The Project: Unknown Ways Project 2025 is Destroying America
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Brad dives into the controversial Project 2025 with David Andrew Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Graham discusses the origins, key figures, and goals of Project 2025, highlighting how the project aims to expand executive power and reshape America according to conservative ideals. Key individuals involved include Kevin Roberts, Russ Vought, and Paul Dans.
The discussion also explores the interplay between religious convictions and political strategies, and the broader implications for American democracy.
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Project 2025 is now a household thing.
It's been reported on endlessly.
Many of you who listen to this show have read it, analyzed it, listened to podcasts, read articles.
What you know is that it presents a scary vision for the United States, one that is being implemented.
But what if I told you that there's a story about how Project 2025 came together?
The men who masterminded it.
That shows us what they're really trying to accomplish.
What if I told you that behind the project is a set of characters who know they have only a short amount of time to effect a second American Revolution and completely change the way of life Today I speak to David Andrew Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Graham is the author of the Atlantic Daily Newsletter, and he won the Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting in 2021 for his coverage of the 2020 presidential election.
We discuss how the project came together, the way that three characters, Russ Vogt, the leader of OMB and the mastermind of Trump's second presidency, Kevin Roberts, the infamous leader of the Heritage Foundation.
And Paul Dans, an obscure figure who is relatively unknown, but has played an outsized role in shaping the new administration.
We talk about the ways that the leaders of the project masterminded the executive orders that are now being signed by Donald Trump.
But we talk more about their vision for the country, the way that they want to expand the presidency to the point And perhaps most importantly, how they are anticipating a two-year window for their work.
How they know that by the time the midterms come, they need to have accomplished almost everything on their agenda, or it may be in jeopardy, and their majority in Congress may be lost.
The story of today is that the pretext of Project 2025 may be as revealing as the text itself.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, and it's great to be with you on this Monday.
Joined today by a first-time guest and somebody who I just reached out to just very recently to say, hey, would love to have you on the program and would love to see if you'd come talk to us.
And that's David Andrew Graham.
So, David, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
You are the author of The Project, which is all about Project 2025.
And like me, you've made questionable career choices because you write about the worst things in the world.
And I was telling you before we hit record there, a lot of our listeners are really informed folks.
They're up to date.
They're knowledgeable.
They know what's in Project 2025 to some extent.
They've heard some of the scariest bits of it.
And I think we're all aware of the ways, at least some of them, it's being implemented in the current administration.
And we'll come back to that in a second.
One of the aspects of your book that I just appreciated the most was the kind of behind-the-scenes view into how Project 2025 came together.
And, you know, I wonder if you wouldn't start us off by just sharing a little bit of how in the years of 2020, 2022, a kind of collaboration between three main characters in your book, Kevin Roberts, Paul Dans, and Russ Vogt, comes together and it really...
Sure.
So coming out of the first Trump administration, you had members of the administration and allies of the administration sort of trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
And one of the important strains is the idea that Trump had been failed and had not failed, and that he'd been failed by his own lack of planning and by his aides.
And so I see Project 2025 as coming out of that and being an attempt to sort of fix that.
Yeah.
think tank.
And it had a little bit of a down period.
They'd gone through a couple of presidents in a short period of time.
And Roberts was sort of trying to right the ship.
And I think also to reclaim some of Heritage's leading role in the conservative movement.
Could we talk about that real quick?
Because I think a lot of times Heritage gets mentioned as this legacy think tank that's always been at the forefront since Paul Weyrich had the idea.
So it's But, you know, like, before Project 2025, and really before Robert's tenure, Heritage was kind of in a muddled—I mean, there was moments in the, like, Tea Party Obama years where people thought the Heritage Foundation was hurting conservatives rather than helping them.
So it's not like there was just a natural manifest destiny for Heritage to be the kind of creator of this manifesto for the second Trump admin.
Yeah, you know, Heritage had hired Jim DeMint, who was the firebrand South Carolina senator, to be their president, and that had been a somewhat rocky tenure.
DeMint left under a little bit of acrimony to create his own organization.
They brought in Kay Cole James to replace him, but she clashed with people in the Trump administration, couldn't really get on the same page.
And so, you know, at this moment when suddenly conservatives are ascended in Washington, Heritage is finding itself a little bit on the outside, and I think they were trying to fix that problem, you know?
The creators.
Yeah, sorry.
Go ahead, please.
So they, you know, so Roberts calls Paul Dans, who had been in the Trump administration, in a sort of mid-level role eventually in the White House, and asked him to put together a plan for a new conservative administration, whoever that might be, and to gather really a big tent.
So he wanted to convene people from across the right, across the MAGA right, but to get a pretty big tent within that, and put together a plan and put together a whole agenda, not just policy, but how to implement the policy and who would implement the policy so that they would be ready for the next Republican standard bearer.
I'm interested in folks getting the clear picture that—so here's Kevin Roberts, the new leader of the Heritage Foundation, Paul Dance, who we'll come back to, and then Russ Vogt, who talked about on this show, but this seems to be the era of the Russ Vogt profile.
Your book is— Got great info.
There's been profiles of Russ Vogt coming out in the Atlantic and in other places, Bloomberg.
They view this as, you know, in like typical conservative fashion.
It's not like, hey, y 'all, we have an opportunity to do something important.
Like, what is the rhetoric?
The rhetoric is like, you know.
This is 1776.
Like, how are they approaching the creation of Project 2025?
Grandiosely, as you say.
You know, Vogue talks about it as being like 1776, or he talked about the 2024 election as being like 1776 or 1860.
Roberts gave a famous interview right around July 4th of 2020, 2024, I believe July 2nd, maybe, where he said that, you know, we were in the midst of a second American revolution that would remain bloodless if the left allowed it to be.
So they had these really big, Claims for what they want to do.
And, you know, you see that, I think, in the text.
And there is this, you know, this grandiose attitude.
But I also think it is – the flip side of that is a really apocalyptic vision that a lot of them have.
You know, so they talk about we're in a post-constitutional order.
Russ Vogt says, you know, don't tell me we're still living under the Constitution.
They say we're in the late stages of a Marxist takeover.
So on the one hand, they see this big opportunity.
On the other hand, they see the consequences of not taking the opportunity as extremely dire.
There's a great line, you recall of Vietnam, kind of about, we have to destroy the village in order to save it.
And it seems like the reaction to the apocalypse that they sense is coming is to really take drastic action as it comes to the executive branch.
I have mentioned this on the show in the past as well, but, you know, doing just the overall research for this that you've done, how did they land on the idea that if we're going to save the nation, we have to be able to expand the executive or at least change the role of the executive in a way that's unprecedented in American history?
I find it a little bit unresolved.
And there are these places where I think they have accurate critiques.
They talk about Congress abdicating a lot of its power and giving up way too much to I think that's a really compelling claim and I think a claim that a lot of people across the political spectrum would make.
What I don't think they do a good job of explaining is why empowering the executive branch is a solution for that.
It seems like quite the opposite, you know?
They talk about the idea that when you have an executive branch that is full of people who don't report to the president, it's anti-democratic.
And that's, you know, there's a certain amount of argument as far as that goes.
But it doesn't at all explain why sidelining Congress is in fact better.
They also take little chunks of this.
You know, they say they believe that Humphrey's executor, which creates independent regulatory agencies like the FCC, is unconstitutional.
They think the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional.
So on a law-by-law basis, they have arguments.
But I don't think the whole thing really resolved itself at all.
It really does feel like, hey, we're in a place where the president has continued to get more and more power.
Congress is really the weakest branch.
Thus, we should make the president almost unbound.
And that will be the solution as long as I guess our guy is in the presidency and our policies are the ones he's listening to.
You call this a...
you don't need a bunch of programs or an adapter.
You just plug Project 2025 into Trump's second presidency and you've got your entire roadmap as it pertains to everything from the environment to the family to the military.
Is that how you see it?
And what was the kind of innovation there of creating, in essence, a document that is the plan to be the government's entire roadmap for four years?
I love that analogy.
I think that's really good.
I think it's a good description of what they're doing.
We see plans sort of like this.
They're sort of policy blueprints you get every four years.
Heritage has been doing this for a very long time.
So it's not just a policy plan.
It's a policy plan with thoughts about how to implement it.
There's a 100-day playbook that they put together, and that's something that I have not seen that has not yet become public, although I think we've seen a lot of it actually coming out as part of the administration.
But the original documents haven't come out.
So it's, you know, how are we going to do these things once we're in office?
And then it is this personnel side of it.
And they have the advantage of a president who has...
You know, Trump cares a lot about tariffs.
He cares a lot about immigration.
He cares a lot about retribution and other stuff he doesn't really care.
And so they sort of fill in those blanks.
They have this, you know, they have plans for every department.
And what they get is more unified control of the executive branch because they want to push this vision of society.
And what he gets is people who are willing to work for him, be loyal, be ready on day one.
And who help him get control of, for example, the Justice Department for retribution.
So it's a sort of symbiotic relationship, and I think Trump is a good vessel for them.
You have a quote here from Paul Dance who says, and this is Paul Dance talking to Steve Bannon, we have detailed agency plans.
We are writing the actual executive orders.
we are writing the actual regulations now.
And I think folks out there probably But, you know, reading your book, reading the quotations from someone like Dan's, it really does put into perspective that the onslaught of Trump's first couple of months was planned and masterminded by a few characters.
And I wonder if we can't talk about those.
So, you know, we've talked about Kevin Roberts.
I think people have heard about him.
He's been in the news.
And, you know, he's BFFs with J.D. Vance.
He had to pull his book because it was a little too incendiary before the election.
He maybe got out too in front, maybe, before the election for Trump's taste.
Who is Paul Dance?
I'm sure 99% of the people listening are like, don't know that name and have never heard of that guy.
Yeah, and I mean, wouldn't have a whole lot of reason to.
I think Dance is an interesting character.
You know, so sort of going way back, he's a product of official Washington.
His parents met working for the federal government.
He describes them as sort of Kennedy Democrats brought to D.C. by the idealism of Camelot.
And he went to MIT and then got a master's degree in urban planning and then goes to law school.
And in law school, he joined the Federalist Society and sort of the beginning of his conservatism.
And he has talked about that as being a really bleak period for conservatism, feeling like he was sort of – they were out in the wild.
So instead of going into government, he went into law.
And he worked at big corporate firms in New York for a while.
Eventually went out of his own.
And he remained sort of interested in conservative politics and interested in the federal society.
And in 2011, when Trump started talking about birtherism, he was on board with that.
He said he had serious academic questions about Barack Obama's birthplace.
And he hoped that Trump would run for president, which, of course, Trump didn't.
And he was kind of crestfallen.
And then four years later, when Trump ran for president again, Dan's was all in.
And he had this idea that as an early supporter and as an elite lawyer, he was going to sort of walk into the Justice Department and get a high-ranking position, which is not at all what happens.
He couldn't get a job for quite a while, and he blamed that on rhinos.
He thought it was Bush holdovers, people who were in the administration who weren't really true believers in Trump, who had gotten these jobs because they had a government credential already.
He finally made it in.
Starting in 2018, he meets this guy who's a college student who's working in the administration, but he's sort of a helpful way in.
And so he started housing and urban development and then moved to the White House in 2020 and ended up at the personnel office.
And so between working in the personnel office and then his own experience of not finding a job for the longest time, he developed this real animosity, not just towards civil servants, although towards them, but also towards political appointees in the first Trump administration that I think informs a lot of how Project 2025 thinks about personnel and thinks about You know, it's planned to get all these people in place.
Go ahead.
Well, what is the personnel office?
You know, it's one of those obscure government agencies that, like, now has all this prominence because our government's being torn up.
So, you know, what is that?
So we know, you know, people know about the civil service, which has its own mechanisms.
And then there's another office that deals with all of the political appointees.
And there's about 4,000 of these people.
We obviously know about cabinet officials and the highest ranking names, but there's all these people who are not Senate confirmed, but have a lot of power and a lot of influence in the government because they are in charge of writing regulations, implementing regulations, shepherding all these things along.
And those are the people that Danz is dealing with through the presidential personnel office.
So he's there, and he gets all this experience.
And I think for me, this was a really illuminating aspect of your book.
He gets this experience with personnel and also political appointees.
Who he's not impressed by.
And I think that's part of what inspires this whole idea of when Trump gets back in, we're going to take the gambit that Trump's going to get back in.
We need to be ready to stock the shelves with people who have the commitment, not necessarily the experience or the expertise, but the commitment to be crusaders, ideologues, to actually set forth 12 hours a day, six days a week to accomplish the MAGA agenda.
And they're like, we want deplorables.
We want people who've been canceled.
We want people who went to battle with their school board.
We can train them.
You can teach people how the government works.
You can get them ready for that.
But we need people who come in with the ideological commitment.
So the other character here is Russ Vogt.
I think some folks will have some passing familiarity with Russ Vogt.
But what do we need to know about Russ Vogt in terms of the creation of Project 2025?
I think of Vogt as the intellectual architect.
Dan's had spent a little bit of time in government, but not a lot.
A lot of the people who contribute to this are folks who've spent time in individual offices or have they spent time, you know, they have some government experience, but Vogt is the guy who really knows the White House and he knows the systems of government.
And so when they think about how they're going to make these things happen and they're thinking about how the White House and, you know, various aspects of the White House, especially the Office of Management and Budget, can be used to push this agenda.
He's the guy who's thinking about that and kind of outlining the structures for it.
Can I just stop for a minute and tell you, like, Russ Vogt is just a vexing character to me.
And I just need to do some therapy for a minute.
I know you're not my therapist.
But, like, everything you read about Russ Vogt is that Russ Vogt knows how the government works maybe more than anyone.
Like, he is a policy wonk procedural guru.
Whether it's Congress, the executive branch, the minutiae that requires this rigor and analytical dedication.
But I'm looking at things you've quoted him saying here.
You say vote has become a backer of Trump's most fringe ideas.
So here's a man who has the intellectual acumen.
To probably understand the sprawling behemoth of the federal government's process more than anyone may be on earth at the moment.
And then he'll say things like this.
I think the 2020 election was stolen.
He says, we are in a post-constitutional moment in our country.
Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed over decades away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement.
A new regime, if you will.
Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.
So, like, here's what I'm getting at is, like, my friends who are, like, classicists and, like, can just correct you on the most minute form of Latin grammar are not usually my friends who make, like, sweeping political ideological statements in another breath.
Russ Vogt seems to do both.
Just, I don't know.
Like, is there any way to understand him beyond that?
He's ideologically extreme?
And a savant when it comes to the details of government procedure?
You know, he's a really mysterious figure for all the reasons you say.
And he's mysterious because I think he's undergone some transformation.
I mean, one thing I'd say is you hear him say those outrageous statements.
And then if you – when he's – you know, it's one thing to read them.
But if you can – if you hear him on a podcast or you see a video of him, he speaks in this very low-key way.
I mean, he sounds like a wonk too.
He doesn't sound like a firebrand.
It's just the content is – Really aggressive.
What I don't totally grasp, and former friends and former comrades of his grapple with this too, he came up through real fiscal conservative circles.
He was working in both fiscal and social conservatism.
He works for Phil Graham, the great deregulator.
He works for Jeb Hensarling.
He's all about cutting budgets.
And he also has this very religious mindset.
And so how he becomes the sort of conciliaria to Trump, I think, is a real mystery.
When you hear him say that the 2020 election was stolen, it's hard to know what to make of that because you can't be in Trump's circle and not say that.
It's a, you know, it's the clear litmus test for people who work around him.
So it's hard to know whether somebody is sincere, or whether they're willing to say that to get somewhere.
But his, I mean, his sense of a post-constitutional order and the sort of apocalyptic tone to those things makes me think that he may really believe it.
I, I, I, I, I, so many questions.
Let me ask, here's the thing I want to make sure people take away from today.
And I think a lot of them will have already understood.
I had bits of this before on this show and many other outlets, of course.
Russ Vogt, Christian nationalist.
You know, what do we know about his faith and how his religion plays a role in everything?
So he grew up in a very religious family.
He went to Wheaton.
And he has always talked a lot about faith.
It's always been part of the way he frames his life.
He had a sort of skirmish with Bernie Sanders when he was originally appointed, I believe, deputy head of OMB.
Because Sanders dredged up a column that he'd written arguing that Muslims were – or Islam was theologically deficient and that Muslims were going to hell.
And Sanders brandished this and said, you know, you can't be saying these things.
And the response from a lot of people says, well, what does that have to do with OMB?
This is a – don't institute a religious test for this job either.
But I think it gives a sense of where vote is.
And when he talks about the policies that he wants to implement, even when he talks about, for example, immigration restriction.
He couches it in very religious terms.
He talks about, you know, Christian responsibility.
He talks about fiscal responsibilities of Christian obligation.
And he talks about Christian nationalism as a way, you know, he describes himself.
I guess there's an interview with Charlie Kirk where he says, you know, the left likes to come up with these descriptions, these pejoratives.
They call us Christian nationalists.
But I think that one's actually true.
I'm a Christian.
I'm a nationalist.
I think Christian nationism is how I would describe my worldview.
Yeah, there's a bunch of things here that I think are really interesting to dig into.
One is, he also has the infamous quote that, speaking about federal workers, that, you know, we want to put them in trauma.
And there was a piece today at the Washington Post talking about how they are, in fact, in trauma.
Federal workers from the national parks to any other agency are feeling trauma.
It's one more instance of Christian nationalism in the Trump era.
As a form of cruelty.
Like, we want to put people in trauma is a Christian virtue.
I mean, that's a strange...
I also just want to point out, and I wonder if you have thoughts on this, that, you know, when you think of Kevin Roberts and Russ Vogt getting together here, you think of two wildly different men.
If you ever see Kevin Roberts' friends, he's like this guy who shows up.
He's like bald and stocky.
He looks like that dad at the, like, youth soccer game that might fight the ref.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, he just looks like he's wearing cowboy boots, probably.
He talks like a football coach.
And then Russ Vogt, as you say, is mild-mannered.
He seems to always be wearing a suit.
I think he sleeps in a suit.
I don't think he ever unties his tie.
But all that aside- Okay.
All right.
So there it is.
Paul Weirich, Jerry Falwell, and so on.
And it really is a renewal of that kind of Protestant-Catholic alliance that has fueled much of the American rights politics.
I totally agree.
Dan's is an interesting character in this.
Dan's grew up Catholic.
He doesn't talk so much about faith in his own life.
And so he's sort of the odd man out there.
But I think the two of them, that alliance is really important.
So you've mentioned fiscal responsibility a couple of times.
And I have a gander, and I don't know if others agree with me, but there's been this uneasy balance in American conservatism of, hey, we're fiscal conservatives, low taxes, small government, libertarian leanings, get off our back, big brother, and traditional Judeo-Christian values will make America great again.
And, you know, debates from William F. Buckley to Russell Kirk to Brent Bozell to Ronald Reagan.
But to me, Project 2025 is...
Like, Russ Vogt, totally into it.
When push comes to shove, though, if I have to serve the president who will add three trillion to the debt in order to get the culture war stuff I want surrounding family, sex, gender, immigration to to to pass, I'm willing to do it like the the imposition of values takes precedent over.
Do you see that on Project 2025?
Or do you feel like I'm reading too much into that?
No, I think you're right.
I mean, you know, Vote made that deal effectively already in the first Trump term.
And I think you see it throughout Project 2025.
They don't, you know, there's no real accounting inside Project 2025.
They don't put numbers on many things.
They argue that a balanced budget would be good.
They express concern about the national debt and about the deficit.
But they don't actually offer any plan for it.
And I think that is another case where they're sort of giving in to Trump.
I mean, they say, look, our deficit problem is a Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security problem.
We're not going to raise taxes, so what we have is an entitlement problem.
They're willing to cut Medicaid, but they don't offer any plan for addressing Medicare and Social Security costs.
And the reason for that, I think, is they know that Trump has pledged over and over again that he's going to defend those things.
And so they're willing to—they can't really fight him on that.
They're willing to compromise that because they're getting something else for it.
And what that is is the social stuff.
Roberts has this quote, and we've got to talk about this quote, because I think to me this gives away the game.
There's a lot to say about it, but he says, Our Constitution grants us each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.
That is like six books right there.
I'll be quiet.
I'll just say, what does that mean to you?
Because I know I have like a million thoughts in my head.
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I've taken up enough of your time.
I'm so grateful for this conversation.
It's therapeutic for me to just, you know, talk about these things.
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So it's really helpful.
The book is the project where are places people can be, you know, connected to you and your work and follow along with anything you might be writing or appearances and so on and so forth.
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