Project 2025 Leader Just Made It Harder for Trump to Distance Himself

One day after Donald Trump was caught red-handed lying about his storied relationship with Project 2025, the president of the group behind the scheme is claiming it’s actually a good thing that the Republican presidential nominee is playing down his favor with the agenda—all while admitting that the two are, actually, very close.

Speaking with right-wing commentator Michele Tafoya on her podcast Thursday, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said “it’s good” that Trump is trying to “distance [his] campaign” from Project 2025, which he described as a platform for “any candidate to lean on.” But in doing so, he also let slip that his relationship with Trump—who insisted in July that he had “no idea who is behind” Project 2025—was “very good.”

“To the heart of your question, our relationship with Mr. Trump and his advisers remains very good,” Roberts said. “It’s one where we’re not coordinating at all.”

Instead, according to Roberts, the massive overlap between Project 2025, the RNC, and Trump’s official campaign platform, Agenda 47, is simply because they all fall in the same “big lane.”

Donald Trump has spent weeks trying to disavow Project 2025 since it became clear just how deeply unpopular the christo-nationalist agenda is among American voters. He even went as far as to claim that he knew “nothing about Project 2025” after Roberts called for a “bloodless” revolution. But the renewed insistence that the two have no direct correlation comes just one day after photographic evidence emerged of Trump and Roberts taking a private flight together in April 2022 to a Heritage Foundation conference—where Trump was slated as the keynote speaker.

“I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025,” Roberts told The Washington Post that month, “because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”

Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy and was designed to be a transition playbook to expedite the first 180 days of a potential second Trump presidency. But the 920-page Christian-nationalist manifesto boasts what would otherwise be considered outrageous policy positions, including dismantling staples of the executive branch, such as the Department of Education.

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance seems perfectly happy to dish out criticism of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz over his military record, but he just can’t take it.

Vance blew up at CNN anchor Brianna Keilar on Thursday, after she called Vance an “imperfect messenger” to criticize Walz over his military service.

“At what point did military service become a liability?” Keilar asked rhetorically on CNN’s Inside Politics. “I also think that J.D. Vance as a messenger on this may be an imperfect messenger.”

Vance served a single four-year enlistment in the public affairs section in the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, and according to his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, the Republican nominee was “lucky to escape any real fighting.” Still, that hasn’t stopped Vance from accusing Walz, who served with the Army National Guard for 24 years, of exiting the service before his unit was deployed to Iraq.

Walz actually left his unit months before it received a mobilization order for Iraq. The unit deployed to Iraq almost a year after Walz retired.

Keilar, who is married to an active duty Green Beret, took issue with how Vance’s own military service was being framed.

“You introduced him as a combat correspondent, which was what his title was, but when you dig a little deeper into that, he was a public affairs specialist, someone who did not see combat, which certainly the title ‘combat correspondent’ kind of gives you a different impression. So he may be the imperfect messenger on that,” Keilar said.

Keilar conceded that, “At the same time, then you have this argument going on where it seems to be, ‘Did you really serve your country unless you were shot at a lot?’ And I just think that’s a very, kind of, gross place to be because there is so much service and sacrifice that goes on in the military.”

Apparently Vance was incensed by Keilar’s criticism, which had been startlingly similar to his own.

“It’s easy to sit in the comfort and safety of a @CNN studio and trivialize the service of countless men and women who risked their lives. I served with some of the people mentioned in this thread. I miss them all very much. Shameful of @brikeilarcnn to slander an entire MOS,” Vance wrote in a post on X, referring to military occupation specialty.

But Vance felt perfectly comfortable questioning the legitimacy of Walz’s service just days before.

“When were you ever in war?” Vance demanded at a Michigan rally on Wednesday. “What bothers me about Tim Walz is this stolen valor garbage. Do not pretend to be something that you’re not.”

Donald Trump’s spontaneous press conference at Mar-a-Lago was riddled with lies. He claimed that his crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (it wasn’t even close). He claimed that Democrats want to gut Social Security (they don’t, but Republicans are trying to). He claimed that no one died on January 6 (four of his own supporters died from the events, including Ashli Babbitt, whom Trump and his allies attempted to morph into a MAGA martyr).

But possibly the weirdest lie that Trump told Thursday was a tall tale about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Vice President Kamala Harris’s old boyfriend, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Trump said, responding to a question about whether he believed Harris’s relationship with Brown helped her political career. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this was the end.

“We were in a helicopter, going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing,” he continued.

“And Willie was—he was a little concerned,” Trump said. “So I know him, but I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me, anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he—he, I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he—he was not a fan of hers very much, at that point.”

Brown, for his part, denied ever riding in a helicopter alongside Trump—or nearly dying in one, for that matter.

“You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!” he told The New York Times shortly after the press conference, affirming his support for Harris.

Instead, the man in the helicopter was reportedly former California Governor Jerry Brown, who rode in the copter with Trump alongside current California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2018. But aside from sharing a last name, the two Browns look, frankly, nothing alike. Still, the two actual passengers in the story had their qualms with its legitimacy.

“There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris,” a spokesperson for the former governor told the Times, while Newsom laughed the whole thing off, calling it “complete B.S.”

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem tried to attack Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz on X, only to be bombarded with mockery.

Noem tried Tuesday to call out Walz as a radical, claiming that he “pretended to be moderate” while they were serving in Congress together but “then showed his true extremist colors as soon as he became Governor.” She also said that South Dakota was performing better economically compared to Minnesota, with people moving away from Walz’s state due to his policies.

But on Thursday, former Representative Adam Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican, called her out with a photo of a happy Walz hunting with a dog, referring to Noem’s disturbing account of how she killed her puppy after it failed to live up to her hunting expectations.

Noem’s puppy story drew attacks from other Republicans including Mitt Romney, and was likely a major factor in Noem losing out on becoming Donald Trump’s running mate. In contrast, Walz not only has that good photo but also has a pet dog, Scout, that is already an internet darling. The black lab mix, a rescue, was adopted by the Walz family in 2019 and memorably locked himself in Walz and his wife Gwen’s bedroom in 2023. The story resurfaced this week after Walz was named as Kamala Harris’s running mate.

Noem follows Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders as red state governors that have tried to attack Walz and failed. Like Noem, Sanders was trolled with a photo of a happy Walz, in this case surrounded by children hugging him, contrasted with Sanders surrounded by serious, unhappy children. Perhaps Republicans can’t comprehend a governor that is actually liked by their constituents—Native tribes have actually banned Noem from all of the tribal land in her state.

Donald Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the campaign “disciplined” Thursday after one of the most chaotic press conferences he’s had so far.

During an appearance on Fox News, Leavitt praised the Trump team’s supposedly controlled efforts against Vice President Kamala Harris, just as Trump gave a wild press conference from Mar-a-Lago.

“This is a disciplined campaign,” said Leavitt. “And we’re disciplined because we are led by President Trump, who wakes up every day and focuses on the issues that matter to the American people.”

But Trump was anything but disciplined during his meandering rant Thursday, as he ricocheted between making wild claims about his crowd sizes and weak excuses for his lackluster week of campaigning. In one afternoon, Trump seemingly flip-flopped on whether he would agree to debate Harris, going from not debating her at all to offering three dates.

Trump is so unrestrained that he couldn’t help but put his foot in his mouth, once again attacking Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who refused to overturn his state’s presidential election results in 2020.

Trump previously spoke about Kemp at his rally in Atlanta over the weekend, the last campaign event before his apparent staycation, taking a significant portion of his stage time to cut down Kemp.

Trump’s decision to skewer Kemp has reportedly sparked some concern from Trump’s allies, who had hoped he might actually win in Georgia. Several people close to Trump’s campaign told The Washington Post that there was a concerted effort to persuade Trump to stay on message and focus his attacks on Harris and other Democrats, not Republicans like Kemp.

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung dismissed concerns from allies about messaging. “Our message discipline is second to none,” he told the Post. “It’s why President Trump was able to take out Joe Biden in the debate; it’s why we’ve been so successful thus far, and it’ll be why President Trump will win the election.”

While the word “disciplined” certainly seems to have worked its way into the Trump team’s talking points, its candidate continues to be anything but.