Tonight, we're going to talk about the rarest of birds in the Washington ecosystem.

A policy report that someone actually read.

The Heritage Foundation, formerly a think tank, now something closer akin to the MAGA movement's waiting room, has a fairly revolutionary vision for America, and Donald Trump, Heritage found someone who would readily take to its views.

Trump made a lot of noise about the irrelevance of Project 2025 when he was campaigning, but the proof of the pudding is in the implementation.

His administration has taken many of Project 2025's ideas and is poised to take even more.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times.

Leeann Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent for Puck.

Laura Barone Lopez is a White House correspondent for MSNow, and David Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Project How Project 2025 is reshaping America.

Thank you all for joining me.

I hope you've had good holidays so far.

David, you wrote this book.

very nice looking book.

Um, we've excerpted it.

I want to start, let's start at the near the beginning of Project 2025.

Uh, give us the overview.

What did its authors, and you could talk about the authors a little bit if you want.

What are the authors want the executive branch to do.

So a lot of these authors came from the first Trump administration, and they had this real frustration that Trump hadn't gotten nearly as much done as they wanted, but I think he kind of fired their imaginations.

So their idea was to put together this vision for sort of maximalist executive power.

They would take power from Congress, sort of undermine the administrative state and use all this to establish a very socially conservative vision of America.

They talk about a biblically based vision of the family.

So it's a plan to overhaul the way government works and then from there to overhaul what American society looks like writ large, right?

So talk a little bit about some of the main areas of focus, then I'm going to ask our panel to, to, to go into some of those areas in a little bit more depth.

Yes, I think a couple key things.

One of them is immigration, which of course has been a priority for Trump for a long time, and you see them pushing beyond, you know, it's not just closing the border, it's not just reducing illegal immigration.

It's also cracking down on visas.

It's denaturalizing people, really sort of closing off the US in many ways, reversing immigration, reversing the effect of immigration, not simply slowing immigration.

Exactly right.

Um, you see them, you know, putting a lot of power to the president, so trying to take over independent agencies taking power from Congress about a lot of these things, creating this, this, uh, you know, prison without checks and balances.

Uh, connected to that, you see sidelining Congress, you know, taking these powers, impoundment, for example, so the president can kind of do whatever he wants.

Uh, and then finally you have this, this very traditional vision of how society should work.

So, you know, men as breadwinners, women at home, taking care of children, abortion banned, this kind of, you know, pro-natalist vision that we've heard from people like JD Vance as well, right?

Who are the most important people in the making of Project 2025.

I think the most important one really is Russell Vogt, who's kind of the intellectual architect of this.

Had the plan for how government could do the things that they wanted to do.

Head of office of of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump's first term and again now, right?

And why did Trump, any one of you can answer this question actually why did Trump disavow 2025 and then immediately hire its author or main author to run one of the most important functions of his government, how it's managed and budgeted I mean because it was incredibly unpopular during the campaign trail, and there was polling that showed that and that voters weren't necessarily aligned with this.

And so even Susie Wiles at the time and Chris Lasaveto, the chief of staff, now the chief of staff, one of his campaign managers said the demise of Project 2025 could not come soon enough and people associated with it should not claim to be associated with the campaign.

Of course that was false at the time.

That was not true.

And more than just Russell vote, a number of other authors of Project 2025 work inside of the government, including at various departments, right?

What I'm getting at is was it conscious gaslighting of the public, like or or did they actually not want anything to do with Project 2025.

It was conscious gaslighting, definitely conscious gas, conscious gas light a vote around the panel 25 also created an entire list of some 10,000 people that were going to be Trump loyalists, that could then staff the government and be across the government and do exactly what the president wanted.

The reason I ask about the gas lighting is that I'm impressed that they had the discipline to keep to that one message for several months that we don't know what 2025 is and we've never heard of it and we don't like it.

If we had heard of it.

I mean, look, you know, if you were to fact check what you just play with Donald Trump, that's one where he might actually pass muster.

He probably didn't read it, right?

This is, this is a lot of people who are imputing their own agendas on to Trump's presidency that he's OK with, right?

He actually goes along with all of these things, most of these things, a lot of these things, they suit his, his ideas, but this is a remarkable thing in history, Jeff, if you think about it.

This is the only time really if you don't count Grover Cleveland, in which a president had a 4-year break.

after having been president, experienced what it was like to try to figure out, OK, if I have a chance to do it again, what would I do differently?

Or the people around him are figuring that out, right?

And they came up with this plan that really has been a blueprint.

Every other second term president had to go immediately from their re-elect into the second term, never a chance to pause, think through what the plan might be.

That's why they've been more effective at accomplishing a lot of these goals.

I'll give you $10,000 if you tell me what Grover Cleveland did in his interregnum.

Well, I think he got married actually, didn't he?

That, that does not going to get you 10,000 bucks.

He did not have a project.

I count Grover Cleveland, by the way.

You say don't discount Grover Cleveland, but we all take Grover's very seriously.

It's probably 1892 was very, very 1892.

Laura, let me go to the immigration questions.

uh discuss it's discuss this plan's immigration vision, how much it aligns with what we're seeing right now and how far down the road it is in implementation.

It aligns very closely with what was laid out in Project 2025 including kind of this meshing of the and melding and bringing together of the Customs and Border Protection agents and the immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE agents, and so bringing Border Patrol into the interior and having them more involved in rounding up immigrants was one of the visions of Project 20202. just so people understand that the Border Patrol literally stays within how many miles?

It's meant to stay within previously meant to stay within how many miles of the actual within 100 miles or so of the border, and yes, oftentimes they are just right there along the border in those border towns.

They operate very differently than ICE agents.

They are used to dealing much more with cartels and violent criminals and operating, you know, along the border and outside of the border and that so far like that, but ICE agents actually operate very differently.

They tend to take their time to figure out if there is a criminal or to figure out what kind of targets they want to go and arrest inside the interior of the United States in US cities, and we've seen that all go by the wayside where there are mass roundups.

There are people who have no criminal convictions and no history of criminal convictions being rounded up, but I recently spoke to Paul Dance, who was the director of Project 2025 at the time, and he was pushed to the side and kind of took was the fall and scapegoat at during the campaign cycle when they wanted to distance themselves from it, and he told me that immigration was the one reason that Trump got elected, and it was one of the main, if not the main, directives of Project 2025, and it's one of the reasons that Joe Biden came in for so much criticism from middle of the road America, but he also said that he, one of the other visions that to me is key here and we're starting to see heading more into the new year is the attack and the targeting of legal immigration, and he said that they want to see that go down to a very light drip where that means almost no legal immigration is allowed into the US.

A light drip.

Leanne on Congress the Republicans in Congress seem to, whether or not they meant to go along with this vision.

They do go along with this vision they have stopped providing oversight of the executive branch.

Yeah, I mean they're trying to get a little bit back now, but, but yes, I mean, Congress is complicit in give handing over their power to the executive branch, and to be, you know, fair to Project 2025.

They wrote a line about Congress that given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous.

Most members of Congress have chosen the latter, so being vulnerable and famous.

So this is, I mean, they understood the weakness of Congress and how they understood the psychological weakness of Congress people and how it operates now, how getting on, you know, with influencers or on cable news or fundraising are most members of Congress's priorities now, and Congress has been handing over a lot of their power over the decades.

Every president wants to abolish Congress essentially.

but, but they saw this weakness and they, so their plan was because Congress isn't doing their job anyway.

The president needs to step in through executive orders, through impoundment as far as appropriations are concerned and take back some control of the administrative state, the federal government, and Congress has even now when this president is more effective at it than many other presidents previously are letting them do this.

So David, on this on this question about Congress, is this an evolutionary change or a revolutionary change.

It seems from what Leanne is saying that they were, they were moving in this.

I mean, we all make the joke about everybody in Congress is just trying out to be a podcaster at this point, but how revolutionary is this in a historical terms, yes, I mean, I think that it's exactly right.

They have been, you know, this is from an understanding of Congress, Russell Vo spent time in both the Senate and the House.

He knew whereof he spoken as a staff, right, as a staff in there and you know, I think this is an evolution that has been happening of Congress giving it up, but I think the result is going to be more revolutionary.

If we look at, for example, control of the administrative state.

If we look at the way the Supreme Court seems poised to hand over control of, you know, independent regulatory agencies to the White House.

We're looking at a really huge shift in the way the government relates to individual citizens and in Congress giving up that power, and I think that's more than just a kind of, you know, gradual de-empowerment of Congress, right?

Peter, talk about first talk about the Grover Cleveland administration even more.

But when you finish with that, uh, talk about the way the Republicans act now in Congress versus the way they acted or led in the Nixon administration and the latter days of the Nixon administration.

Yeah, yeah, well, I would say, by the way, that rover Cleveland's second term was hobbled by economic repression, and that's exactly what this administration is worried about.

So there is some possible parallel there.

He just don't encourage it.

He's just going to start on the Benjamin Harrison moving forward to the 70s, how are the 1970s, please.

The Davis point, look, this is obviously an evolution, but it's sort of like what Hemingway say.

It's gradual then sudden, right?

We've been moving this direction and then suddenly this last year you might say we kind of fell off the cliff of congressional influence in Washington, and it's fascinating to see a president, first time I've seen it in his first year in office, basically tried to do nothing, legislatively.

He did his big tax bill, obviously that was necessary to keep the tax cuts that he had pass ed his first term going, and he threw other other policy into it, but broadly speaking, he didn't go to Congress and say this is my one chance to really do something big and permanent like Obamacare, like No Child Left Behind, like other things, a signature legislative legislative thing and he doesn't seem to have much of a plan for any further, uh, plans that way because he does want to use executive power, but the, the danger of that is that the second the next president comes in, if it's a Democrat, for instance, they can simply say I now hereby overturn all the executive orders the last guy did.

Now that doesn't mean that would change overnight because a lot of things he's done have real lasting impact, but it's not permanent the way legislation is, and Republicans in Congress, to your point, are, are willing to let that happen and willing to be quiescent at the very least until the primary filing deadlines when they see whether or not he takes aim at.

David, are tariffs in 2025 whereas tariffs trump's own preoccupation.

Tariffs is one of these weird places where you can see the kind of cleavages in the conservative movement.

So whereas in most of Project 2025, there is a clear view on tariffs.

There's a debate within mandate for leadership, the 900-page document between a certain Peter Navarro, current White House aide, and Trump acolyte on tariffs and Trump, Trump's Svengali on tariffs and a more free market conservative vision, and I think what you see is places like the Heritage Foundation that still retain that older school conservative, you know, free trade attitude, you know, accommodating themselves, knowing, look, if Trump is the president, we're going to have tariffs and we just need to sort of find a way to to cope with that in order to get the other particularly socially conservative goals we have.

Put it this way, if the president they were serving, didn't have strong feelings on tariffs.

What would, what would 202025 have said?

Would have been more traditional Republican.

Yes, it would be closer to the old school.

Let's talk about Russell Vogt, who I think maybe won, along with Stephen Miller, maybe the most quietly or semi quietly influential person.

um, in the administration, and he had very, very, he has very, very pronounced views about government itself.

I want you to listen to, to one famous quote that he was caught saying in a in a fit of candor.

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.

We want, when they woke up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.

Because they are so they're, they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

We want to put them in trauma.

Um talk about the, the, the, the vision there, the, the, the, the impetus behind that description of what he wants a federal bureaucracy to look like.

Well, first of all, cruelty is the point, right?

I mean, you know, every president of the modern era has felt some frustration with the federal bureaucracy, Republican and Democrat.

They find themselves hamstrung by the rules and the red tape and the resistance and the inertia, but this is the first one who comes in waging war on it and Russ's vote is his field marshal, right?

It's not just that the bureaucrats need to be reformed.

It's that they are the enemy.

They are evil.

They need to be made into villains, because if nothing else, it provides an excuse if things don't get done and it allows Trump to have an enemy.

Trump plays best politically when he has somebody to go after.

He likes to fight.

This is why Code was a problem for him.

COVID wasn't an enemy he could go after.

The deep, that's why he called it.

He spent a lot of time blaming the Chinese because some other way to attack it, right?

And the, the rust boat has given voice to this instinct of Trump's, which is to find an enemy and the enemy is the people who work for the federal government and also trying to get rid of all these thousands of federal workers is trying to get rid of any kind of check and balance that may have existed.

It's another like Congress, it's another it's another check hampering, another potential check to the president, which is, you know, including career lawyers who work across these agencies who say no, actually if you attempt to do this policy change you want to do, that may be illegal.

And now there's no one doing that, including at the Justice Department, which is not independent anymore, and at other key agencies.

I mean, I have talked to federal government workers who are still inside who, yes, Russell vote was effective.

They are not happy about going to work.

They are pretty miserable.

They're depressed.

The morale is low, and many are afraid that they're going to be fired or forced into a layoff in retirement come next year because they expect more will be happening across the in addition to expanding the executive branch are part of that plan for Russ's vote is also making OMB, the agency he oversees, much more powerful.

having much more heavy hand throughout the administration and weakening GAO, which is the kind of the oversight wing, the accountability office, yeah, for Congress, and Congress relies on the GAO, and they think that there's a huge disproportionate like focus on GAO and they're trying to completely destroy that.

All the inspector generals are gone, yes, right, David, one thing I don't understand, I understand why if you're a fast moving executive, you want to be uh disinhibited.

You want, you want, you want the, you want the chains off you in terms of the bureaucracy.

You want to be able to do things you want to do, and there are plenty of bureaucrats in the federal government and some people do actually slow things down.

I don't understand, and maybe you can explain it in the context of 2025.

I don't understand why the government has fired so many lying scientists, for instance, people who are not, not, not, not doing bureaucracy.

They're actually looking for Ebola.

They're actually trying to cure cancer.

What, what do they have to do with this?

and how does that fit into the overall vision?

Well, I think there's a couple of things.

One of them is a kind of opposition to scientific research from the government, skepticism of climate change, wait, stop.

Number one doesn't make much sense to my mind.

Sure, I mean, I think there's a sense that they're often pursuing very liberal goals.

It's climate change, it's, it's gender ideology as they term it.

Yes, but the massive, the massive of the research is just done on diseases that kill large numbers of Americans.

Well, red blue state doesn't matter.

There's an entire, I mean this is an interesting dovetail with the Maha agenda, which is skeptical of that research.

It sees it as in bed with bed big pharma pushing in the wrong direction.

Maha, for those of you who don't know, is Make America Healthy Again, that's the RFK whatever you program, right?

And so they want some of these things to be private.

They want some of these things to be done outside of government.

Some of them, they just don't want them done at all.

Um, and they want the government to be smaller.

Meanwhile, measles and woofing cough cases are across the country, right, David, I want to read something that you've wrote about the cultural aspects, um, of this quote, with a little imagination, we can glimpse the America that Project 2025 proposes.

It is an owedly Christian nation, but following a very specific narrow strain of Christianity.

In many ways it resembles the 1950s.

While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families.

At school, students are an old fashioned values and lessons.

Abortion is illegal.

Vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in healthcare.

The government is slow to police racial discrimination in all but its most blatant expressions.

Trans and LGBTQ people exist, they always have, but are encouraged to remain closeted.

How explicit is this in the framework of the 900 pages, extremely, I mean, basically every one of those things I could point you to a page where that comes from.

This is the vision they want and they're very clear about it.

They're not, you know, I, I think what's interesting is there have been, you know, claims about hidden agendas for many years.

There's no hidden agenda here.

They're very clear about what they want.

They actually published.

They put it online, you know, in 2023 for everyone to read, right?

One more question on that because I'm interested in, and this is, I'm interested in where Trump's inclinations diverge from 2025s inclinations.

I mean, Trump seems to be historically fine with at least the L's and the, the, the G's and the B's, maybe not the T's We, we see that, but it's, this is not a person in Donald Trump who would overturn marriage equality.

Is it?

I mean, I get that the heritage people might, if they had their drug I think what they found is common cause on this fear of wokeness, this idea that the the the cultural left is taking things over and so you start by knocking out DEI programs and wokeness, but pretty quickly you're getting into things like civil rights enforcement, equal employment Opportunity Commission, all of these things become very connected for the people at this heart, and I think, you know, for Trump he's getting what he wants and if they want to go further, it's not a huge problem for him.

He's having to let them have their run.