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.

The far right is attempting to smear Governor Tim Walz by claiming that he replaced the old Minnesota state flag with one that is designed to resemble the flag of Somalia.

The Guardian’s Ben Makuch reports that racist and xenophobic attacks against Walz have spread since Vice President Kamala Harris named him as her running mate Tuesday. The claim that Walz deliberately chose a flag design close to Somalia’s national flag has been echoed on X (formerly Twitter) by right-wing accounts including End Wokeness and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. Fox News’s Jesse Watters also picked it up on Tuesday.  

But the claim isn’t true. Both the fact-checking website Snopes and The Washington Post have debunked it, showing that the flag went through a long redesign process following complaints that the old flag, which contains the state seal, was offensive to Native Americans. In 2023, the Minnesota state legislature created a commission to redesign the flag and seal and received more than 2,500 new proposals.

The commission narrowed the flag submissions to six, and then three, before selecting a base design created by Andrew Prekker, which received slight modifications. After 10 attempts, the final design passed both the Minnesota House and Senate and was flown for the first time on May 11, 2024. The commission also released a report breaking down the process for the redesign. 

The new flag bears very little resemblance to Somalia’s flag, though both use shades of blue and a star. The star on Minnesota’s flag has eight points compared to Somalia’s five-pointed star, and the shades of blue are different.  

The far right seems to think that Walz is kowtowing to Minnesota’s 60,000-strong Somali American community, the largest in the U.S. But a member of the Minnesota Historical Society, which took part in the redesign, told conservative website The Dispatch that the designer isn’t Somali, included the star to represent the North Star, and incorporated the shape of the state into the flag design. 

This noncontroversy joins the many weak attacks against Walz and Harris from the right, including shots at his military record, baselessly accusing the campaign of antisemitism, or calling him “far left.” Maybe one day they’ll come up with one with substance.  

At Donald Trump’s Thursday’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the former president compared himself favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.

After incorrectly claiming that “no one was killed on January 6th,” Trump went on to gloat that the crowd at his insurrection rally was larger than the March On Washington, which Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” said the former president. “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech and you look at ours...we had more.”

Growing ever more furious at this perceived slight, Trump began throwing (made up) numbers around. King, he said, spoke to a million (actually 250,000) people. But, according to Trump, the January 6th crowd actually looks just as big in photographs as King’s! and yet the biased experts insist that only spoke to 25,000 would-be insurrectionists and rioters (actually 10,000).

One could give Trump the benefit of the doubt, maybe he is experiencing a “senior moment” and actually confusing his (famously sparsely attended) inauguration and the events of January 6, 2021.

Clearly, the Republican presidential nominee is rattled by the massive crowds that have greeted Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz over the past week. Early Thursday morning, Trump took to Truth Social to complain. “If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes “crazy,” and talks about how “big” it was - And she pays for her “Crowd.” When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!” In the same press conference, Trump also made the same point in an arguably even madder fashion. (It is, in fact, difficult to think of another moment where he was this angry.)

In the past, Trump has drawn large crowds, perhaps even approaching that 100,000 number, but certainly January 6 was not one of them—or one to brag about.

Donald Trump tried Thursday to explain away his apparent staycation amid a tightening presidential race, but unfortunately for the former president, his numbers just didn’t add up.

Ever since Trump’s rally in Atlanta this past weekend, the former president has been lying low at home. Meanwhile, his running mate, J.D. Vance, has seemingly been sent to follow Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz across the country, to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

During a press conference from the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, Trump was asked about his apparent pause in public appearances. He didn’t take it well.

“You have not had a public campaign event for nearly a week now; tomorrow you’ll be in Montana, which is not a swing state,” said one reporter. “Some of your allies have expressed concern that you’re not taking this race seriously, particularly—”

“What a stupid question,” Trump interjected.

“At a time where there is enthusiasm on the other side. Why haven’t you been campaigning this week?” the reporter asked.

“Uh, because I’m leading by a lot and because I’m letting their convention go through,” Trump said, implying he had taken a step back before immediately contradicting himself. “And I am campaigning a lot.”

Trump then claimed that he’d kept busy working on “commercials that are at a level that anybody’s ever done before.”

The Republican nominee also said that he’d been doing remote interviews.

“I’m speaking to you on phones, I’m speaking to radio, I’m speaking to television. Uh, television is coming over here,” Trump said. “Excuse me, what are we doing right now?”

Earlier this week, Trump called in to Fox & Friends to push the baseless claim that Harris had picked Walz out of antisemitism against another contender, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, but he couldn’t get through it without reviving his own offensive comments about Jewish voters.

Trump then criticized Harris for not speaking more with the press. “She’s not doing any news conferences. You know why she’s not doing [them]? She doesn’t know how to do a news conference. She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump said Thursday.

This claim seems to be a new line of attack for Trump and Vance, who made a comment about it Wednesday on the tarmac in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Someone close to Harris’s campaign told Politico that there was little “incentive” for Harris to speak more with the press. “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out,” they said.

As for Trump’s claim that he’s “leading by a lot,” that’s not necessarily clear.

When listing recent polls that had him ahead, Trump cited a recent Rasmussen Reports survey published Thursday, which found that Trump was leading 49 percent to 44 percent. Rasmussen was recently dropped from the national poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, after it was determined to be too right-leaning to be considered reliable.

Trump cited a CNBC poll published Thursday that found the former president to have a two-point lead over his opponent. He also mentioned an MSNBC poll that placed him ahead, but such a poll did not appear to exist.

While Trump claimed he’d taken the lead in swing states, an Ipsos poll published Thursday found that the two candidates were neck and neck, with Harris taking a slight lead. On Wednesday, two key national poll aggregators found that after months of struggling, the Democratic Party’s candidate had overtaken Trump in the polls.

Trump is well aware that he’s beginning to struggle in the polls—apparently, it’s driving him nuts.

Donald Trump hasn’t let up on insisting that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently became Black.

During a bumbling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee deflected a direct question probing his reasoning for claiming that the biracial Democrat had “turned Black.”

“Kamala Harris’s father is Jamaican American, and she went to a historically Black college,” prompted a reporter, referring to Harris’s attendance at Howard University. “How is she only recently deciding to be Black?”

“You’ll have to ask her that question because she’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it,” Trump said. “But I’ve known her a long time, I actually contributed to her campaign a long time ago, because I was a developer—I contributed to lots of campaigns, to Democrats, Republicans; some were liberal, some were conservative, but you’ll have to ask her about that.

“To me it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “But to her, from her standpoint, I think it’s very disrespectful to both, really. Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both. To me it doesn’t matter.”

Trump’s outrageous claim sprang up at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, when the 78-year-old white candidate tried and failed to curry favor with the crowd by trash-talking Harris’s racial identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said at the convention, seemingly unable to grasp how a person could have two parents from different cultures but still manage to appreciate both. (More than 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2020 census, is multiracial.)

Donald Trump announced Thursday he has agreed to debate Vice President Kamala in not just one September debate but three.

The news of the three new dates, however, didn’t arrive without a confusing flub. In the middle of a rambling, short-notice press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced his intentions to debate Harris on September 4 on Fox News, September 10 on NBC News, and in another September 25 debate on ABC News.

But moments after Trump made the claim, it appeared he had mixed up some of the dates and their networks. Spokespeople for ABC said the network had agreed to proceed with the originally scheduled September 10 debate, while NBC News said they had agreed to host a debate on September 25, reported The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies.

“She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview,” Trump said of Harris. “But I look forward to the debates.”

Harris’s campaign reaffirmed that she would be up for the September 10 ABC News debate shortly after the details were ironed out.

Trump’s announcement came as a complete reversal of where he stood on the debates just last week, when he wrote on Truth Social that he had “terminated” the September 10 ABC News showdown over the fact that the Democratic nominee had changed when he had only agreed to debate “Sleepy Joe Biden.” In its place, Trump offered an alternative debate on Fox News in front of a live crowd, which Harris’s campaign did not sign up to.

The sudden announcement of three back-to-back debates may have been a last-ditch effort to regain lost favor with some of his fans, who were stunningly disappointed by his decision to back out of the first scheduled debate—so much so that they got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending on Truth Social after the news broke.