Project 2025 and Inept Presidenting
Trump again shows that he really doesn't have the skills for the job.
So I want to talk a bit about Project 2025, the Heritage-based plan for a second Donald Trump presidency (and no, it hasn’t gone away), because I think it tells us something important about Trump.
Granted, some of this this is basically speculative. But it is consistent with what we know, and I think it’s a helpful window into what’s going on with Trump and the GOP.
Trump is surely lying when he claims that he knows nothing about the endeavor; as many have documented, it’s basically written by his presidency-in-waiting, and he must know that.
But he may well be genuinely surprised that he’s stuck with a whole bunch of very unpopular policy positions that Democrats have already been running against and intend to continue running against.
Why surprised? Well, for one thing Trump doesn’t read, and refuses to be briefed. What’s more, from everything we’ve seen, he just doesn’t care about almost any of the substance of government and public policy. The exceptions? He appears to care a lot about the stuff that affected him personally as president, such as any constraints on his authority, all of which he wants to erase. And he does have strong views on a handful of policy areas — trade, immigration, maybe a few others — although not strong enough that he’s willing to actually learn anything about them.1
It’s the first of those, his procedural radicalism, that turns out to matter a lot. Because it’s meant that Trump’s only real allies within the Republican Party are other people willing to embrace his lawlessness. Sure, it seems like the GOP has been filled with nothing but hard-core procedural radicals ever since Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, but as Trump’s presidency demonstrated that wasn’t true.2 Even as it also demonstrated that there were plenty of Republicans willing to go along with it most of the time. If you really want people who are gung-ho authoritarians, you’re going to be stuck with…well, weird.
Or, to put it more properly: The problem for Trump is that his allies in the House Freedom Caucus and the current version of Heritage also bring with them a whole range of policy extremism. Trump does seem to be aware that unpopular ideas can cause problems for him come election time, but he’s incredibly poorly equipped to do anything about it, what with having minimal at best policy knowledge and hardly any skills at what Richard Neustadt called “persuation.” At best, he’s capable of firing people and starting over (as he did in his 2016-2017 transition, when he fired Chris Christie), but all that does for him is deliver the next set of even more extreme folks.3
Look: There’s nothing particular unusual or scary about the out-party preparing to take office by detailing their policy plans and beginning to screen personnel. Presidential transitions are enormous tasks, and they often go wrong. In that sense, Project 2025 is a normal thing that outparties do – figuring out the specifics on how to pass and implement a vague party agenda and priorities, and at the same time preparing for the massive effort needed to staff up a new administration.
With a normal presidential nominee, that’s healthy.4 It’s just that the Project 2025 gang isn’t a normal party faction and Trump isn’t a competent candidate. Indeed, I suspect it doesn’t quite occur to him that promoting extremists means promoting extreme policies. The people he’s been promoting within the party aren’t going to surrender their priorities just because he’s not into them, especially since (1) he doesn’t really care, (2) he’s barely aware of most of it, and (3) he’s so easily rolled.
Which gets back to the main thing about Trump: even if you put aside all the other reasons he has no business being president, he simply doesn’t have the skills for it. That ended badly in his first four years, and would almost certainly end badly if he gets another shot at it.
It’s hardly unusual for presidents to have limited expertise in many areas, but Trump sure appears to be off the scale when it comes to having gaping knowledge deficits, even about things he cares about.
The January 6 insurrection was a good sorting mechanism. Most of the party was eventually willing to live with Trump despite it, but only a relatively small group were actually enthusiastically pro-insurrection on that day. And then there was an even smaller group that never could stomach it.
In Neustadt-ish terms, he’s really only capable of bullying, but bullying generally has severe long-term costs even if it brings short-term gains. And it often doesn’t even get that.
Yes, it may mean that they achieve more of their policy goals, which their opponents won’t like. But for a healthy party with a normal nominee, part of the process of sketching out specific plans (and, for that matter, screening personnel) involves taking into account the costs of unpopular people and policies. That certainly doesn’t seem to have happened here.