#Presidential Transition Project

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Eric Hananoki at MMFA:

Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official and the director of Project 2025, told a right-wing podcast last year that his group has a “great” relationship with former President Donald Trump, and “Trump's very bought in with this.” His comments fly in the face of Trump’s recent attempts to distance himself from Project 2025.  Project 2025, which is organized by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, states that “Dans directs Heritage’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, organizing policy and personnel recommendations and training for appointees in the next presidential administration. Prior to joining Heritage, Dans served in the Trump Administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.”  Media Matters has heavily documented the extreme nature of Project 2025. Notably, Heritage Foundation president and key Project 2025 figure Kevin Roberts recently sparked heavy criticism when he said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” 

Following the controversy, Trump attempted to distance himself from the Heritage plan and has repeatedly claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025.” But media outlets including Media Matters have documented the numerous connections between the project and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.  Dans himself appears to have contradicted Trump’s claim that he knows nothing about the project.

In an unearthed video by MMFA, Project 2025 Director Paul Dans has praised Donald Trump and said that he’s “very bought in with this.”

See Also:

MMFA: Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts on WMAL's The Vince Coglianese Show: “The overlap is tremendous” between Trump's campaign platform and Project 2025

[hale-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Project 2025 - Really, Still in Denial?

[guiltyidealist]

In case you haven't had the chance to go through the specifics of Project 25, here's the Wikipedia blurb with some key highlights.

( Please be very alarmed by the statement "we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" )

[bloghrexach]

Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is a collection of conservative policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should a Republican Party candidate win the 2024 presidential election. Wikipedia

[chuck-glisson]

STOP Project 2025, and BOYCOTT Coors Beer!

Donald Trump's "Presidental Transition Project" is a plan by The Heritage Foundation, as outlined in THEIR "Project 2025", to OVERTHROW the "US Constitution", SUSPEND ALL "Future Elections", & "Appoint" DONALD TRUMP as a DICTATOR!

[charyou-tree]

Ok, I get it, you hate Biden

You want a cool, leftist candidate to vote for instead. Great, me too!

What is your plan to get some candidate you like better into power?

Who should we campaign for?

How do we raise money?

What races are important? What races can't they win?

And most importantly, how do we convince ~100 Million other Americans that you're right, and we should vote for this person?

You don't have a plan.

You say "don't vote for Biden" and refuse to provide any alternatives, so I can only assume you'd rather the people on Tumblr not vote at all.

I guarantee the fascists will be voting next year, and making sure that if they win, this will be the last election you get to vote in. Don't take it from me, here it is in their own words:

There's a 900 page plan about how the fascists intend to take over America.

So I ask again, what's your plan? Do you want to help Palestinians, or do you want to make sure that the last people who still believe in elections lose?

If your only contribution is "Biden is evil" and "both sides are the same" or "every American politician is evil" then I'm going to assume your intentions are to keep young leftists disillusioned and prevent them from voting, and I'll block accordingly.

[dertaglichedan]

Trump Plans To Revive Keystone XL Pipeline Project on Day One

It’s been quite some time since we covered the Keystone XL Pipeline, a proposed extension of the existing Keystone Pipeline System designed to transport crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska.

The project’s goal was to expand the pipeline system’s capacity by allowing the transport of up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day over a distance of approximately 1,210 miles. The aim was to provide a more direct route for Canadian oil, and provisions were included for adding American-produced oil from the Bakken formation in Montana and North Dakota.

The last time we reported on this Keystone KL, it included a review of the number of jobs that were not created because Biden terminated this project (initially authorized by President-elect Donald Trump.)

The report, which the Department of Energy (DOE) completed in late December without any public announcement, says the Keystone XL project would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had a positive economic impact of between $3.4-9.6 billion, citing various studies. A previous report from the federal government published in 2014 determined 3,900 direct jobs and 21,050 total jobs would be created during construction which was expected to take two years.

Now, people familiar with the incoming administration’s plans indicate that Trump will revive the project on Day One.

Trump believes declaring the 1,200-mile Canada-to-Nebraska crude project back on the table would drive the pro-oil message he delivered in his campaign, said people involved in the transition team discussions about the idea. Trump also wants to show he can defy President Joe Biden, who reversed Trump’s initial 2017 approval of the project, which was strongly opposed by the climate movement. “It’s on the list of things they want to do first day,” said one of the people familiar with Trump’s plan, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. …During his latest presidential campaign, Trump railed against Biden’s decision to revoke the Keystone XL permit. “Why does Biden go in and kill the Keystone [XL] pipeline and approve the single biggest deal that Russia’s ever made, Nord Stream 2, the biggest pipeline anywhere in the world going to Germany and all over Europe?” Trump said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, referring to the gas line that was hit by sabotage in 2022. “Because they’re weak and they’re ineffective.”

[contemplatingoutlander]

Trump’s first-week strategy: ‘Flood the zone.’ Repeat.

It was all part of a plan to begin with a bang and follow a detailed policy blueprint, although key administrative posts remained stuck in a hiring bottleneck and many of his directives lacked immediate effect.

“This was a vast effort to think through the executive actions. We’ve had four years, and this is what you see.”

—Steve Bannon

A known white nationalist was behind most of Trump's executive orders.

According to the above Washington Post article:

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller led policy preparations during the transition and personally drafted or coordinated most of the executive orders Trump signed Monday evening, according to White House officials. Miller did not respond to requests for comment. [emphasis added]

Trump's Project 2025 lie enabled him to be elected.

It is now abundantly clear that Trump was elected fraudulently because he lied about his knowledge of, association with, and even his attitude towards Project 2025. If it were not for that lie, there is a good chance that those on the fence who finally decided to vote for Trump would not have done so.

According to The Washington Post:

Many of the [White House] actions overlapped detailed preparations by right-wing think tanks, including the policy blueprint Project 2025. Out of 52 presidential directives (excluding pardons and appointments) that Trump signed by Friday, 28 contained language resembling text published as part of Project 2025, according to a Washington Post analysis. They include withdrawing from the World Health Organization and Paris Climate Accord. Trump rescinded a Biden administration executive order creating a gender-focused advisory council and a 1965 executive order on contracting discrimination that were specifically identified in Project 2025. [emphasis added] Similarly, the new administration started firing senior civil servants citing career officials using a legal theory gaining popularity among right-wing lawyers and advocated in Project 2025. The firing notices cited the president’s inherent power under the U.S. Constitution rather than any specific legal authority. [emphasis added]

Russel Vought's Center for Renewing America, and Brooke Rollins's America First Policy Institute also guided the design of Trump's policy agenda.

According to The Washington Post:

“It’s called Project 2025, but it’s bigger than that,” [Steve] Bannon said, crediting Miller for the ambitious policy agenda along with budget director nominee Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America and agriculture secretary nominee Brooke Rollins’s America First Policy Institute. “This was a vast effort to think through the executive actions. We’ve had four years, and this is what you see.” [emphasis added]

This is a gift 🎁 link that eliminates the paywall, so you can read the entire article. I encourage you to do so.

[qqueenofhades]

Not to ruin your day but thoughts on the 2025 project?

It is, with zero exaggeration or hyperbole, a literally perfect blueprint for fascism. If anyone is somehow still on the fence about voting for Biden, plans not to vote for Biden, or to throw away their vote on some third-party whackjob just to "send a message," I urge you to read these articles and understand the magnitude of what is at stake (courtesy, again, of the fucking Heritage Foundation):

A Rational Analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”

The Heritage Foundation Plan to Help Trump End Democracy in America

What is Project 2025? Trump Shadow Network Plans to Overhaul 'Deep State'

‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate policy for next Republican president

[awesomearchives]

Every four years, before and after the U.S. presidential election, a team of libraries and research organizations, including the Internet Archive, work together to preserve material from U.S. government websites during the transition of administrations. These “End of Term” (EOT) Web Archive projects have been completed for term transitions in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020, with 2024 well underway. The effort preserves a record of the U.S. government as it changes over time for historical and research purposes. With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million unique web pages. All this information, produced by the U.S. government—the largest publisher in the world—is preserved and available for public access at the Internet Archive.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey at ProPublica:

ProPublica and Documented obtained more than 14 hours of never-before-published videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy, which are intended to train the next conservative administration’s political appointees “to be ready on day one.” Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation and its allies for a future conservative presidential administration, has lost its director. In recent weeks, it faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump, whose campaign has tried to distance itself from the effort. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy remains on track. Video trainings like these are one of the “four pillars” of that plan, says Spencer Chretien, the associate director of Project 2025, in “Political Appointees & The Federal Workforce.” For transparency, we are publishing the videos as we obtained them.

The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

ProPublica and Documented partner up to reveal 14+ hours’ worth of never-before-published videos from The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Presidential Administration Academy.

[hale-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Trump Is Project 2025

[dostoyevsky-official]

How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?

On Sunday evening, the night before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, scores of luminaries from across the New Right are expected to gather for a dinner and gala called the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel. The event is being hosted by the young right-wing publishing house Passage Press, known for publishing the neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin — one of the earliest of those luminaries, most famous for advocating a monarchy “run like a start-up.”

Today, this upstart coalition of thinkers may be best described simply as the intellectual wing of Trumpism. “Celebrate the inauguration of Donald J. Trump,” the publishing house announced, “with the people and organizations that will shape the culture in his second term.”

The ball will celebrate more than the recoronation of a president. It seems intended to mark the ascent of a new counterelite with aspirations to supplant the existing establishment in everything from high politics to business and culture. But this is a loose alliance, colored by rivalries and complex divisions. It has brought together people who previously had little in common.

It’s a gap in worldviews that went overlooked in the heady days of the campaign. When Elon Musk endorsed Mr. Trump, putting a great deal of personal money and energy into the project of MAGA populism, he joined figures like the venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks and the crypto exchange founder Tyler Winklevoss in what represents one of the most surprising and disruptive alliances in American political history. Tech emerged as an alternate power center to the Republican establishment. Silicon Valley money filled in for dollars lost from the traditional donor class. As the presidential transition took shape, tech figures stepped in to supply elite human capital, as they put it, to staff the new administration. All the biggest tech companies made sure to offer a $1 million tribute to help fund the inauguration.

But the core of the aspiring Trumpian aristocracy are still reactionaries and nationalists aching to restore an American way of life thought to be lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy. They are often deeply skeptical of the idea that the innovations promised by tech companies represent progress, and they describe America as “not just a country, not just an economy but a people with a common history,” as Jeremy Carl, a deputy assistant secretary of the interior in the first Trump administration and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, told me. The tech figures who came to the movement in 2024 were often sympathetic to Trumpian nationalism. But they tended to be more interested in making money and launching a new era of American dynamism.

[...] The debate has genuinely high stakes, heading in the first days of a wildly ambitious presidential administration. People like Mr. Bannon see the tech right almost as an fundamental enemy to the natural human order they wanted to restore. More moderate allies on the MAGA side just hope to keep things calm and friendly. If a true conflict emerges, Mr. Trump himself might well end up siding with the part of the coalition that offers vast supplies of cash and new friends socializing and scheming with him down at Mar-a-Lago.

The coalition is achingly close to achieving a long-held conservative dream — of fashioning a high-low alliance powerful enough to supplant the liberal establishment and remake America. It is a project that might well collapse if one side or the other gets too much of what it wants and ends up driving the other away.

[...] “I think the tech right is going to win in the short term,” said Razib Khan, a geneticist and tech consultant who is friendly with many figures in both the MAGA and tech right spheres. As he saw it, the talent and money were mostly on the side of tech.

“The tech right is pro-American,” he said. But it’s pro-American in the sense that they see America as “an empire that takes over the world and goes interplanetary.” This was too rationalist of an approach for many on the MAGA side, which is shaped in large part by Christian faith and, at least for some, a belief that America should be a homeland for “heritage” Americans, of Northern European extraction. They are “not excited about the American Empire,” he said, or racing into space. They care more about the values of a “pre-1960s America, the values of a Western civilization.”

[rjzimmerman]

Mexico elects climate scientist as next president (Heatmap AM)

Mexico resoundingly elected Claudia Sheinbaum as its next president over the weekend. Sheinbaum, 61, is making headlines for becoming the country’s first female president, as well as its first Jewish leader, but she is also a climate scientist, and her landslide victory “could mark a turning point from the current administration’s pro-fossil fuel policies,” as Climate Home News explained. Sheinbaum studied physics and then received her doctorate in energy engineering. She spent four years at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab studying Mexico’s energy consumption, and had a brief stint on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She was tapped as secretary of the environment for Mexico City before being elected as the capital’s mayor in 2018. During her tenure she was an advocate for rooftop solar and better public transportation infrastructure.

On the presidential campaign trail, Sheinbaum promised to “accelerate the energy transition” by boosting wind and solar, installing new transmission lines, and improving the country’s hydropower stations. But she has also backed the “energy sovereignty” policies of her predecessor and mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He built an oil refinery, funneled support into an indebted state oil company, and failed to set a national net zero target. Under his leadership, private investment in renewable projects has slumped. Energy policy may be on Sheinbaum’s to-do list when she takes office in October, but tackling crime is likely to be top of the agenda.

[ohyeslawd]

Google Project 25

What is Project 2025?

The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project is a well-funded (eight-figure) effort of the Heritage Foundation and more than 100 organizations to enable a future anti-democratic presidential administration to take swift, far-right action that would cut wages for working people, dismantle social safety net programs, reverse decades of progress for civil rights, redefine the way our society operates, and undermine our economy.

A central pillar of Project 2025 is the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900+ page policy playbook authored by former Trump administration officials and other extremists that provides a radical vision for our nation and a roadmap to implement it.

Project 2025 Snapshot

Proposals from Project 2025, discussed in detail throughout this guide, that they claim could be implemented through executive branch action alone — so without new legislation — include:

Cut overtime protections for 4.3 million workers

Stop efforts to lower prescription drug prices

Limit access to food assistance, which an average of more than 40 million people in 21.6 million households rely on monthly

Eliminate the Head Start early education program, which serves over 1 million children annually

Cut American Rescue Plan (ARP) programs that have created or saved 220,000 jobs

Restrict access to medication abortion

Push more of the 33 million people enrolled in Medicare towards Medicare Advantage and other worse, private options

Expose the 368,000 children in foster care to risk of increased discrimination

Deny students in 25 states and Washington, D.C. access to student loans because their state provides in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants

Roll back civil rights protections across multiple fronts, including cutting diversity, equity, and inclusion-related (DEI) programs and LGBTQ+ rights in health care, education, and workplaces