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Trump, Harris fight over former president’s ties to Project 2025
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Trump, Harris fight over former president’s ties to Project 2025

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Democrats have tried in recent months to tie former President Donald Trump to Project 2025. Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was no exception.

Harris described Project 2025 as a “detailed and dangerous plan” that she claimed Trump “intends to implement” if he is elected to a second term. She also called it “his Project 2025.”

But in the debate and elsewhere, Trump has claimed he has “nothing to do with Project 2025.”

“I haven’t read it,” Trump said during the debate. “I purposely don’t want to read it. I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people who got together, they came up with some ideas. I think some of them were good, some of them were bad. But it doesn’t make any difference.”

Trump has previously indicated that he disagrees with elements of Project 2025, but he has not specified which elements of the project he disagrees with.

USA TODAY previously rated False a claim that Project 2025 is Trump’s plan. But as we noted then, there is certainly overlap between Trump’s camp and the effort.

Project 2025 includes former Trump employees

The Heritage Foundation and more than 100 other conservative groups collaborated on Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project. The resulting 900-page document lays out policy recommendations for the next Republican president that reflect the think tank’s goal of “[rescuing]the country from the clutches of the radical left.”

While Project 2025 has said it “does not speak for any particular candidate or campaign,” there is a lot of overlap between Project 2025 and the people and policies in Trump’s world.

Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff in the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, is the former director of Project 2025. Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt also appeared in a video supporting the project’s “Presidential Administration Academy.”

Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, wrote the foreword for a book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, to be published in November. Roberts wrote the foreword for Project 2025, describing the effort as a “plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.”

Vance spokesman Will Martin told The New York Times in July that Vance’s foreword “has nothing to do with Project 2025” and that the vice presidential nominee “disagrees with what they are asking.”

Project 2025 calls for an end to illegal immigration, while Trump has vowed to “conduct the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and “end every open border policy of the Biden administration” if re-elected.

The project also supports closing the Department of Education, which Trump promised to do in a 2023 campaign video.

The Heritage Foundation reported in a January 2018 press release that Trump had adopted nearly two-thirds of the foundation’s policy recommendations in his first year in office.

USA TODAY has debunked a series of claims about Project 2025, including the false claim that page 451 states that the “only valid family” consists of a working father and a stay-at-home mother and that women must carry a “menstrual passport.”