Trump Has Been An Anchor Around The Necks Of GOP Candidates
Yesterday, Ezra Klein floated the idea that the deep state that defeats Señor T might be his own. The deep state he’s talking about is the one envisioned by Project 2025. “The 900-page tome that Democrats hoist in front of the cameras,” he wrote, “is a festival of policy options, detailed down to the sub-agency level. But options for whom? Not for Trump himself. Even the most wonkish of presidents can only engage on a small fraction of what the executive branch does. And Donald Trump was not the most wonkish of presidents. When he said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and has no intention of doing so, I believed him. But Project 2025— and much else like it that has gotten less press— is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own. The presidency is not one man, Diet Coke in hand, Fox & Friends on TV, barking orders. It’s 4,000-or-so political appointees— nearer to 50,000 if Trump again uses Schedule F powers to strip civil-service protections from vast swaths of the federal government— trying to do what they think the president wants them to do or what they think needs to be done. They do that by setting policy for the more than two million civilian employees of the federal government and by writing regulations that the rest of society must follow.”
For MAGA to take over the U.S. government “the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done. The unifying theory of a second Trump term— which the fascists see as “the second American Revolution,” maybe bloodless, maybe not— is to “purge or break the federal bureaucracy. Fill it with vetted loyalists. Then use its power to pass policy, yes, but also to break or conquer the other institutions in American life that so vex Trump and his supporters.”
By all accounts, Trump and his campaign are furious that Project 2025 has been hung like a millstone around his neck. But there are two reasons their disavowals have counted for little. The first is that the campaign has treated Trump’s policy plans like a secret the public can only be let in on after his victory. His issues page is a joke, his official platform a Delphic collection of all-caps aphorisms backed up by the occasional bullet point.
The next Trump administration will do far more than the Trump campaign is describing, and Project 2025— which was produced with input from more than 100 conservative organizations that see themselves as part of the MAGA-governing coalition— filled the void that Trump himself has left. He did not tell us what he was going to do, so Project 2025 did.
…[N]ow Trump is the leader of the Republican coalition. He cannot credibly divorce himself from the groups working day and night to secure his victory and staff his presidency. There is no competing power center that the media or the public can assume will do the governing that so bores Trump. But Trump is not temperamentally suited to the work of managing a coalition and he has not elevated a trusted ideological consigliere to do it for him. He is a diffident, distracted ruler, and the result is dozens of groups competing for his favor and unsure of how to win it.
The Heritage Foundation was one of these groups and Project 2025 their signature effort. In 2021, Roberts took over Heritage and retooled it into an organization dedicated to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He sought centrality through both scale and publicity: Project 2025 was a vast undertaking, and Roberts promoted it relentlessly. This is now seen as folly, but it is easy enough to follow the original logic: Heritage has experience putting together governing documents for insurgent candidates, going back to the Mandate for Leadership that Ronald Reagan relied on in 1981, and Trump often rewards the loyalists he notices fighting for him in public. But Roberts went too far.
“The problem, which I had always suspected, was that very few plans survive contact with Donald Trump,” said Matthew Continetti, the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. “He always wants to maintain maximum flexibility and maximum maneuverability in order to improve his position at any given moment. So he was not just going to turn around and say, yes, Project 2025 is exactly what my program will be, and it’s exactly who I plan to have in my administration.”
But if Trump wins, he will need plans and he will need people. And so the problems that Project 2025 has caused for Trump in the campaign would also bedevil his presidency.
The MAGA coalition— particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class— has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.
Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is, but MAGA is whatever his movement becomes. This is why JD Vance has been a political liability to Trump’s campaign: Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved— esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online— unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment. It is telling that it is Vance, not Trump, who wrote a glowing forward to Roberts’s forthcoming book. Trump is where MAGA started, but Vance and Roberts is where it is going.
Trump’s problem in the 2024 election is that he can no longer run as if he is a man alone. Everyone knew Mike Pence did not represent Trumpism. But Trump chose Vance to be the heir of the MAGA movement. A Trump administration would be full of people like Vance pursuing the agendas they believe in. In the Talento presentation I mentioned, she describes the Biden administration as “a federal leviathan that is killing our babies” and argues that “every cabinet secretary who comes into a new, hopefully Republican administration will have a pro-life agenda that they must enact.” This is not Trump’s election-year message but it would be his administration’s reality.
Another Trump administration would be filled with people pursuing agendas like this at every level, and properly so: That is what coalitions do when they win elections. But this is why Trump’s disavowals ring so false: He is denying a reality of his second term that everyone else can plainly see. Project 2025 is not a perfect guide to that second term, but it the closest thing we have to one. It was all so much easier when the deep state was something Trump could complain about, rather than something he had to manage and own.
Evidence shows that Trump will— whenever he can— make his own decisions about personnel. And evidence shows that those decisions will be disastrous. Trump hires people based on loyalty to him— and maybe how they look on TV— not based on anything remotely resembling competence. Just yesterday, North Carolina Attorney General— and likely next governor— Josh Stein told Jake Tapper on State of the Union that “Robinson exists because Donald Trump has lifted him up throughout, and candidates up and down the ballot in North Carolina need to have, they need to be held accountable for supporting Mark Robinson and being part of his entire campaign. They have been supporting him, and now it looks like folks want to run away from him, but they have lifted; Mark Robinson could not exist without the support of Donald Trump… [noting that Robinson] is utterly unqualified, unfit to be the governor of North Carolina, and we’re going to do everything in our power to keep that from happening.”
And, of course, it wasn’t just Robinson that Trump disastrously foisted on the GOP. Trump managed to lose plenty of Senate seats the GOP might have won by getting behind crackpots like Blake Masters (AZ), Dr. Oz (PA), Don Bolduc (NH), Roy Moore (AL), Herschel Walker (GA)… and backing Kelly Tshibaka against GOP incumbent Lisa Murkowski, he turned the victorious Murkowski into an enemy of his own and of MAGA who has been willing to vote against the Republicans in crucial roll calls. Same in gubernatorial races, where his ridiculous handpicked candidates helped Democrats win uphill races, in Pennsylvania (Doug Mastriano), Arizona (Kari Lake), Michigan (Tudor Dixon), Derek Schmidt (Kansas), Wisconsin (Tim Michels) as well as freaks in blue states like Dan Cox (Maryland) and Darren Bailey (Illinois). Similarly, Trump presided over red district losses in the House by pushing fascists like Joe Kent (WA-03), Sarah Palin (AK), John Gibbs (MI-03), JR Majewski (OH-09), Bo Hines (NC-13), Madison Gesiotto Gilbert (OH-13), Yesli Vega (VA-07), Karoline Leavitt (NH-01), Sandy Smith (NC-01).
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