Trump Makes a New Campaign Promise Straight out of Project 2025

Donald Trump has spent months trying to distance his campaign from Project 2025, but some of his comments during a campaign stop in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on Monday revealed that his platform is still nearly identical to the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto.

Speaking before roughly 5,000 people at the Kovalchick Convention and Athletic Complex, Trump flatly promised to demolish the Department of Education, claiming that the federal authority was the reason for the country’s floundering education rates.

“We spend more money per pupil than any other country by far, and yet we’re at the bottom of the list,” Trump said. “Out of 40, we’re ranked about Number 40.”

“And I’m going to close the Department of Education and move education back to the states,” he continued. “And we’re going to do it fast.”

The United States actually ranks twenty-second out of 41 countries, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Index.

The Republican presidential nominee then continued to compare individual states to countries that consistently place high on international education rankings, such as Denmark or Norway, which use national socialist structures to fund their public schools. For Trump, those states include Idaho and Iowa—but not California, where Trump believes Governor “Gavin Newscum” would interfere with localized education systems.

“We’re going to have 35 like, different ones—Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30, 35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK. You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump said. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt; they run a great state.”

Project 2025 has advanced seemingly outrageous policy positions, including dismantling, wholesale, staples of the executive branch such as the Department of Education. It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

On July 5, Trump claimed that he “knew nothing about Project 2025” and had “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,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Representative Lindsey Graham flailed while trying to help Donald Trump distance himself from North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson.

Within 24 hours of the bombshell report last week alleging Robinson had left inflammatory and explicit comments on a pornography website’s message board, the Democratic National Committee launched a series of digital and billboard ads linking Trump to the North Carolina lieutenant governor.

Graham appeared on Fox News Monday night to try to separate the two and to bail out Trump’s slowly sinking campaign in the Tar Heel State.

“That’s literally their campaign in North Carolina, is trying to make people believe that Donald Trump somehow is involved with Mar—uh with the Robinson guy,” Graham said. He stumbled slightly, appearing to avoid saying Robinson’s first name.

“Donald Trump knew nothing about this. I knew nothing about it. They’re trying to guilt by association,” Graham whined. “If you’re Republican, you own Mark Robinson.”

Later, Graham tried to shame Democrats for going so low as to link Trump to a candidate he has openly endorsed and fawned over for more than a year. (In June 2023, Trump called Robinson “one of the great stars of the party, one of the great stars in politics.”)

“This is really a hit job, it’s unconscionable. And if we did this to them, it would be blowing up the entire mainstream media,” Graham said.

Unfortunately for Graham, Trump’s statements about Robinson are well documented, and that’s exactly what the advertisements are about. The billboard design will feature a photograph of Trump and Robinson standing together, with comments the former president has made about Robinson, according to NBC News.

The former president called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids” during a rally they both attended in Greensboro, North Carolina, in March—a particularly strange comment made even weirder by the fact that Robinson has allegedly called himself a “black NAZI.” During a rally as recently as August, Trump said that Robinson was “a very good man.” Trump has also called Robinson “outstanding” and an “incredible gentleman,” and said things like, “We have to cherish Mark.”

Now it seems that Graham, and by extension Trump, wants to sweep their whole relationship under the rug—but the Democrats aren’t willing to let anyone forget. Meanwhile, Robinson’s staffers are ditching him left and right, and Robinson, who has maintained that he is innocent, is strangely turning down offers from I.T. specialists to help him exonerate himself.

One of the architects of Project 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, apparently killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because its loud barking was bothering his family.

The Guardian reports that about two decades ago, Roberts was a history professor at New Mexico State University, and told his colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a pit bull belonging to one of his neighbors in 2004.

“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.

Two other people who attended a dinner at Roberts’s home, a professor and her spouse, remember hearing a similar story, and three other professors told The Guardian that they remember hearing it from colleagues who heard it from Roberts. All of these people said they didn’t remember Roberts ever saying that the dog was directly threatening him or his family.

Roberts denied killing a dog with a shovel in a statement to the publication, and didn’t respond to questions as to why people said that he had.

“This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence. In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter,” Roberts said. “Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”

At the time, the people who heard the story didn’t ask Roberts for any details, finding the story disturbing.

“I think that probably people were not eager to engage with him over this. It sounded like a pretty crazy thing to do and people didn’t want to get into it at that point,” Hammond said.

As the president of the Heritage Foundation, a giant in the conservative world, Roberts has been a major figure behind the Project 2025 manifesto, which provides a right-wing blueprint for a future Republican president. The project has become very unpopular, thanks to its recommended restrictions on the LGBTQ community, reproductive rights, and other conservative policy priorities.

Trump has tried in vain to distance himself from the project but has been unsuccessful thanks to the extensive ties between himself and the Heritage Foundation, especially Roberts. This canine revelation isn’t the first time something damaging has come about the foundation’s president: A disturbing book written by Roberts, Dawn’s Early Light, was delayed because of how bad it could be for Trump, particularly since his running mate, J.D. Vance, wrote its foreword. Roberts was also a member of Opus Dei, a secretive, ultraconservative Catholic organization.

Roberts is scheduled to speak at the New York Times Climate Forward event on Wednesday, where it’s possible that he’ll face questions about his thoughts on loud dogs in addition to Project 2025’s ideas on weakening environmental laws. Trump and Vance hope that their presidential campaign won’t come up.

Donald Trump has a new promise for America’s women. It’s not safeguarding against extreme abortion and reproductive health restrictions but instead a creepy, vague vow to be their “protector.”

“I am your protector, I want to be your protector. As president I have to be your protector,” Trump declared at a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, speaking to women voters on Monday. “I hope you don’t make too much of it,” he added, after perhaps hearing how strange he sounded.

There is a large gender divide in the polls, with Harris leading women voters by a net 21 percentage points, according to an NBC poll released Sunday. Still, Trump pushed back against claims from the “fake news media” that he has an issue getting half of the population to like him. “I always thought women liked me, I never thought I had a problem,” Trump said, as he promised to assure women they would “no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared” and urged them not to worry about abortion rights.

On Saturday, in a post on Truth Social, the former president and convicted rapist posted a similar sentiment. “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES.”

Women, themselves, were less impressed.

“Seeing that line ‘I am your protector’ makes me think about the fact that he was found liable for sexual assault,” said Alecia Johnson, senior adviser to Joe Biden’s campaign, on CNN. “The tone was very patronizing to women, and I think there are a lot of women who will see right through it.”

Others on X echoed her sentiment.

It’s no surprise that the man who has dozens of sexual harassment allegations against him, and who called the #MeToo movement “a very scary time for young men in America,” can’t read the room.

Donald Trump pledged to unleash federal law enforcement on “failing” U.S. cities, after promising to end all sanctuary cities in a state where there actually are none.

During a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, Sunday, Trump promised to invade American cities with federal forces.

“Today I am announcing a new plan to end all sanctuary cities in North Carolina, and all across our country,” said Trump. “No more sanctuary cities.”

“As soon as I take office, we will immediately surge federal law enforcement to every city that is failing, which is a lot of them,” he continued. “To turn over criminal aliens, and we will hunt down, capture every single gang member, drug dealer, rapist, murderer, and migrant criminal that is being illegally harbored.

“I will ask Congress to pass a law outlawing sanctuary cities nationwide, and we demand the full weight of the federal government on any jurisdiction that refuses to cooperate with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” Trump added.

In sanctuary cities, there are policies in place that limit coordination and information sharing with federal immigration authorities about noncitizens. This allows noncitizens to be able to report crimes, acquire homes and jobs, and participate in society without fear of being deported.

ICE officials are still able to arrest undocumented immigrants in sanctuary cities, and if undocumented immigrants commit crimes, they are processed by local law enforcement similarly to how anyone else would be.

Trump has repeatedly and vastly overstated the threat of sanctuary cities. Case in point: North Carolina doesn’t have any sanctuary cities for Trump to get rid of, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative, anti-immigrant think tank. There are a few county-level institutions that have been deemed noncooperative with ICE, but no actual cities.

Trump has previously vowed to militarize U.S. law enforcement to “restore law and order to our cities,” which he claimed have become “cesspools of bloodshed and crime” under President Joe Biden. Trump has argued that additional federal funding and forces would help supplement supposedly defunded police departments—but that the extra help would only go to cities that complied with ICE.

Project 2025 would see Trump take over sanctuary cities and rebuild them to his liking by withholding FEMA funding from states and cities that refuse to cooperate with federal law and immigration enforcement.

Trump’s promise to end sanctuary cities is made even more chilling by his plan to round up and mass-deport noncitizens based on their “serial numbers.”