Trump’s Tattoo

When I was a kid, I thought about getting a tattoo. A group of guys with motorcycles up the alley behind my house all had tattoos. I thought motorcycles were cool – and, therefore, tattoos – just like many young people today. Before I could have some noticeable name or picture punctured into my skin, I learned that tattoos don’t go away. Once you get one, it’s there forever.

photo by Lily Miller

Former President Donald Trump now has the same problem with a tattoo of a different sort. It’s a political tattoo called Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for America. Try as he might, Trump will never rid himself of his indelible ties to Project 2025. He might as well have “Project 25” tattooed on his forehead.

Project 2025 contains Heritage’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a nine hundred page conservative manifesto proposing that a newly-elected Republican administration enact a massive federal government shake-up, should Trump and his running mate, Senator J. D. Vance, win the upcoming 2024 election. Heritage, Trump, and Vance deny any connection between the controversial proposals in the document and the policies the Republican nominees intend to pursue. Former President Trump has publicly disavowed ties between his campaign and the Mandate for Leadership.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on his social media platform. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they are saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” The Heritage Foundation, too, denies any ties between its blueprint and the Trump ticket. It says it has produced a conservative wish list for the next president, regardless of who wins the election.

Many critics don’t buy Trump's or Heritage’s claims, though, and for good reasons. First, how can Trump call some of the project’s proposals “abysmal” if he “knows nothing” about it?

Trump also has a problem with the pen of his running mate, J. D. Vance. The GOP vice presidential nominee wrote a forward to a book entitled “Dawn’s Early Light Taking Back Washington to Save America” by Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, the prime force behind the mandate whose views reflect the philosophy behind Project 2025 and the base of the Republican party.   

Newsweek wrote about Vance’s glowing Amazon review of Roberts’ book to be published in September: “Never before has a figure with Roberts’ depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance wrote. “We are now all realizing it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

The Trump team’s fingerprints are also all over the Project 2025 document. The manifesto is chock full of ideas that could become politically toxic in the hands of a sharp-tongued Democrat such as Vice President Kamala Harris. When speaking to a national teacher's union recently, she highlighted Project 2025 in her attacks on Trump and company, emphasizing the Project’s particularly relevant ideas to eliminate the Department of Education.

Trump’s struggle to distance his campaign from the ideas espoused by Project 2025 will have to be monumental. By my count, of the thirty-three authors listed as contributors to all or part of the Project 2025 document, twenty-two came from people who held executive positions in the former Trump administration, including some chapters written by members of Trump’s 2016 transition team. Trump loyalists from past GOP administrations or organizations such as the Federalist Society were authors of the others that contained positions Trump embraced while solidifying his right-wing base in the GOP.

“We want you,” implored Paul Dans, a former Trump administration chief of staff of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Cans co-edited the Project 2025 Mandate with Steven Groves, a former White House Special Assistant to Trump. “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at twelve noon on January 20, 2025. Welcome to the mission. By opening the book, you are part of it. Indeed, one set of eyes reading these pages will be those of the 47th President of the United States, and we hope every other reader will join in making the incoming administration a success.”

Dans’ plea may be an overstatement common in politics these days. His promise that the “47th President” will read the document is an obvious reference to Trump. But the former president infamously barely reads anything, and it’s hard to see how he could plow through of a nine hundred page tome. Nonetheless, the Mandate is replete with language that former President Trump and his allies routinely embrace on the campaign trail, such as the blistering attack on the so-called “dark state” singled out for retribution by Trump acolytes such as Steve Bannon, a former Trump top aide who went to jail for refusing to testify about the January sixth Capitol insurrection. Trump later pardoned him on unrelated fraud charges.  

In some respects, the document’s right wing flaming tone is unfortunate. It overshadows some good, plausible ideas. Any federal program or agency deserves scrutiny and can be reformed. The authors also display a sophisticated understanding of the federal bureaucracy and its foibles. Project 2025 raises some legitimate criticisms, such as Congress’ failure since 1996 to pass the twelve individual spending bills needed to fund the government. Instead, lawmakers have passed each year an omnibus spending plan so large and unwieldy that few lawmakers understood what they were voting for. But the Mandate also contains some political nitroglycerin.

In its first promise to voters, the Mandate celebrates the conservative’s “greatest pro-family winner in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade,” the Supreme Court decision in the 1970’s. Called the Dobbs decision, the vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, long a conservative goal, was made possible by Trump appointees to the high court. This ruling enraged many women, including suburban women, a key voting bloc. Project 2025 will no doubt also turn off many political independents who will probably decide the next election. Indeed, Trump is now backpedaling on the issue, trying to soften his views on the controversial subject. However, Project 2025 hints that more could come if he wins the White House.

“The Dobbs decision is just the beginning,” the Project 2025 Mandate says. “Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.”

The Mandate also launched a no-holds-barred attack on the high-tech industry, making one wonder why Silicon Valley leaders such as Elon Musk, miffed by the Biden administration snubs, endorsed Trump in word, deed, and money. The Mandate includes the high-tech industry in the attacks that Trump’s Republican party routinely deploys against America’s corporate and political “elites.”

“Big Tech,” the Mandate says, “now is less a contributor to the U.S. economy than it is a tool of China’s government. In exchange for cheap labor and regulatory special treatment from Beijing, America’s largest technology firms funnel data about Americans to the Chinese Community Party. They hand over sensitive intellectual property with military and intelligence applications to keep the money rolling in. One side of Big Tech companies’ business model is old-fashioned American competitiveness and world-changing technological innovation, but increasingly, that side of these businesses is overshadowed by their role as operatives in the lucrative employ of America’s most dangerous international enemy.”

There are too many controversial proposals in Project 2025 to detail in a blog like this. The documents suggest, for example, that the hospitals and physicians who preside over the nation’s disgraceful healthcare system need more freedom to employ controversial policies that ignore patients or treat them like cash registers. “The federal government should not restrict providers’ ability to discharge their responsibilities or limit their ability to innovate through government pricing controls or irrational Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement schemes, Project 2025 says.

One suggested change that drew my eye was a section recommending dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that provides daily weather forecasts and hurricane predictions and tracks severe storm warnings and climate predictions. The conservative manifesto sees NOAA as a sinister force behind alarming reports on climate change. It proposes privatizing the National Weather Service, raising the specter that American citizens would have to pay private companies for a weather forecast. I’ll be waiting to see how that goes over with the public.

Not all of Heritage’s proposals will become law, of course. But that doesn’t mean many couldn’t. The Heritage Foundation and its ideas have swirled around Republican circles where former President Trump is a fixture. Indeed, Heritage President Roberts notes that the first Mandate for Leadership was launched in 1981, the year President Ronald Reagan took office after campaigning that “government is the problem.” Roberts says the original 1979 document contained more than 2000 proposals to reform the federal government. “Ronald Reagan was sworn in,” he says, “and by the end of 1981, more than sixty percent of its recommendations had become policy.”  Project 2025 recommends the new conservative administration act quickly on its Manifesto for Change.

Trump, Vance, and Heritage's claim that Project 2025 is not tied to an agenda that Trump and Vance intend to pursue if elected invites a strain of skepticism as enduring as that of the ink in a tattoo. A political tattoo, after all, is like the real one that I did not get because you can’t get rid of it. Even extensive laser techniques will never remove all the ink.

 —James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.