Dear John,

Project 2025 is so toxic, Donald Trump now claims to know “nothing about it” or the Heritage Foundation which created this blueprint for a next Trump administration.

You and I know better. Ultimately, the nearly 1,000 pages of this blueprint for the destruction of democracy line up directly with Trump’s own rhetoric at rallies and interviews over the last two years, as well as the stated goals in his own website’s published “Agenda47” platform.

Trump claims to think some Project 2025 ideas are “ridiculous and abysmal,” but at the upcoming ABC debate, shouldn’t we find out which ones he embraces or rejects? Is he really willing to go on the record against any of the issues he has already placed at the center of his own policy agenda?

Let’s be clear about it: The overlap between Trump’s rhetoric and Project 2025 is extensive, though in Trump’s meandering speeches he doesn’t stick to the script as efficiently as the “true believers” who wrote Project 2025 for him. In addition, the Heritage Foundation has already recruited and trained an “army” of MAGA extremists to replace the tens of thousands of civil servants Trump has said he will fire.

Here’s just a few of the hundreds of Project 2025 policies that match up closely with Trump’s promises:

• abolishing the Department of Education

• deploying the National Guard against protesters

• making abortions, as well as in vitro fertilization, harder to obtain

• allowing government databases to monitor women’s pregnancies

• slashing corporate taxes while gutting social programs

• imposing a "biblically based definition of marriage and families”

• placing the Justice Department under his direct control, and

• refocusing DOJ’s mission to target his political opponents.

Clearly, Trump is Project 2025 and we can’t let him get away with claiming anything else. Send a message to Disney CEO Bob Iger and ABC News President Kimberly Godwin to demand Trump’s connections to the policies of Project 2025 be exposed at the next debate now.

Trump also claims to know nothing about who created Project 2025 too, but he knows them. He knows many of them very well.

A recent report by CNN identified more than 140 people involved in producing it who have worked for Trump, including six Cabinet secretaries -- many, if not all, of these people are likely to do so again.

Contributors to this weighty tome include Trump’s former HUD Secretary Ben Carson; his architect of family separation Stephen Miller; RNC 2024 platform committee policy director and avowed White Christian Nationalist Russell Vought; and Trump’s former economic policy advisor and fellow convicted felon Peter Navarro.

Speaking at a Heritage Foundation dinner in 2022, Trump said, “This is a great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do, and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

Trump even invited the Heritage Foundation’s President Kevin Roberts to join him on a private flight. This is the same Kevin Roberts who told Steve Bannon we are “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Roberts’ new book even includes a foreword written by Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance.

Trump will lie when asked at the debate, of course. At this point it’s hard to believe he’s even capable of telling the truth. But if ABC asks the right questions, the questions themselves expose him and his Project 2025 plan. And the question will put Trump between a hard and a hard place, because if he disavows anything, it will hurt him with his base. If he doesn’t it hurts him with everyone else.

So let’s make sure ABC exposes the truth. Tell ABC: At the upcoming debate the American people deserve to hear just how closely Trump’s plans align with Project 2025 now.

Thank you for pressing ABC to hold Trump accountable for his extremist agenda!

Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action