Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen.
It's been exactly one year since Donald Trump began his second term as president of these United States.
Chapter 2: What happened during Trump's first year in office?
And trying to recount the last 12 months is perhaps too much. Here's the last 12 hours. Trump's been screenshotting and sharing DMs sent to him by France's President Emmanuel Macron and Mark Ruta, the head of NATO. They're trying to talk Trump off his plan to acquire Greenland, something that wasn't even mentioned in his inaugural address a year ago.
What was immigration, crime, oil, manufacturing?
I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. And we are going to bring law and order back to our cities. See, we will drill, baby, drill.
Absent from that speech was Project 2025, this brick of policy proposals from the Conservative Heritage Foundation that Trump had distanced himself from. But one year in, the president has quietly met many of Project 2025's objectives. That's coming up on Today Explained.
This is Today Explained. My name is David Graham, and I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America.
People may remember 2024, 7,000 years ago, President Trump, at the time, a candidate, says, I have nothing to do with Project 2025.
That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it.
He's been in office for a year. Did his administration actually disavow Project 2025?
No, and I've been surprised how much they have even embraced it. It's true that some of the high profile figures involved are not in the administration, but some of the high profile figures involved also are in the administration. You know, people like Russell Vogt, the budget chief.
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Chapter 3: How has Trump's administration engaged with Project 2025?
The bottom line is that we need to have an army of conservatives ready to march in day one.
When we covered Project 2025 before the election, I remember thinking, you know, there's a lot here and it would take a lot to get all of this done. And Trump is saying he doesn't really want to do it. Maybe everybody is over worrying. And then sometime in the last 12 months, things started to come into clearer focus.
When would you say that it became clear that like, OK, they are actually doing a Project 2025 here?
I think, you know, there were signs before he took office appointing Russell Vogt to head OMB would be one of those.
We have Darth Vader. You know Darth Vader, right?
For me, it really was like the first day of the administration. And I had written this book and I submitted my first draft on January 15th and then sat for five days wondering if they would actually, if they would follow through. And on day one, we got all of these executive orders that followed almost verbatim from things in Project 2025. Okay, no, there's really something here.
All right, so you start seeing it on day one, and then we get 12 months. Give me the top lines of what you've seen get done. This is 900 pages of policy priorities. Group them for me and tell me how far along they are.
Okay, sure. If you look at, for example, gender, family, and rights, we've seen Trump pushing back really hard on anything that looks like wokeness.
Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It's gone. It's gone.
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Chapter 4: What are the main objectives of Project 2025?
David Graham of The Atlantic. When we come back, David's going to talk Project 2026. Support for Today Explained comes from Bombas. Perhaps you want to get in shape this year. Bombas wants to tell you about the all-new Bombas sports socks, engineered with sport-specific comfort for running, golf, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, and all sport.
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Chapter 5: What progress has Trump made on social issues?
intervention in Venezuela and elsewhere, the ACA premiums, the Epstein files. When you look at these splits, what do they tell you about how united or not the conservative movement is behind what's in Project 2025?
I think the only thing that really unites the conservative movement right now is Donald Trump. And even then, we can see some of that looking shakier than it has for quite some time. Trump has been able to hold all of these things together.
And you see even in Project 2025, these kind of schisms over, you know, everything from how best to provide childcare in order to encourage higher birth rates to whether or not there should be tariffs. And, you know, they're trying to bring together these people from across a lot of the right. And it worked in this context, and it works as long as Trump is there. If you look at somebody like J.D.
Vance, I think he fits the Project 2025 policy mindset better than Trump does. Trump is not particularly devout. Vance is a very serious conservative Catholic. I think he thinks about policy more than Trump does. But I don't know if somebody like Vance can hold the coalition together like Trump has.
I think it's a little bit of a free-for-all as you see these groups, whether it is Heritage and the Project 225 group or Mike Pence's group, kind of vying to see who can be the next power player in the next stage or whenever Trump exits the scene.
I remember after Trump was elected, and of course, Republicans won the House and the Senate, and it was like, look, Americans voted. If Trump proceeds to do a Project 2025, that's what Americans voted for, right?
So we have got the midterms coming up later this year, and I think there's a sense that Republicans are going to want to need to moderate to some degree to hold on to the House and the Senate, and they're going to have to pull back on some of this stuff that strikes Americans as extreme. Do you see moderation coming this year? And do you see that affecting how Project 2025 plays out?
I would say first that I'm not convinced that Americans were voting for that, even though the administration acted that way. Project 2025 was wildly unpopular. People knew about it, which is surprising for this kind of dry plan and hated it. So I do think there will be some pullback.
And I think you see in the small breaks between members of Congress and Trump, the beginnings of members trying to edge towards the center and away from these more extreme ideas.
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