David A. Graham

And that's a place where, although we are seeing Trump again just in the last few weeks, you know, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, really taking a lot of action.

I think that's far a little further afield from what Project 2035 envisioned, which was a kind of Trump one style isolationism.

And it turned toward China rather than focusing on all these other things.

You know, I find it really hard to quantify.

And there's a good tracker out there online that puts the number right above 50%.

And I think that's useful, but also a little bit, you have to take it with a grain of salt because some of these things are just hard to equate on a numerical level.

Or like, you know, that tracker says Trump eliminated USAID, which is a goal.

Project 2055 wanted to reform USAID, shrink it, use it different ways, but not to abolish it.

So it doesn't always fit one-to-one.

But I think that's a good way to think about it, like how far they are.

And the other thing that I would say is so much of what they want to do depends on having this really powerful president and sort of an unfettered, no checks and balances situation.

And they've made so much progress on that in the first year.

And I think that will enable more progress

towards their goals in the future.

A way that I've heard people talk about it is you don't get a lot of chances for a president to try things, leave office for four years and then get another shot at it.

And I think that is a lot of this.

So many of the people involved were veterans of the first Trump administration or had been closely related to it.

And they saw what went wrong.

and they had theories of that.

And they also learned a lot about how government works.