Trump and Project 2025

Even the most casual followers of the 2024 presidential campaign became familiar with Project 2025, the policy manual for “the next conservative President” created by the Heritage Foundation and written by veterans of the first Trump administration and other conservatives.
 
Democrats cited it repeatedly on the campaign trail and in TV ads as Donald Trump’s not-so-secret agenda, and pointed out numerous policies in the document it described as extreme. (As we wrote at the time, Trump’s public policies were not always fully aligned with Project 2025 in the ways critics claimed.)
 
Trump, meanwhile, distanced himself from Project 2025, claiming he knew “nothing about” it and had “no idea who is behind it,” despite evidence to the contrary.
 
Now well into Trump’s second term, FactCheck.org’s former director, Eugene Kiely, set out to find just how closely Trump’s policies have mirrored those in the Project 2025 blueprint. As it turns out, very closely. By one count, Trump has already implemented or is in the process of implementing about half of Project 2025’s proposals.
 
As Paul Dans, director and co-editor of Project 2025, told Eugene in a phone interview, Trump’s efforts so far have “exceeded my expectations. My wildest dreams, if you will.” 
 
In a five-part series that ends today, Eugene took a deep dive into the 887-page Project 2025 book to detail not only what it proposed, but also how it proposed achieving its objectives. He then matched that against Trump’s policies to date.
 
The series started on Sept. 29 with the story, “Trump, Project 2025 and the ‘Dismantling’ of the ‘Administrative State.’” As with all of the stories in the series, it begins with an overview of Project 2025’s position on the topic and then includes a series of “collapsible” topics, such as DOGE workforce reductions, federal spending, the Department of Justice and the IRS. Readers can click on any that pique their interest for an in-depth accounting of the Project 2025 recommendations and to what extent Trump has implemented them.
 
The second part in the series deals with immigration, the third with climate change/fossil fuels and the fourth with the social safety net. Today’s final installment deals with “culture war” issues such as abortion and transgender policies.
 
The series was an enormous journalistic undertaking, and, we think, well worth the attention of anyone curious about the machinations of government and the direction in which Trump seeks (and is largely succeeding) to move the country. 

Reader: Politicians are rightfully concerned about their safety. The left blames the right for political violence, and the right blames the left. What does the data say?

FactCheck.org Staff Writer Saranac Hale Spencer: Data from multiple sources show that political violence comes from both sides of the political spectrum as well as from jihadists. But, until this year, political violence in the U.S. had been driven mostly by right-wing extremism — white supremacy in particular.

There isn't much information about political violence in 2025 since data collection is ongoing, but one brief by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that looked at domestic “terrorist attacks and plots” from the beginning of 2025 through July 4 found that there had been a steep decline in right-wing incidents and an increase in left-wing incidents. "So far, 2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right,” the report said. 

Researchers who study extremism and political violence use different criteria for measuring its prevalence — some include riots and the police response to them, some measure the ideology of the perpetrator, and others count the ideology of the target — so it’s hard to compare the findings. But the common theme in research published over the last decade is that right-wing ideology has produced the biggest threat of political violence.

For example, a 2024 National Institute of Justice report found that "the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism." The Department of Justice recently removed that study from its website.

You can read about further details on this issue in the article we published this week, "What We Know About Political Violence in America."

Wrapping Up

Here's what else we've got for you this week:

• Q&A on Changes to Recommendations for Combined MMR and Chickenpox Vaccine
  On Sept. 18, the vaccine advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to change its recommendation on the combined vaccine for chickenpox and measles, mumps and rubella, called the MMRV vaccine. Cases of these diseases in the U.S. plummeted after the introduction of vaccines decades ago.
  

• Trump hace afirmaciones engañosas sobre el cambio climático y las energías renovables en la ONU
  En un discurso de una hora ante la Asamblea General de la ONU el 23 de septiembre, el presidente Donald Trump arremetió contra quienes promueven “la agenda de energía verde”, diciendo que había dejado a muchos países europeos “al borde de la destrucción” y desestimando el cambio climático como un “engaño” y “la mayor estafa jamás perpetrada en el mundo”.
   
• Las afirmaciones de los legisladores sobre la atención médica y el cierre del gobierno
  Los demócratas y los republicanos se han estado enfrentando debido a las exigencias de los demócratas de abordar asuntos de atención médica en un proyecto de ley de financiación del gobierno, y el enfrentamiento ha provocado el primer cierre del gobierno desde 2019. Aquí entregamos los hechos sobre los dos puntos de discusión que cada lado está usando para culpar al otro por el cierre.