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
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.