Democrats highlight Project 2025 ahead of Milwaukee’s RNC

With all eyes on Milwaukee ahead of next week’s Republican National Convention, Democrats are hatching their own strategy in the city — a media campaign arguing that the real Republican platform is a behemoth policy proposal known as Project 2025.  

But Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have distanced themselves from the plan, which was developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank and calls for a significant expansion of executive branch powers.

“The President said publicly that that is not about him, and he is not about that,” Wisconsin Republican Party Chair Brian Schimming told WPR.

Schimming added that he’d recently attended the national Republican party’s summer meeting.

“And in the dozens and dozens of conversations I had with party chairs, national committeemen, strategists, everything, not one of them brought up that 2025 plan,” Schimming said. “Not once.”

Project 2025 is a more than 900-page document developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. It outlines a vision for the country that would significantly reduce the federal government while expanding presidential powers.

It also has specific policy proposals, like eliminating the Department of Education, transforming many nonpartisan civil servant jobs into partisan positions and cracking down on medical abortion and legal immigration.

On a conservative podcast, president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, has likened the plan to a “second American Revolution,” which he said “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Trump later disavowed the project on social media, saying “I have nothing to do with them.”

“I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote.

Elements of the plan do overlap with Trump’s campaign promises. For example, a proposal to mass deport millions of immigrants aligns with Trump’s calls for “the largest deportation in our country’s history.”

Some longtime Trump allies are also associated with the plan, including the project’s director, Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

The campaign of President Joe Biden argues that the plan was designed for a second Trump White House, and would be implemented under his leadership.

“He’s trying to hide his connections to his allies’ extreme Project 2025 agenda,” Biden said in a campaign statement. “The only problem? It was written for him, by those closest to him. Project 2025 should scare every single American.”

The national Democratic Party announced that it would unveil a media strategy linking Trump to the plan throughout next week’s RNC, which will take place Monday through Thursday. That will include an ad campaign, and Biden surrogates will be in Milwaukee to respond to the week’s events.

“If Trump thought Milwaukee was ‘horrible’ before, he won’t be happy when he’s met by a counter-convention from Democrats on the ground who will expose his extreme Project 2025 agenda and hold him accountable for shilling for the rich at the expense of working families, attacking reproductive freedom, and threatening to be a dictator on ‘day one,’” said DNC Communications Director Rosemary Boeglin in a statement.

Senior Trump adviser Danielle Alvarez recently told NPR that outside groups do not speak for the Trump team, and called the Democratic focus on the platform a “Hail Mary.”

The Republican National Committee adopted its official platform earlier this week, and is expected to vote to formally confirm it at next week’s convention.

Schimming said that, during the process of hammering out that agenda, he met with dozens of party officials. He said the official platform is not influenced by Project 2025 and argued that, at a time that many people are questioning Biden’s age and ability to win, drawing such connections is a distraction.

“I think the Democrats want people to believe that this is, you know, this is some part of our platform, or part of where President Trump is, but it’s not,” Schimming said. “And they can sit and insist on it until they’re blue in the face, but they’re doing it for their reasons, not for our reasons. And they have a lot of diversion to do.”