Project 2026

0:00Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen.

0:03Noel King:It's been exactly one year since Donald Trump began his second term as president of these United States. And trying to recount the last 12 months is perhaps too much. Here's the last 12 hours. Trump's been screenshotting and sharing DMs sent to him by France's president Emmanuel Macron and Mark Ruta, the head of NATO. So they're trying to talk Trump off his plan to acquire Greenland, something that wasn't even mentioned in his inaugural address a year ago. What was immigration, crime, oil, manufacturing? I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. And we are going to bring law and order back to our cities.

0:43See, we will drill, baby, drill.

0:46Noel King:Absent from that speech was Project 2025, this brick of policy proposals from the Conservative Heritage Foundation. that Trump had distanced himself from. But one year in, the president has quietly met many of Project 2025's objectives. That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Perhaps you want a deeper, more complex understanding of the world around you. That same instinct is worth protecting when you're using AI, says Anthropic. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, committed to their AI without ads, meaning what you see won't be shaped by what an advertiser paid for.

1:26Noel King:Claude says Claude is built to sit with the complicated version of a story, not hand you the tidy one. Try Claude free at Claude.ai slash Today Explained. As AI reshapes professional services, law firms and in-house teams are rethinking how complex work gets done. Harvey AI is an AI platform built specifically for legal practice, helping teams analyze documents, draft with precision, and collaborate securely across matters. Today, more than half of the AMLA 100 use Harvey. Learn more at Harvey.ai.

2:04This is Today Explained. My name is David Graham, and I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America.

2:15Noel King:People may remember 2024, 7 ,000 years ago, President Trump, at the time, a candidate, says, I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it. He's been in office for a year. Did his administration actually disavow Project 2025? No, and I've been surprised how much they have even embraced it. It's true that some of the high-profile figures involved are not the administration, but some of the high-profile figures involved also are in the administration. You know, people like Russell Vogt, the budget chief. They call him Darth Vader.

2:56I call him a fine man. Or John Ratcliffe, the CIA director. I did not transmit classified information. Or Peter Navarro, a crucial tariff advisor. So first of all, Elon and I are great. It's not an issue.

3:10Noel King:Even though he called you a moron and dumber than a sack of bricks? I've been called worse. And I think more importantly, if you look at the policies, Trump has picked up so many of the policy ideas and the kind of approaches to governance that Project 2025 laid out. What was it laying out? Remind us what it was. So this is this huge project. And it was I'd say there are a few different things. One is a set of policies, really ideas for every department of the government and what they would be doing under the right wing administration that Project 2025 foresaw. Our common theme is to take down the administrative state, the bureaucracy.

3:46And you're going to, yeah, it's not as easy done as it is said. The second thing was an approach to make those things happen. So how are we going to make the federal government do things that has not done before? How are we going to seize control? How are we going to give the president powers that he hasn't had in the past in order to do those things? We are going to be prepared day one, January 20, 2025, to hit the ground running as conservatives to really help the next president. And then the third part was a big database of potential appointees, thousands of people who would be sort of on the team, trained, ready to go, and could fill executive positions as soon as a president came in and wanted to start appointing them.

4:28The bottom line is that we need to have an army of conservatives ready to march in day one. When we covered Project 2025 before the election, I remember thinking, you know, there's a lot here and it would take a lot to get all of this done.

4:44Noel King:And Trump is saying he doesn't really want to do it. Maybe everybody is over worrying. And then sometime in the last 12 months, things started to come into clearer focus. When would you say that it became clear that like, okay, they are actually doing a Project 2025 here? I think, you know, there were signs before he took office. Appointing Russell Vogt to head O &B would be one of those. We have Darth Vader. You know Darth Vader, right? For me, it really was like the first day of the administration. And I had written this book and I submitted my first draft on January 15th and then sat for five days wondering if they would actually, if they would follow through.

5:26And on day one, we got all of these executive orders that followed almost verbatim from things in Project 2025. Okay, no, there's really something here.

5:35Noel King:All right, so you start seeing it on day one, and then we get 12 months. Give me the top lines of what you've seen get done. This is 900 pages of policy priorities. Group them for me and tell me how far along they are. Okay, sure. If you look at, for example, gender, family and rights, we've seen Trump pushing back really hard on anything that looks like wokeness. Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It's gone. It's gone. We've seen the, you know, the attack on DEI programs, not only in the federal government, but in private institutions, in universities. We have seen attacks on transgender rights, attempting to write binary sex into the language of government.

6:20There are only two genders, male and female. Undermining traditional tools is civil rights enforcement. So we've seen a lot of those things. You know, I don't think we've seen the kind of pro-natalist policies that some of Project 2025's authors intended, but that's in the same area. Looking at immigration, which is obviously a big Trump priority for a long time. They're coming into our country. We are seeing, even in January, the big push in Minneapolis, and we've been seeing things like this basically constantly. On the economy, we've seen Trump, you know, pursue tariffs, as part of Project 2025 suggests.

6:58I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary. And work to cut taxes. Some of the more fantastical ideas like, you know, abolishing the Fed or returning to a gold standard we haven't seen.

7:10Noel King:Although he's gone after Jay Powell real hard in the last couple weeks. That jerk will be gone soon. Yeah, it seems like Trump has realized he'd rather control the Fed than get rid of it. Yeah, yeah. You look at environmental regulation, this is a place where I think they've made a lot of progress. Encouraging drilling, encouraging oil and gas exploration. We have oil and gas more than anybody in the world. We're going to have more of it too. Cutting down on renewables. The wind doesn't blow, those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad. taking away mandates for renewables and really eliminating regulation and research on climate change and environment generally.

7:51And then, you know, the kind of last area I think about is foreign policy defense. And that's a place where, although we are seeing Trump again just in the last few weeks, you know, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, really taking a lot of action. I think that's far a little further afield from what Project 2025 envisioned, which was a kind of Trump one style isolationism and a turn toward China rather than focusing on all these other things.

8:20Noel King:OK, so what you're pointing out is that this administration has actually gotten a fair amount done, maybe even a lot done. Project 2025 was 922 or so pages. How much of what's in there has the Trump administration accomplished? You know, I find it really hard to quantify. And there's a good tracker out there online that puts the number right above 50 percent. And I think that's useful, but also a little bit, you have to take it with a grain of salt because some of these things are just hard to equate on a numerical level. Or like, you know, that tracker says Trump eliminated USAID, which is a goal.

8:54We have effectively eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was funding much of this lunacy. Project 2035 wanted to reform USAID, shrink it, use it different ways, but not to abolish it. So it doesn't always fit one to one. But I think that's, you know, I think that's a good way to think about it, like how far they are. And the other thing that I would say is so much of what they want to do depends on having this really powerful president and sort of an unfettered, no checks and balances situation. And they've made so much progress on that in the first year. And I think that will enable more progress towards their goals in the future.

9:31Noel King:How did they get so much done, this administration? A way that I've heard people talk about it is you don't get a lot of chances for a president to try things, leave office for four years, and then get another shot at it. And I think that is a lot of this. So many of the people involved were veterans of the first Trump administration or had been closely related to it. And they saw what went wrong. And they had theories of that. And they also learned a lot about how government works. And so that meant that they could come in on the first day and be just so ready, so organized and so energized. What we're doing is systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.

10:20I think that that gave them the chance to sort of conduct this blitzkrieg that took the courts by surprise. It seems to have taken Congress by surprise. And I think it took a lot of the public by surprise as well.

10:32Noel King:I think I hear you telling me that there is still a lot in that big book of ideas and policies that they would like to get done. Oh, yes. You could spend years pushing a lot of these things. And the ambitions are pretty big. They really want to reshape society. And that is a project you can make some work on in a year, but I think they're on a time frame of years or decades.

11:02Noel King:David Graham of The Atlantic. When we come back, David's going to talk Project 2026.

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15:05Noel King:Today Explained, we're back with David A. Graham from The Atlantic. David, in the first half of the show, we talked about what the Trump administration got done from Project 2025. What did they fail to get done? There are several areas where they haven't done much. I think one is in this area of sort of pro-family policy or socially conservative policy. We've heard these kinds of things from the right, and we've seen some incremental progress on it in the past. But they really had large ambitions. I mean, they want to ban abortion entirely at the federal level. And let me just be really clear, especially for conservative elected officials who are pro-lifers, the federal government does have a role in making sure there is no abortion in the United States, period.

15:48That is the heritage position. Short of that, they want to do everything they can to limit it. So that's withdrawing approval for Mithoprestone. It is surveilling abortion use in states. It is barring the mailing of these drugs under an 1873 law. We haven't seen those things. We haven't seen a lot of kind of pro-family encouraging higher birth rate stuff either. We haven't seen the kind of labor policy that would bolster a more pro-family vision, like things that J.D. Vance was talking about in the campaign. I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments.

16:27I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And we haven't seen a sort of major shift of social welfare programs away from the government and towards religious organizations. So that stuff feels a little bit undone. One thing that he has partially done is work to shut down the Department of Education. Oh, I'd like it to be closed immediately. Look, the Department of Education is a big con job. Not all the way there, but he has gotten a lot of carte blanche from the Supreme Court to do that.

17:01Going after big tech, rather than going after tech, I think we've seen instead a real embrace. They're leading a revolution in business and in genius. And in every other word, I think you could imagine there's never been anything like it. The most brilliant people. And I think that has to do with the fact that tech CEOs cozied up to Trump and Trump was more than happy to have that. But there hasn't been much of a crackdown. There hasn't been the sort of progress there. And we haven't seen the kind of turn toward China that I think the authors argued was really important and should be basically the only thing that the U.S.

17:36was worrying about in the world for the near future.

17:40Noel King:Trump and his people have been pretty honest while in office about what they want. Like, they've said a lot of what they plan to do and then tried to carry it out, in some instances, very successfully. What do you think we're going to see more of in the year ahead? Like, what maybe have we not been paying enough attention to that they've been banging the drum on and we should? Something that I think is underappreciated, even as it has gotten attention, is the takeover of the independent regulatory agencies. So, you know, this is the alphabet soup, the NLRB, the FEC, the FCC. The FCC in particular has gotten some attention.

18:18And we're expecting a Supreme Court decision soon that seems likely to basically give the president control over all these agencies, with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve. And I think that's just going to change the way everybody interacts with the government. And the FCC is a great example. You know, we saw the chair of the FCC basically try to get Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel. Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

18:55Now imagine that in so many other areas of life, the way you work through labor protections, the way you interact with the Social Security Administration, the way you interact with any number of walks of your life. I think we're going to see the president controlling that and making it an arm of policy. And we've seen what that looks like, for example, the Justice Department, where he uses it for retribution. On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas. I think that's something that people need to be paying more attention to, and they're not really going to appreciate it until it starts actually happening in their lives.