seems. Without bazillions from would be authoritarian billionaires and given a level playing field where people are hired based on merit and ability rather than entitled white male status, these guys would have a hard time finding employment.