Trump Tries, Fails to Distance Himself From Project 2025

On Friday, Donald Trump claimed that the Heritage Foundation’s radical Project 2025 plan—which lays out a course for uprooting American democracy as we know it, and has been elevated by Trump’s allies—has “nothing to do” with his run for president.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “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. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

How can Trump both know nothing about Project 2025 and “disagree” with it? He doesn’t say. But it’s clear that he recognizes that the plan is a growing political liability.

The public severance came two days after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts issued an ominous warning for leftists, ahead of what he called a “second American Revolution.”

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room, celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this week on presidential immunity.

“In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back,” Roberts said.

Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly frustrated by reporting on the affiliation between the campaign and Project 2025’s agenda, despite their apparent linkage, and the program’s intention of serving as the former president’s wish list if and when he returns to office next year.

Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy and has been boosted by key allies, including former advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. Trump’s own super PACs have run ads highlighting Project 2025’s policy goals. And as much as Trump wants to distance himself from the conservative apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November. But they may have more on the way—in November, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

“Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state,” Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, told Axios at the time.

Regardless, senior Trump advisers have warned news outlets against reporting on the connections. In statements to both Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita pointed to Agenda47 as the official platform of the Trump campaign, noting that “unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”

President Donald Trump is continuing to insist that he never called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” after a fact-checking site declared that his remarks from 2017 were misconstrued.

The presumptive Republican nominee posted on Truth Social Friday, sharing pieces of a report from the New York Post about Snopes, which had recently fact-checked Trump’s infamous defense of rallygoers at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Earlier this month, Snopes issued a controversial “false” rating to the claim that Trump called white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the rally “very fine people.” Afterward, Trump claimed he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis and white-supremacists, and said that they ought to be “condemned totally.”

Snopes deliberated that Trump’s full statement—“very fine people on both sides”—was referring to all of the attendees at the neo-Nazi rally, rather than a specific group of neo-Nazis at the rally. A small, but important difference, especially for Trump supporters who have been claiming for years that the former president was simply misunderstood.

During CNN’s first presidential debate last week, President Joe Biden referenced Trump’s infamous line as his rationale for running for president in 2020.

“I said I wasn’t going to run again until I saw it happen in Charlottesville, Virginia,” said Biden.  

“People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torches, torches and singing the same antisemitic bile they sang when back in Germany.… And the young woman got killed. I spoke to the mother. And they asked him, what do you think of those people? … And he said I think there’s fine people on both sides.”

Trump rejected Biden’s story. “He didn’t run because of Charlottesville; he ran because it was his last chance,” Trump said. “He made up the Charlottesville story, and you’ll see it debunked all over the place.” Trump insisted that this was the consensus among “every reasonable anchor,” and added that “just the other day it came out it was fully debunked,” likely referencing the Snopes rating.

Still, Biden urged, “It happened.” And he’s right.

Many were horrified by Trump’s failure to adequately condemn the participants of the Unite the Right rally, which killed three people. Snopes’s determination, which has emerged seven years after Trump’s original statement, seems to be differentiating between neo-Nazi supremacists and people who simply chose to attend a neo-Nazi rally—a dubious fact-check at best. The updated Snopes rating also failed to acknowledge Trump’s penchant for doublespeak, and the power of his more nuanced rhetoric, which when combined with his fascistic rhetoric, has garnered him the support of white supremacists across the country.

During an appearance on Philadelphia-based WURD Radio broadcast Thursday morning, Biden appeared to refer to himself as the “first Black woman” to serve in the White House.

“By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first Black woman, to serve with a Black president,” Biden said, apparently fusing his time as Barack Obama’s vice president to now having Kamala Harris as his vice president.

As Business Insider notes, Biden correctly stated earlier in the interview that he was the first president to have a Black woman vice president and that he had served as vice president to the country’s first Black president. It was only after he circled back on the statement that it became jumbled.

The 14-minute radio appearance was Biden’s first media spot since his debate against Trump and came as allies close to Biden privately warned that strong media appearances into the Fourth of July weekend were crucial to stem fallout from his debate performance.

“I had a bad debate,” Biden said during the radio show. “But 90 minutes on stage does not erase what I have done in three-and-a-half years.”

The radio appearance largely focused on work Biden has done to support Black communities, including giving billions to HBCUs, lowering the price of insulin, and pushing policies to increase Black homeownership. According to polling from CBS, 60 percent of registered Black voters feel democracy and the rule of law will be safe only if Biden wins—but 55 percent believe Biden should not be running for reelection and 31 percent think neither Biden nor Trump have the cognitive health to serve as president.

“Black voters in cities like Philadelphia are the ones who are going to decide the outcome of this election,” Biden said. A key voting bloc, Black voters clinched the presidency for Biden in 2020. Despite dips in support, a majority of Black voters continue to support Biden as Trump continues failing to make a convincing case for himself.

As the rest of the country obsesses over Joe Biden’s fitness for office, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has dared, once again, to say what absolutely no one was thinking.

The conspiratorial independent candidate had strong words to share about 9/11 on Friday, announcing that, as an official part of his platform for president, he wouldn’t “take sides” on the national tragedy.

“My take on 9/11: It’s hard to tell what is a conspiracy theory and what isn’t,” Kennedy wrote. “But conspiracy theories flourish when the government routinely lies to the public. As President I won’t take sides on 9/11 or any of the other debates. But I can promise is that I will open the files and usher in a new era of transparency.”

The unexpected and unwarranted message was prompted by a CBS 60 Minutes segment that aired late last month about possible Saudi involvement in the attack, according to Kennedy.

“Speculation about what our government may be covering up is rife outside the mainstream of our political culture,” he continued in a separate post. “Trust [in] government is at an all-time low. The way to restore that trust is through honesty and transparency. That is my promise, and that is what will resolve any questions about 9/11, UAPs, and other contentious topics. I am personally agnostic on those issues. My issue is TRANSPARENCY.”

It’s been a bad week for Kennedy, whose already low favorability tanked after a Vanity Fair exposé published images of him chowing down on what veterinarians identified as a barbecued dog. The article also included accusations from the Kennedy family’s former babysitter, Eliza Cooney, who claimed that Kennedy had rubbed her leg, read her diary, asked her to rub lotion on his back, trapped her against the pantry door, and groped her—all on separate occasions.

But that kind of behavior wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, according to several of Kennedy’s friends who told the publication that he had sent them photographs of nude women multiple times. The friends believed Kennedy had taken the pictures himself, but did not know if the women had consented to being photographed or of the images being shared.

Over a week out from President Joe Biden’s calamitous performance during the first presidential debate, a sense of doom is setting in among White House staffers, according to a report from Axios.

“Everyone is miserable, and senior advisers are a total black hole,” one White House official told Axios. “Even if you’re trying to focus on work, nothing is going to break through or get any acknowledgment” from those in charge, they added.

There has been some speculation that Biden’s inner circle, specifically Deputy Chief of Staff Annie Tomasini, Jill Biden’s top adviser Anthony Bernal, and longtime aide Ashley Williams are working overtime to keep dissent from the president’s ears. The result appears to be a rising tide of discontent from others in the president’s employ.

“The only thing that can really allay concerns is for the president to demonstrate that he’s capable of running this campaign,” said one high-ranking official from the Democratic National Committee. “Everything else feels like Weekend at Bernie’s by his inner circle to prop him up.”

To try to counteract the growing sense of dread, Biden’s campaign circulated an all-staff memo on Wednesday, including internal polling that shows the president neck and neck with former President Donald Trump, a slightly more optimistic finding than that of other polls published this week.

Still, Biden has insisted to staffers, and a group of Democratic governors, that he will continue his campaign to stay in the White House.