ATLANTA — ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump insists that Project 2025, the nearly 1,000-page blueprint for the American government and society, does not reflect his priorities for a White House encore.
“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it – purposefully,” said the Republican presidential candidate September 10 on the debate stage.
But from economic policy, immigration and education to civil rights and foreign affairs, there are common ideas and shared ideologies between Project 2025 and Trump’s outline for the rest of the term – from the official “Agenda 47” slate, the self-approved Republican platform and apart. statement.
There are also differences: Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation and written by many conservatives working in or with the Trump administration, offers more detail on some issues than the former president.
Here’s a look at how Trump’s 2024 campaign and Project 2025 align and diverge:
TRUMP: His tax policy is heavily against corporations and wealthier Americans. That is mostly due to his promise to continue the improvement of 2017 when he reduced the corporate rate to 15% from the current 21%. He would also end the Inflation Reduction Act levy that funds energy measures to combat climate change. That idea aside, Trump has put more emphasis on plans aimed at working- and middle-class Americans: exempting earned tips, Social Security payments and overtime wages from income tax. His proposal on tips, however, could provide back-door tax breaks for top earners by allowing them to reclassify some of their pay as tip income — a prospect that, at its most extreme, could see hedge fund managers or top lawyers take advantage. of Trump’s provisions framed as help for restaurant servers, bartenders and other service workers.
PROJECT 2025: The document goes beyond Trump, calling for two federal income tax rates — 15% and 30% — while eliminating most deductions and credits. It envisions a “nearly flat tax on wage income above the standard deduction” by adjusting any income subject to the payroll tax that pays for Social Security and Medicare. A flat tax would effectively increase the overall share of taxes paid by poorer and middle-class Americans. That’s because many state and local tax codes, anchored by transactional taxes and improved income taxes, are more regressive than the current federal income tax brackets. Project 2025 also calls for a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise corporate or individual income taxes in the future.
TRUMP: “Build the wall!” since 2016 it has created “the largest mass deportation program in history.” Trump has called for the National Guard and police to be drafted, although he has not said he would ensure that they target only people in the US illegally. They have created an “ideological filter” for prospective candidates and ended birthright citizenship (which would require a constitutional change). He also said he would roll back first-term policies such as “Stay in Mexico,” restricting migrants on public health grounds and restricting or banning immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Comprehensively, his approach would not only eliminate illegal migration but also limit immigration altogether.
PROJECT 2025: There are several detailed proposals for various US immigration statutes, executive branch rules and agreements with other countries – reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients and asylum seekers, for example. Perhaps the most instructive statement from Project 2025 is the call to restore “every immigration-related rule issued” during Trump’s 2017-2021 term.
TRUMP: They’re making regulatory cuts an economic cure. He promised to reduce US household utility bills by cutting the pace for fossil fuel production, including opening up all federal lands to exploration. (U.S. energy production and exports are at record highs under President Joe Biden.) Trump has promised to boost the housing stock by cutting regulations, although most construction rules come from state and local governments.
Two broad proposals and ideas: The first would make it easier to kill federal workers by reclassifying thousands more as outside civil service protections. That will almost certainly reduce the government’s power to enforce statutes and regulations by reducing the number of employees participating in the work. The second is Trump’s claim that the president has the exclusive power to control federal spending despite the appropriations power of Congress. Trump insisted that lawmakers “set a ceiling” on spending but not a floor — meaning the president’s constitutional duty to “faithfully execute the laws” gives him discretion over how the money is spent.
PROJECT 2025: The author made several calls to the president, the Cabinet and other political officials to reduce regulations, reclassify federal employees to make it easier to fire, reduce “unaccountable federal spending” and set the course from the West Wing. “The Administrative State is going nowhere until Congress acts to take its own power away from bureaucrats and the White House,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, there are many executive tools that a bold conservative president can use to handcuff the bureaucracy (and) bring in the Administrative State.”
TRUMP: The former president wants to end government diversity programs, use federal funding as leverage, and he will target existing protections for LGBTQ individuals. On transgender rights, he pledged to end “boys in girls’ sports,” a practice he asserted, without evidence, as widespread. Trump will reverse Biden’s extension of Title IX civil rights for transgender students and ask Congress to allow only two gender choices at birth.
PROJECT 2025: The government must “affirm that children need and deserve love and care from mothers and play and protection from fathers.” That philosophy permeates the 2025 Project, which defines the ideal family – and the individual – in narrow, traditionalist terms. The author envisions consolidating federal civil rights efforts under the Justice Department’s civil rights division, with enforcement only through litigation. That would effectively center the choice of how and when to implement civil rights laws with the attorney general – and, by extension, in the White House.
TRUMP: The Department of Education will be a target for elimination. That doesn’t mean Trump wants Washington out of the classroom. Among other maneuvers, he will use federal appropriations as leverage to eliminate diversity programs at all levels of education and force K-12 schools to eliminate tenure and receive merit pay for teachers. They are asking for money from “any school or program that promotes Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or racial, sexual, or political content that is inappropriate for our children.”
Trump called for redirecting university endowment money to an online “Academy of America” that offers college credentials to all Americans without charging tuition. “It will be non-political, and no wokeness or jihadism will be allowed,” Trump said on November 1, 2023.
PROJECT 2025: Congress should “kill” the Department of Education and “return control of education to the states,” Project 2025 said, refuting Trump’s argument that the US education infrastructure is implementing progressive indoctrination. The authors proposed, among other things, eliminating the Head Start program, turning Title I programs into block funds and eventually eliminating federal funding, and using the tax code to provide incentives for home child care, said GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance. advocate.
TRUMP: Trump falsely claims climate change is a “hoax” as he downplays Biden’s spending on cleaner energy designed to reduce US reliance on fossil fuels. Trump will anchor his energy and transportation policies on fossil fuels: roads, bridges and combustion engine vehicles. Trump has said he is not against electric vehicles but has promised to end incentives that encourage the development of the EV market. And they will lower fuel efficiency standards.
PROJECT 2025: The document criticizes the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden administration. It proposes closing or limiting many programs for environmental protection and regulation, including those that many Americans take for granted among them: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Project 2025 will eliminate, and the National Weather Service, which the document will steer to exclusive. selling weather data to private forecasters would leave the National Hurricane Center — even though the NHC relies on the National Weather Service to make forecasts. cutting it will reduce its range.
TRUMP: His strategy is more diplomatic isolationism, military noninterventionism and economic protectionism than the US has had since World War II. But the details are more complicated. Trump has promised military expansion, pledged strong Pentagon spending and proposed a missile defense shield — an idea from the Reagan era. He insists he can end the Russian war in Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, although he has not explained how. He remains critical of NATO and the U.S. military at the top. “I don’t think of him as a leader,” he said. And repeatedly praised authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
PROJECT 2025: Echoing the Trump vibe, the document calls for “tough love” in international relations — but it’s different from Trump. In military preparedness, Project 2025 will reduce the number of generals but expand the number of enlisted personnel, although the authors do not call for a re-draft, as alleged by critics. The 2025 project may be more aggressive than Trump in China’s rhetoric: “Economic engagement with China must be ended, not reconsidered,” the statement said.
At NATO, the blueprint reflects Trump’s emphasis on other member states paying more for their own defense, but does not bring the skepticism of the NATO alliance that Trump has predicted for years. And while Trump remains reluctant to criticize Putin for invading Ukraine, Project 2025 states: “Regardless of point of view, all parties agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that Ukrainians have the right to defend their homeland.”
