Project 2025 Head Resigns After Backlash From Trump

The director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, announced Tuesday that he is stepping down from his role.

The move comes after a wave of public criticism, led by Democrats, over the conservative manifesto and the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that backs it. The project’s agenda items include everything from the dismantling of government agencies, such as the Department of Education, to the implementation of national abortion bans and contraception restrictions.

Dans said in his email that others on the project’s team will continue to push for its implementation in a conservative presidential campaign, and that he will be directing his efforts toward “winning, bigly!” in November. He also told Heritage Foundation staff earlier this week about his departure.

Thanks to the increased public attention on the project, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from the 900-page document. According to Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast, Dans’s departure comes after pressure from the Trump campaign, partially due to a power struggle for control over staffing in a possible Trump presidential administration.

This would seem to align with what Trump campaign officials have said publicly. One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, recently called Project 2025 a “pain in the ass.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is annoyed that it has received so much attention, and he resents the implication that the project is behind his policies and choosing his presidential staff.

On Tuesday, after the news of Dans’s resignation spread, the Trump campaign celebrated in an email written by LaCavita and co-campaign manager Susie Wiles.

Bizarrely, Dans’s departure seems to be yet more evidence of Trump’s influence on Project 2025. Vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance also has connections to the project, and Trump’s decision to make him his running mate made one of its key architects, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, very happy.

The move will likely do little to halt Democratic attacks against Project 2025, particularly as those behind it say that their efforts will continue. It’s one of the many weird things that Democrats are successfully tying to the GOP, who are having a tough time convincing voters that any of their policies are normal.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed up a blatantly antisemitic claim about Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband.

During an interview on WABC 77’s radio show Sid & Friends in the Morning, Trump agreed with host Sid Rosenberg, who criticized Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, on the basis of his faith.

“They tell me that this Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, Mr. President, is Jewish,” Rosenberg said. “He’s Jewish like Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Are you kidding me? He’s a crappy Jew, he’s a horrible Jew!”

“Yes, yes,” Trump replied under Rosenberg’s rant. As Trump made perfectly clear throughout the interview, to him, the only good Jewish person is one who’s voting Republican.

During the interview, Trump repeated his old attack against Jewish Americans who refused to support his presidential bid.

“Any Jewish person that voted for her, or him, or whoever it’s going to be, I assume it’s going to be her; anybody that did that should have their head examined,” Trump said. “If you love Israel, or if you’re Jewish—because a lot of Jewish people do not like Israel, and they happen to be in New York, you know that?”

“Yes,” chirped Rosenberg, whose radio talk show is local to New York City.

“If you are Jewish,” Trump continued, “regardless of Israel, if you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat you’re a fool. An absolute fool.”

Trump has previously suggested that any Jewish person who did not vote for him “does not love Israel” and “should be spoken to.” The former president seems to have a pretty limited idea of what a Jewish person can and cannot think. He also claimed in March that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

On Tuesday, Trump complained that Democrats no longer felt afraid to criticize Israel.

“You know, 15 years ago the strongest lobby in all of Washington was Israel. It was by far the strongest. Nobody would say anything bad about Israel! Today, it’s like nobody says anything good—except for Republicans by the way,” Trump griped.

While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is not the biggest lobby in U.S. politics, its impact is still felt in crucial races. Earlier this year, AIPAC gave a whopping $14.5 million in the New York Democratic primary election to George Latimer, funding his ultimately successful effort to unseat progressive Representative Jamaal Bowman, a staunch critic of Israel.

During the radio interview, Trump also claimed that Harris looked uncomfortable during her meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he said suggested that she secretly dislikes Jewish people—despite being married to one, of course.

“You can see the disdain,” Trump said. “Number one, she doesn’t like Israel. Number two, she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it, and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it.”

Trump’s lack of logic on this subject is nothing new. The Republican presidential nominee has previously asserted that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party had “abandoned” Israel, despite the fact that the U.S. has continued to fund Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 40,000 Palestinians and created an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis.

J.D. Vance is not beating the weird allegations, even from his allies.

In a Monday night segment on Fox News, host Jesse Watters highlighted how Democrats such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and others are aligning in a “coordinated attack” that Trump’s vice presidential candidate is just plain weird.

In doing so, however, Watters just made a supercut that did nothing to push back on the talking point.

As Rolling Stone points out, the host’s attempt to dispel the controversy by playing the compilation is the perfect example of the Streisand effect, or when you try to hide something but end up only drawing more attention to it. By highlighting the couch controversy and politicians calling the vice presidential candidate weird, Watters is only making the situation worse for Vance.

To be clear, Vance did not have sex with a couch. But his off-putting nature may be a liability for the Trump campaign.

It looks like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had his mind made up on presidential immunity from the start, and made no effort to negotiate with the court’s liberal justices.

According to a stunning new report from CNN citing unnamed sources, Roberts looked past any chance of coming to a compromise outside of the conservative majority on the court, as was typical in past cases on presidential power. He instead thought that he could persuade the court’s liberals to look beyond Donald Trump.

The oral arguments for the case on April 25 didn’t indicate such a clear-cut breakdown, as justices seemed ready to vindicate Trump in only some of his legal team’s arguments, while also accepting some of special counsel Jack Smith’s points.

But the justices’ private session the next day did not reflect any of that, with votes quickly breaking down on ideological lines and Roberts ready to rule that presidents have near-absolute immunity for all “official acts.” He tried to steer the conversation away from Trump, writing in his opinion that ​​“unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.”

Roberts’s actions flew in the face of his previous rulings, such as the court’s 2022 decision Jackson v. Women’s Health Organization. While Roberts sided with the conservative majority in that case in ruling against the organization, he dissented on overturning the abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. And a decade earlier, he cast the deciding vote that upheld the Affordable Care Act, breaking with his fellow conservatives in a 5–4 decision.

But this time, Roberts did not seem amenable to compromise, and in fact one of Trump’s appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was the lone conservative on the court who sought any kind of compromise with the liberal justices. In her opinion on the immunity case, she said the Trump plan to use alternative slates of electors should be considered a “private” and not an official act, and thus subject to criminal prosecution.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, led by Roberts, has upended precedent and put all of Trump’s legal cases in jeopardy. The one criminal case that was decided prior to the court’s ruling has had sentencing delayed. Of the two federal cases that are still being decided, one was dismissed pending appeal by a judge seemingly on Trump’s side, and the other is in limbo. In short, Roberts may have presented himself as moderate before, but his decision on immunity shows that his conservative beliefs come first.

Elon Musk, a self-declared “free speech absolutist,” has been accused of suspending the account of a group organizing voters to support Vice President Kamala Harris.

Leaders of the newly formed Democratic outreach group “White Dudes for Harris” hit back at technocrat Musk after the group’s X (formerly Twitter) account was temporarily suspended Monday night, following a wildly successful fundraiser earlier that evening.

More than 190,000 people tuned into a massive virtual call, reportedly raising more than $4 million for Harris’s campaign. The group had originally hoped for a turnout of 10,000 people, and to raise $50,000, a milestone they passed before the call even began, according to the organizers.

There were appearances from a few white guys who are reportedly in contention to be Harris’s vice presidential nominee, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Shortly after the call ended, the group’s organizers said they had received notice that their account on X, which Musk owns, had been suspended for supposedly “violating our rules against evading suspension.”

“Seems like @elonmusk might be a little scared,” wrote Ross Morales Rocketto, one of the group’s organizers in a post on X, adding a screenshot of the email.

Mike Nellis, another organizer, also posted a screenshot of the email. “We scared @elonmusk and @DonaldJTrumpJr so much tonight they suspended our account and won’t let us back in,” he wrote. “These guys are running scared of the success we’ve had tonight, but we’re not going to quit. More coming tomorrow (unless they shut down my account too!)”

The group’s account was restored by Tuesday morning.

It’s not clear that Musk was involved in the account’s suspension, but Rocketto and Nellis aren’t all that crazy to think that the X CEO might be behind it.

Musk endorsed Trump earlier this month and has since been increasingly outspoken about the presidential race online, repeatedly claiming that President Joe Biden has been “importing” immigrants into the country to illegally vote for Harris. Last week, Musk posted a parody ad for Harris, which used an A.I.-generated version of her voice to call Harris the “ultimate diversity hire,” raising concerns about the use of A.I. in political campaigns.

While Musk boosted the conspiracy theory that Google was suppressing answers about Donald Trump, many have accused him of making it difficult to follow Harris’s campaign’s X account in the days after she became the presumptive nominee.