Former President Donald Trump may not cosign Project 2025, but the founding member of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force says don’t believe it.
The tone of this year’s presidential election may have shifted since Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and passed the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris. Still, Democratic lawmakers say voters must ward off the threat of another Donald Trump presidency and the ideology of his supporters.
“People should stay woke,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a founding member of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, told Capital B in a recent phone interview. Project 2025 has been coordinated at every level, she added.
“The same mega donors that are influencing Justice [Samuel] Alito and Justice [Clarence] Thomas with lavish gifts are the same mega donors who bankrolled The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025,” she said.
Although Trump’s campaign has tried to distance itself from Project 2025, Pressley and others say the manifesto’s ideas — written by Trump associates and published in April 2023 — are sprinkled throughout the former president’s plans. Trump started posting videos of his policy ideas, if he were to return to the White House, in December 2022, and called it Agenda Agenda 47’s plans — to restrict prosecutorial discretion when it comes to enforcing immigration laws, give state leaders power over their education system by eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, and weaponize the U.S. Department of Justice’s criminal and civil rights divisions — are eerily similar to the plans outlined in Project 2025.
The 922-page Project 2025 dedicates 36 pages to the DOJ, and its “assault on civil rights.” The proposed transition plan — officially titled “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise” — is spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation — a right-wing think tank — for the next Republican president. Their outlook for the DOJ mirrors what Americans witnessed with Jeff Sessions and William Barr in charge.
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant. We will continue to shine a light on Project 2025, [which is] institutionalized Trumpism that we have every reason to believe would be made real if Donald Trump is elected to another term in the White House,” Pressley told CapitalB.
This week, the Massachusetts Democrat and others from Congress signed a letter to the president of the Heritage Foundation requesting he release the fourth pillar of Project 2025. It’s described “as a roadmap of comprehensive, concrete, early actions for each federal agency” within the president’s first 180 days.
Pressley helps break down some key areas of this policy agenda that voters should pay closer attention to.
Why are the Project 2025 plans so alarming?
“I was immediately alarmed because I saw what was laid out in this manifesto as plans. Not ideas, but plans. A policy plan, and a transition plan for institutionalized Trumpism, and, in my opinion, a weaponized White House, DOJ, and Supreme Court,” Pressley said.
The Justice Department under Trump had two attorneys general, Sessions and Barr, who split the four-year term. During their short tenures, they collectively:
- Shutdown the DOJ’s civil rights division ability to launch pattern and practice investigations against police departments with allegations of misconduct.
- Allowed the federal executions of more people in a six-month period than any other administration.
- Used a loophole to send the U.S. National Guard into cities whose elected prosecutor didn’t prosecute low-level crimes — an offense the Trump administration saw as defiant.
Under current U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, there has been a moratorium on executing anyone on federal death row; a review was launched into the use of the lethal injection; and the civil rights division has been revitalized with Kristen Clarke as its new leader.
Project 2025’s ideas for the DOJ are in one chapter that, in part, calls for:
- Federal prosecutors to override local prosecutor’s discretion. And prosecute crimes the local prosecutor won’t.
- An end to investigating voter suppression and election interference allegations.
- Executing the 40 people currently on federal death row and enforcing death as a penalty, especially for those convicted of “particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children … until Congress says otherwise through legislation.”
- Reviewing all active consent decrees implemented in law enforcement agencies across the country and surrounding U.S. territories before eliminating the practice altogether.
“Given the education that I’ve gotten — and we all received from these extremists in the last five years — they do not make threats, they make promises,” Pressley said.
Pressley is a sponsor and co-sponsor of several proposed bills that may be affected by Project 2025 if it comes to fruition. For instance, the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act hasn’t been passed yet, but the momentum to support it continues to grow more than in previous years, she said.
“Especially because the best predictor of the future is the past, and Donald Trump, in the final days of his presidency, executed more people than in the last six decades,” Pressley said. “So, again, I take them at their hateful word that they do think that state-sanctioned violence is justice, and that he [Trump] would go on a murdering spree, because they’ve already demonstrated that.”
What chapters or sections of Project 2025 really stand out?
Pressley said she and her colleagues are hosting briefings, hearings, and webinars to continue to shine a light on Project 2025.
“I would encourage people to read it. You know, it’s such a frightening read … you can’t put it down even for its density, because it is just hard to believe,” Pressley said, adding, “But again, when people show you who they are the first time, believe them, and they have shown us time and time again.”
“We have every reason to believe it would be made real if Donald Trump is elected to another term in the White House. So we’re leveraging every congressional tool available to us, oversight and accountability, to make sure people are aware of the real threat codified in this document,” she said.
Pressley emphasizes that Project 2025 is “a threat to every person who calls this country home, and what they want to do is control every aspect of our lives. … Dobbs was just the beginning” — referring to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Pressley said there has been a “coordinated, unrelenting” effort to:
- defund Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives.
- defund Title I funding for K through 12 education.
- ban books.
- dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
- rename the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Life.
- weaponize the U.S. Supreme Court.
- restart a murdering spree on federal death row; and stop the DOJ from investigating voter suppression and election interference allegations.
“So if you just look at the contrast here, they want to control every aspect of our lives. And I can go on,” Pressley said.
Outside of Project 2025, taking what Trump says during his rally stops cannot be taken lightly, either. His twice repeated comments that a vote for him would be the last time Americans would have to vote wasn’t a joke to Pressley.
“I firmly believe, if he is reelected — which I’m going to do fighting with every fiber of my being to ensure that does not happen — I firmly believe he will not leave office,” Pressley said.
“And so when we say that this institutionalized Trumpism laid out in this extremist blueprint, this policy, and transition plan of Project 2025, that it is an existential threat — it is a real threat. It is a real threat to our democracy, to our federal government as we know it, and again, it implicates the courts, because they can’t do any of this without Donald Trump as president and without a Supreme Court, which they have enlisted as co-conspirators in this national extremist march.”
What are the similarities between Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47?
“Those who might be doubters or naysayers about the real threat here, and consider us histrionics,” Pressley said, “those are probably the same people that felt that we were being dramatic in our fears about [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Brett Kavanaugh.”
During Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing, he said he wouldn’t touch Roe v. Wade, the legal precedent that gave women the right to access to an abortion.
“And we didn’t believe him. We knew we had cause to question his sincerity,” said Pressley, who has called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment. “I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman in movement building work in electoral politics, and they often think that we’re being dramatic. But I would argue that when we have been the canaries in the coal mine, those things have come to pass.
“So I would just say to those who think we’re being hysterical, that won’t be the first time that we’ve been told that, and likely not the last,” she said. “But I know that we are not being hysterical or hyperbolic. Donald Trump, and his sycophants, his allies, have already revealed who they are. We have a term to look at as a guide, it mimics the agenda that he had in the White House. This has been very coordinated, every level and stay woke. This is not a drill.”
