Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term The Fulcrum has started Phase 2 of the series has commenced.
One month in and we’re getting clarity on President Trump’s priorities. He’s certainly fixated on bureaucratic waste. He has controversial innovator and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, leaning into that effort, playing the real-life host of the decidedly un-celebrity Apprentice. The career civil servant at the Department of Veterans Affairs? You’re fired! The lifelong administrator at the Small Business Administration? You’re fired!
Trump’s also hyper-focused on global affairs: courting Vladimir Putin (again), attacking Volodymyr Zelenskyy (again), practically pulling permits for developing Gaza into the next “French Riviera,” slapping tariffs on Chinese imports, repatriating Black South African landowners from their post-apartheid homes, chastising the French President for correcting him in real time, along with threatening Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada under some present-day Manifest Destiny.
And, of course, America’s 47th president hit the proverbial jackpot with his executive order that imposes a 90-day pause on all U.S. foreign development assistance programs. That move united his interest in reducing government waste with his focus on foreign affairs.
But how is President Trump doing with Project 2025’s “four broad fronts that will play a big role in deciding America’s future?” How well does his early agenda map onto Project 2025’s broad ambitions?
As a reminder, Project 2025’s Foreword, written by Heritage Foundation’s President Kevin Roberts, identifies four goals for the Trump administration:
1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls the “Blessings of Liberty.”
Trump has addressed each, even if some have received more of his administration’s attention than others. Most obviously, “front” number two—on dismantling the administrative state—has commanded the most air time. In Roberts’ words, Project 2025 “lays out how to use many of tools including: how to fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government; how to restore the American people’s constitutional authority over the Administrative State; and how to save untold taxpayer dollars in the process.”
Indeed, the Trump administration has followed this particular roadmap to a tee. He has fired the “un-fireable,” shuttered agencies, muzzled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) talk throughout the government, and, at least according to those inside the White House, “saved untold taxpayer dollars in the process.”
The President’s accomplishments on the other three “fronts” are a little less clear.
Let’s take a look at the first goal, centered around families. “Today, the American Family is in crisis,” writes Roberts in Project 2025. As evidence, he cites the danger of fatherlessness, the damage to children by using terms like “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” the harm of exposure to DEI programs in schools and workplaces, and on and on. It is quite obvious that the Trump administration has followed Roberts’ script in prohibiting DEI programs in places receiving federal funds, outlawing certain transgender people from participating in sports, and bolstering “ parental rights.” However, he has taken it a step further by targeting programs that have historically helped families. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP as it is more commonly known, is one such program. First introduced in 1939, this initiative helps families—and especially children—get adequate daily nutrition. 41 million individuals, or about one in every eight Americans, receive the benefit. The Republican-controlled House, with President Trump’s presumptive approval, hopes to cut billions from that assistance program.
With respect to Trump's campaign pledge to secure the borders, there have been multiple executive orders—on immigration, invasion, and terrorism —that mirror the Project 2025 strategy. However, many of these orders are being challenged in the courts, so the verdict is out as to their enforceability and legality.
This brings me to liberty. Project 2025 speaks much of liberty and freedom but often refers to freedom for select groups, not for all. Curiously, Project 2025 advocates for removing terms like "sexual orientation," "gender identity," "diversity," "equity," and "inclusion" from federal rules and regulations and frames this as somehow promoting liberty. Equally curious is Project 2025’s insistence that the elites on the left define liberty too narrowly. Roberts claims, “It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live.” Fair enough. But it works both ways, doesn’t it? I’m not sure we need the Heritage Foundation to tell us how to live either.
I’ve been saying for a long time that freedom—America’s most indispensable value—is neither the prerogative of the left nor the right. Encouraging Americans to “live freely” is not a woke concept possessed only by the left as it is portrayed in Project 2025 and by the Trump administration. But neither is it a libertarian idea, claimed exclusively by the right. It is an enlightenment idea celebrated by our Founders and hailed by those like Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King. Roberts and Trump believe in a certain vision of liberty, but it’s a narrower conception than America needs right now. “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want,” Roberts insists, “but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like.”
No. That’s not what our Constitution grants us. Our Constitution grants us a freedom essential to human dignity, a freedom that encourages the pursuit of happiness, a freedom that braces America’s experiment in self-governance, and a freedom that fosters human flourishing. The trick now is getting all of us to agree.
Samples of Phase 2 articles about Project 2025
- Project 2025: Part II
- Department of Education
- USAID
- Department of Homeland Security
- Changes to the Department of Veterans Affairs
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Pursues Partisan Agenda
- Elon Musk’s attack on the Department of Labor
Samples of Phase 1 articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- Voters oppose the far-right playbook
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
- A blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change
- How anti-trans proposals could impact all families
- The Federal Reserve
- A threat to equitable education
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.