On his Truth Social media platform, Donald Trump claimed to “know nothing” about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation presidential transition plan that would reinvent the role of the federal government in the event that a Republican is elected president in November. Critics say Trump is lying about his distance from the proposal. One public spreadsheet has compiled a list of connections that each contributor to the Project 2025 proposal has to the Republican Party.
ANDRA WATKINS; publicity@andrawatkins.com
Watkins is the writer of the Substack “How Project 2025 Will Ruin Your Life.” Watkins grew up steeped in Christian Nationalist thought, and approaches Project 2025 as a Christian Nationalist text with “hidden Bible references.”
Watkins found that four contributors to the proposal clerked for Samuel Alito. One clerked for Clarence Thomas, one for Aileen Cannon, and one for James Ho. Other contributors have worked for organizations classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In a recent post, Watkins found that though Trump said he knew nothing about the plan, 26 of the 36 total authors of Project 2025 worked in his administration––a total of 72 percent. Watkins believes she was the first to publish such a list. “Mainstream media,” she said, “is not doing their job.”
Of the 36 authors, Watkins found that 26 had “direct connections to Trump’s administration, either through the transition team or working in the actual administration. I found those connections in the document itself, in the authors page. Jonathan Berry, for instance, clerked for Samuel Alito and assisted with Neal Gorsuch’s nomination. Other authors are connected to [Gov.] Ron DeSantis. One worked for Jeff Sessions, who is now out of Congress, and one worked for [Sen.] Ted Cruz. This isn’t just a Trump thing. It’s about the whole party.”
Trump’s “fingerprints are all over this,” Watkins said, “even if I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t read it… Everyone wants to focus on him, but the people behind [Trump] are the people we should be afraid of. Whoever comes after him is going to be much more strategic, much more ruthless, much more focused, much less impulsive than Trump is. To me, they’re using him to tee up someone young: [like Senators] Tom Cotton, J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley… Knowing the history of other authoritarian movements, it’s hard not to see it that way. They don’t need their personality. Trump’s an easy scapegoat.”
Watkins stressed how Project 2025 would “fundamentally alter” life in the U.S., including “arts and culture and Hollywood and what we can read and access.” Of particular concern is the proposal’s definition of pornography. “Someone who has not been indoctrinated in Christian Nationalism [may not] understand that any sex outside of marriage––and even descriptions of sex between married people in books or movies––is porn. It’s a more comprehensive and insidious definition of porn that is backstopping trans and LGBTQIA bans and book bans. All of that is porn to them.
“They define a family as a married man and woman having as many children as possible. Contraception is the rhythm method. They don’t believe in cohabitation [among unmarried people]. They say that in a veiled way in Project 2025… They would outlaw virtually all divorce. They started with no-fault divorce. That’s their game plan. Christian Nationalists believe marriage is a holy covenant between God, man, and one unrelated woman. You don’t break a holy covenant with God.”