Someday presidential historians will have a field day trying to decide what was the biggest lie Donald Trump told during his romp across the American political landscape. Their challenge will be to decide, out of tens of thousands of lies — 30,573 in his first term alone, according to the Washington Post — which was the biggest whopper?
Among the front-runners: He would have won the popular vote in 2016 if illegal votes hadn’t been counted. He didn’t know anything about Russian interference in the 2016 election. He didn’t know that fixer Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money. The crowd at his first inaugural was the biggest ever. His first-term marked the best economy in history. Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. And, of course, he won the 2020 election.
None of which is true. But none of them tops the lie that’s most relevant today: that he knew nothing about Project 2025. That lie alone is worthy of four Pinocchios.
Project 2025 is the 922-page blueprint for a second Trump administration prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation and published in April 2023. As soon as it was made public, however, then-candidate Trump tried to distance himself from it. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social network last July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire! Trump’s professed innocence is manifestly false. He was in on Project 2025 from the start. At a 2022 Heritage Foundation dinner, Trump thanked the organization for preparing the report, saying it was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do…when the American people give us a colossal mandate.” And he knew well the people behind it.
CNN identified at least 140 authors and contributors to Project 2025 who had worked in the first Trump administration, including six of his Cabinet secretaries. Christopher Miller, acting Defense secretary for the last month of Trump’s first term, wrote the report’s chapter on defense. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn, former OMB director Russ Vought and top Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, among others, wrote chapters. In essence, Project 2025 consisted of officials of Trump One, with Trump’s full blessing, laying out the road map for Trump Two.
And that’s exactly what we’re seeing today. The moment Trump was sworn in, Project 2025 kicked into high gear. Time magazine reported that two-thirds of the executive orders signed by Trump in his first week mirrored or partially mirrored proposals from Project 2025. Not only that, but Trump has also facilitated Project 2025’s implementation by naming scores of its contributors to top positions in his administration, including OMB Director Russell Vought, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
They wrote Project 2025. Now they and President Trump are carrying it out. In fact, I’d bet that somewhere near the Oval Office there’s a white board with a list of all the recommendations contained in Project 2025 — and every time President Trump signs another executive order, Stephen Miller picks up his Sharpie and adds another checkmark on the board. He’s been busy so far.
In the last month, actions taken or proposed by President Trump right out of the pages of Project 2025 include: Sending troops to the border. Check. Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization. Check. Shutting down the Department of Education. Check. Gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. Check. Getting rid of any program promoting diversity, equality or inclusion. Check. Eliminating the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Check. Imposing tariffs on major trading partners. Check.
Overall, Trump’s actions have followed the three most important recommendations of Project 2025. First, that a new president must move fast; in his first month, Trump signed close to 100 executive orders. Second, that a president must expand the powers of the presidency; Trump declared that Article Two of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” Three, that a president must have the “boldness to break the bureaucracy” by firing career civil servants who are not MAGA loyalists; as of Feb. 25, Trump had already fired about 30,000 federal employees.
Trump hit the ground running — but only because the Project 2025 team wrote it all out for him. And Democrats can only sigh and say: “I told you so.”
Bill Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.” Follow him on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.
