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Democracy. | |
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
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| This afternoon, White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt will speak to reporters about the Trump administration agenda. | ||
| She's also likely to face questions about the president's position on the Russia-Ukraine war after recently calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator. | ||
| We'll have live coverage of the briefing on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can also watch on the free C-SPAN Now video app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Paul Dance is back at our desk. | ||
| Mr. Dance, the last time you're here was June of 2024. | ||
| You were serving as the director of Project 2025, the presidential transition effort at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| Can you just walk us through what happened with you and with Project 2025 in the months since then? | ||
| Well, you know, Project 2025 was a two-and-a-half-year effort. | ||
| We started back in the spring of 2022. | ||
| It was really a coming together of citizens all over the country. | ||
| We ultimately became 110 groups, all focused on helping the next conservative president be ready to hit the ground running day one. | ||
| So what's happened, you know, we got a lot of work done and made a contribution. | ||
| And very happy to see that these ideas have entered the bloodstream. | ||
| And what President Trump and his team is accomplishing right now is miraculous. | ||
| I stepped down from the project in the end of summer 2024. | ||
| But, you know, what's going on, we have basically wrapped our work by then. | ||
| And I should say I no longer work at the Heritage Foundation, so the ideas today are my own. | ||
| But it's been fantastic to watch President Trump really move like Greece Lightning right now. | ||
| How much of Project 2025 is evident in today being the first month of the Trump administration, the second Trump administration? | ||
| Well, this is all Donald Trump. | ||
| If a man didn't get up and say fight, fight, fight, none of this would be happening. | ||
| So, you know, it's really the indomitable spirit of one man, but that's the essence of leadership. | ||
| Many of the ideas that we brought in Project 2025 are common sense. | ||
| They're ultimately about bringing people back into our own government. | ||
| It's a government of, by, and for the people. | ||
| And that was the central postulate of Project 2025, that we needed to deconstruct this unaccountable administrative state. | ||
| How do you deconstruct it? | ||
| Well, you start by making it transparent. | ||
| And you have to show the rest of the country what's been actually happening here in Washington. | ||
| And that's part of the genius of Donald Trump and working with new folks like Elon Musk to really bring to the fore what we've all kind of suspected. | ||
| But what's being unearthed now is earth-shattering, really. | ||
| And we're seeing, we have a $2 trillion structural deficit in this country going on $50 trillion of debt. | ||
| Anybody who claims that the status quo defends the status quo and says this thing's working is either in on it or completely confused. | ||
| I guess the question is, is what we're seeing now Project 2025 in action? | ||
| Well, it's common sense. | ||
| There's a lot of commonality in the sense that what we put forward were in the main a lot of Trump ideas from term one. | ||
| So I think what you're seeing is aspirational hopes as well. | ||
| Things that people like I, I served in term one, hoped could have been done, but we didn't quite have the political will to do it yet. | ||
| We had a Democrat Congress at the latter half there, the House. | ||
| And, you know, these were ideas in the main that have percolated through the conservative movement and really just center right for decades. | ||
| Remind people what was in Project 2025 was a Department of Government efficiency in Project 2025. | ||
| The whole thing was about efficiency. | ||
| You know, there wasn't per se a department, but the idea with Project 2025 was that the conservatives had to be ready to help the next president govern. | ||
| That, you know, as particularly independent streak that we all have in us, the conservatives have never come together as a group. | ||
| And it was really important that we put aside the petty differences and support the next president. | ||
| So what we did with standing up Project 2025 was a first of its kind, really looking at our friends on the left, looking how they always get ready and saying to the entire country, like, be ready, be prepared. | ||
| And, you know, Project, to the extent that there's a reflection of Project 2025 and what's being done by President Trump now, it's that his team is ready to roll. | ||
| And they really wanted to be prepared to hit the ground day one. | ||
| What do you think the reputation of Project 2025 was by the end of the 2024 election? | ||
| Well, you know, I think the ideas of Project 2025 and what you see now are extremely popular at base. | ||
| What the Democrats had done was probably one of the great electoral failures of all time. | ||
| That was they put $300 million, reportedly, into castigating Project 2025 and really a two-part misinformation play. | ||
| One, that it had anything to do with President Trump, and two, that many of these, their so-called ideas were reflected in Project 2025. | ||
| At the end of the day, it just showed a great contempt for their own base. | ||
| And it ultimately, you know, it's the law of unintended consequences. | ||
| What you're seeing now is Project 2025, you know, on a whole nother plane, another order of magnitude. | ||
| During the election, President Trump and Candidate Trump felt the need to respond to his connection to Project 2025. | ||
| This is about 30 seconds during a campaign stop in July. | ||
| Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, and I don't even know. | ||
| I mean, some of them, I know who they are, but they're very, very conservative, just like you have, they're sort of the opposite of the radical left, okay? | ||
| You have the radical left and you have the radical right, and they come up with this project, I don't know what the hell it is, it's Project 25. | ||
| He's involved in Project, and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme. | ||
| I mean, they're seriously extreme. | ||
| But I don't know anything about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't want to know anything about it. | |
| Extreme came up by the radical right. | ||
| I don't know anything about it. | ||
| What was your estimation of those comments? | ||
| Well, there's no person on earth who's been more attacked by fake news than President Trump. | ||
| So he has much leeway. | ||
| I mean, look, he is a genius at politics, and what he said there is true. | ||
| He didn't have anything to do with this. | ||
| You know, the left, though, had taken a lot of effort to misframe Project 2025. | ||
| And at base, I think he's also made statements subsequent to that that say that many of the ideas are very good. | ||
| You know, some of the bad ideas actually are not even in Project 2025. | ||
| They were completely grafted on. | ||
| For example, the IVF contingent. | ||
| There's not a word about IVF, but the Democrats and their allies spent millions of dollars trying to say Project 2025 was going to stop IVF. | ||
| Fake news. | ||
| Was shutting down or folding in USAID into the State Department, was that, did that come out of Project 2025? | ||
| Well, Project 2025 does a very good treatment on USAID and really going at the heart of how this operation has been running counter to U.S. foreign interests for decades now. | ||
| It's a sieve for unaccountable money. | ||
| So what I think that they've done is really take it to another level. | ||
| It certainly flagged the issue and talked about bringing it under the aegis of the State Department. | ||
| So that's being done. | ||
| There's going to be a vote today on Linda McMahon for Education Secretary to move her nomination out of committee to the full Senate, but a lot of discussion in her nomination hearing about reductions to the Department of Education. | ||
| Democrats concerned about shutting down the Department of Education. | ||
| What does Project 2025 say about the Department of Education? | ||
| Well, what I would say, Secretary, soon to be, I hope, Secretary McMahon, is one of the dynamic figures of modern life. | ||
| She's extremely accomplished businesswoman and former cabinet secretary. | ||
| So I fully commend what she's going to do. | ||
| You know, with the Department of Education, the Heritage Foundation put out the mandate for leadership in 1980 for President Reagan. | ||
| AT THAT STAGE, FOUR YEARS INTO IT, THE BOOK WAS ALREADY CALLING FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE DEPARTMENT. | ||
| I THINK WHAT WE'VE UNFORTUNATELY SEEN... | ||
| WHAT'S THE BOOK? | ||
| The book was the mandate for leadership circa 1980. | ||
| This was published. | ||
| This was published by the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| This was the original mandate for leadership. | ||
| So fast forward 40 years later, we're making the same appeal. | ||
| Look, I went to public schools K through 12. | ||
| I went on to MIT, undergrad, and graduate degrees in MIT in the University of Virginia. | ||
| My mom was a public school teacher. | ||
| My mother-in-law is a public school teacher. | ||
| You're not going to find someone who more believes in the public school system. | ||
| But I really feel it's broken. | ||
| I have four kids, and we're now having to homeschool two of them because this great system that I wouldn't be where I am today were it not for those public school teachers. | ||
| I saw so much dedication from my own mother doing this work, but the system is not working. | ||
| It needs to be put back in the control of states and localities, and the federal mandate needs to kind of relax and be much more accountable to the parents. | ||
| What is your role today? | ||
| Do you have a role in the second Trump administration? | ||
| No, right now I'm on the outside. | ||
| I am very supportive of the work they're doing. | ||
| I just, I'm, you know, every day we wake up, it's Christmas morning. | ||
| I'm down in South Carolina. | ||
| I'm a proud citizen of South Carolina. | ||
| And I'm happy to say that there's a great buoyancy among, I think, just regular everyday Americans that President Trump is delivering on the promises. | ||
| Only a Trump, he's an iconic class. | ||
| And then when he gets into this tremendous kind of tag team duo with Elon Musk cutting through in a way that the deep state never really saw, I think it's just exciting. | ||
| And every day brings a new revelation. | ||
| Would you like to go back into the administration, if offered? | ||
| Would you go back in? | ||
| Well, it's always my honor to serve President Trump and the administration. | ||
| What did you do in the first term? | ||
| I first started at HUD. | ||
| I had been a longtime Trump supporter. | ||
| I worked on the campaign, but I was a New York attorney in white-shoe law firms. | ||
| So I hadn't known Washington and how to navigate it. | ||
| What's a white-shoe law firm? | ||
| A white-shoe law firm are the guys who build $2,000 an hour. | ||
| And many of them are now suing the Trump administration. | ||
| But they're essentially high-end corporate firms. | ||
| They work for a lot of corporate America, defending them, going through regulations. | ||
| There's a big mass of them here on K-Street. | ||
| That's not to say that these are some of the most talented lawyers, but they're expensive. | ||
| And that's where I grew up in New York. | ||
| You come out of law school, you have a tremendous debt. | ||
| You really don't have much of a choice. | ||
| I didn't come from means myself. | ||
| So I basically kind of followed that trajectory. | ||
| That said, it took me two years to get into the Trump administration. | ||
| And I started at HUD in the community planning and development under Dr. Carson, which was an honor to serve. | ||
| I got a quick taste of bureaucracy and the stifling of Dr. Carson and President Trump's homelessness initiatives. | ||
| And then I moved on to the Office of Personal Management, where I was White House liaison and then chief of staff. | ||
| Russ Vogt now heading OPM these days? | ||
| OMB. | ||
| OMB, sorry. | ||
| Explain who Russ Vogt is and did you work with him? | ||
| Yes, Russ Vogt's one of the most talented men in the movement. | ||
| He was formerly director of OMB in the end of Trump 1 and now has been confirmed to be director again. | ||
| He is really Office of Management and Budget. |