Donald Trump on Friday sought to distance himself from a closely-aligned conservative group’s plans to radically reshape the federal government and American life should the former president win a second term.

In a post to his social media site, Trump claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” the name given to a playbook crafted by the Heritage Foundation to fill the executive branch with thousands of Trump loyalists and reorient its many agencies’ missions around conservative ideals.

“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump continued on Truth Social. “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.”

. . . Trump’s campaign has sought for months to make clear that Project 2025 is not its official policy platform amid an intensifying effort by President Joe Biden and Democrats to tie Trump to its more controversial policies.

Yet those efforts are complicated by Trump’s extremely close relationship with many of the people who launched Project 2025 or helped contribute to it. Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, and the group’s roadmap for the next administration includes contributions from others who have worked for the former president, including

  • his former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson,
  • former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli
  • and former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn.
  • John McEntee, Trump’s former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office and one of his closest aides while in office, is also a senior adviser for the project.

Yeah he has NO IDEA WHO IS BEHIND IT. Odds that the demented rapist himself wrote that . . . shit? 0%.

And “Abysmal”? No. Man wouldn’t know an abyss if it bit him in the girdle.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
    41·
    4 months ago

    To your point, you’re right he probably doesn’t care about it; it’s a sure thing he hasn’t read it, whichever poor bastards have tried to explain it to him have undoubtedly been thwarted by his legendary incuriousness.

    But by that same token, it doesn’t even matter. All he wants is to golf and yell at people. He’ll totally leave the keys with whoever to implement fascism while he babbles on about his greatness to room-fulls of Ivanka clones shipped to him by maneuvering billionaires. Nothing will stop them and no one will try.

    • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      I don’t think that Trump is easy to control. The Republican party in 2016 totally failed to do so, and so did members of his administration (both the extremists and the ones trying to be a voice of reason). He’s not interested in the day-to-day business of governing but he is interested in power and I think he has good intuition about people who would try to limit his power or have power over him. He uses people; people don’t use him.