Donald Trump changes tune on Project 2025—”Very conservative and very good”

Donald Trump has publicly praised Project 2025, calling parts of the policy agenda “very conservative and very good.”

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from the initiative. He called parts of the 900-page guideline spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation “ridiculous and abysmal.”

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, in July. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

On Thursday, Time magazine named Trump its 2024 Person of the Year and published an interview it conducted with the president-elect on November 25. Speaking to the magazine, Trump softened his tone on the policy document. Though he continued to distance himself from Project 2025, Trump praised some of its ideas.

“I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things,” he told Time. “I specifically didn’t want to read it because it wasn’t under my auspices, and I wanted to be able to say that, you know, the only way I can say I have nothing to do with it is if you don’t read it. I don’t want—I didn’t want to read it. I read enough about it. They have some things that are very conservative and very good. They have other things that I don’t like.”

The president-elect went on to reiterate that he had “nothing to do with Project 2025,” adding that he disapproved of the timing of its release.

“I won’t go into individual items, but I had nothing to do with Project 2025. Now, if we had a few people that were involved, they had hundreds of them. This is a big document, from what I understand,” he said.

“They complicated my election by doing it because people tried to tie me and I didn’t agree with everything in there, and some things I vehemently disagreed with, and I thought it was inappropriate that they would come out with a document like that prior to my election,” Trump continued, adding, “I thought it was a very foolish thing for them to do.”

Newsweek contacted the Trump transition team for comment by email outside normal working hours.

While Trump continues to distance himself from Project 2025, he has invited some of its key architects to serve in his second administration. Last month, Trump nominated Russ Vought, who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during his first term, to return to the role.

For seven years, Vought served as the vice president of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025.

Since leaving office, Vought has worked on the initiative, authoring its section on the OMB. While many of the suggestions he laid out are highly technical, they seek, for the most part, to expand the president’s authorities and lessen the power of career civil servants.

“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Vought wrote.

Vought also helped craft several executive orders that could be implemented on Day One of Trump’s term. One order would recategorize thousands of civil servants to enable Trump to fire them, Reuters reported, citing two people involved with the project.

Another Trump nominee with Project 2025 ties is Brendan Carr, who wrote the project’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission. Carr is now set to lead the agency.

“Border czar” Tom Homan and nominees John Ratcliffe (for CIA director), Pete Hoekstra (for ambassador to Canada) and Paul Atkins (for chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission) were also involved in Project 2025.

Additionally, Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s incoming deputy chiefs of staff, founded a conservative legal and advocacy group known as America First Legal, which contributed to the project.

Democrats have argued that Trump’s ties to Project 2025 cannot be denied, with Vice President Kamala Harris saying in the September 10 presidential debate, “What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing.” Trump immediately rejected her statement.

Tony Carrk, the executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US, said Trump’s Cabinet picks were a sign that he was “charging ahead” with Project 2025.

“President-elect Trump has dropped all pretense and is charging ahead hand in hand with the right-wing industry players shaping an agenda he denied for the whole campaign. Within the first 180 days, Project 2025 seeks to undermine reproductive rights, double down on a failed economic system that serves billionaires and corporate CEOs, while slashing investments for working class Americans to thrive—and President-elect Trump is putting together just the team to do it,” he said in a statement last month.

Republican strategist John Feehery doubted that Project 2025 would be the driving force behind the second Trump administration.

“Trump has no idea what Project 25 was, and I doubt very seriously that anybody spent any time filling him in on the details. He has appointed people to the White House of all ideologies, from committed protectionists to free traders, from libertarians who want to get rid of all government to former Democrats who don’t really want to get rid of any. The one common thread is that they are all loyal to Trump, who is the antithesis of an ideologue. Trump is driving the agenda not the Heritage Foundation and certainly not Project 25,” he told Newsweek.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokesperson, previously told Newsweek, “As President Trump said many times, he had nothing to do with Project 2025.”

She continued: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail—and his Cabinet picks reflect his priority to put America First. President Trump will continue to appoint highly-qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to Make America Great Again.”