Harris repeats errant claim that Project 2025 is from Trump

Democrats have sought to tie former President Donald Trump to Project 2025 in recent months, and Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was no exception.
Harris described Project 2025 as a “detailed and dangerous plan” that she claimed Trump “intends on implementing” if elected to a second term. She also referred to it as “his Project 2025.”
But in the debate and elsewhere, Trump has claimed he has “nothing to do with Project 2025.”
“I haven’t read it,” Trump said during the debate. “I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas. I guess some good, some bad. But it makes no difference.”
Trump has previously said he disagrees with elements of Project 2025, but he has not specified which elements of the project he disagrees with.
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USA TODAY previously rated False a claim that Project 2025 is Trump’s plan. But as we noted then, there is certainly overlap between Trump’s camp and the effort.
The Heritage Foundation and more than 100 other conservative groups collaborated for Project 2025, which is also known as the Presidential Transition Project. The resulting 900-page document has policy recommendations for the next Republican president that reflect the think tank’s goal of “(rescuing) the country from the grip of the radical Left.”
While Project 2025 has said it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign,” there is much overlap between it and the people and policies in Trump’s world.
Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, is the former director of Project 2025. Trump advisor Stephen Miller and the Trump campaign’s National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also appeared in a video supporting the project’s “Presidential Administration Academy.”
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, wrote the foreword to a book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts set to be published in November. Roberts wrote the foreword to Project 2025, in which he describes the effort as a “plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.”
Vance’s spokesman Will Martin told the New York Times in July that Vance’s foreword has “nothing to do with Project 2025” and that the vice presidential nominee has “plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for.”
Project 2025 has called for an end to illegal immigration, while Trump has vowed to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and “terminate every open borders policy of the Biden administration,” if re-elected.
The project also supports shutting down the Department of Education, which Trump pledged to do in a 2023 campaign video.
The Heritage Foundation said in a January 2018 news release that Trump had adopted nearly two-thirds of its policy recommendations within his first year in office.
USA TODAY has debunked an array of claims about Project 2025, including false assertions that page 451 says the “only valid family” includes a working father and stay-at-home mother and that it calls for women to carry “period passports.”