Ryan Teague Beckwith, MSNBC - On the campaign trail last year, Donald Trump swore he knew "nothing" about Project 2025. As a candidate, he said he didn't even know who had written the far-right blueprint for his second term, called some of its ideas "absolutely ridiculous" and "abysmal" and argued it was "pure disinformation" for Democrats to try to link him to that plan.
In case it wasn't clear at the time, Trump was lying. Along with other journalists, I tried to make that as clear as possible during the campaign, noting the ties that Trump had with its authors, the track record the Heritage Foundation had on getting his support for its ideas and his own previous remarks — as well as the fact that he had declined to say specifically which ideas in Project 2025's 900 pages he considered so ridiculous.
When he won a second term, Trump dropped the pretense and began enacting Project 2025's proposals, in some cases to the letter. In the eight months since inauguration, he has checked off most of its major proposals:
• launching a mass deportation program
• purging civil servants and replacing them with partisan loyalists
• defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• reducing the Federal Emergency Management Agency's role in disaster response
• eliminating federal "diversity, equity and inclusion" efforts
• banning transgender troops in the military
At the same time, he appointed Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He nominated contributor E.J. Antoni as Commissioner of Labor Statistics, despite the latter’s lack of the usual credentials. (The Senate has not voted on Antoni’s confirmation yet.) And he appointed Brendan Carr, who literally wrote the chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, as chairman of the FCC.
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