Whose Plan Is it, Anyway?

It’s election season, which means I’ve seen enough political yard signs around town the last several weeks to have taken down the Titanic faster than that iceberg ever could have. One particular message has continued to catch my eye: “Stop Project 2025.” I’ve seen the same two words, preceded by the noble hash mark, more times than I could count while doomscrolling Elon Musk’s hellsite as we lurch toward Election Day, too. 

Indeed, Project 2025 has become a bit of a boogeyman. Mention it to Democrats and you’re likely to hear apocalyptic prognostications presented as near-certainties if Donald Trump were to take back the White House. Ask a Republican about it and you’ll probably catch some bluster about media fearmongering. 

Project 2025 is a 900-plus-page document prepared by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and others. Its official title is “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” and it was published in April 2023. The tome contains an avalanche of detailed prescriptions for how the government — and the country more broadly — should be run starting on Inauguration Day in January. 

By publication time, the Heritage Foundation knew good and well who the Republican presidential nominee was going to be. So, it stands to reason that it could easily be seen as a roadmap for a second Trump term or, at minimum, a love letter to Team Trump from some of the conservative movement’s best thinkers. The former president and his crew have been all over the place when asked whether they’d adopt Project 2025 should Trump win the election, vacillating between a warm embrace and saying they’d never even seen the document. 

But it occurs to me that not many people have the slightest clue about what’s actually proposed in Project 2025. Indeed, it has in many ways been reduced to a yard sign, a social media hashtag — another reason for Americans to yell at each other. 

So, we set out on this week’s episode of New Mexico in Focus to get under Project 2025’s hood a little bit and, more importantly, to explore how it would affect the people who live in this state. I enlisted political psychologist and author Martha Burk and Dede Feldman, a Democratic former state senator — both longtime contributors to our show — to help out. I hope you’ll watch the three segments I made with Martha and Dede, but I’m not going to use this space to get into what we discussed.  

Instead, I want to focus on the response we received from the New Mexico GOP when we invited them to participate in the discussion. Here it is, from party spokesperson Ash Soular: 

“Thank you for reaching out to us today. We are always inclined to discuss the actual policies of the Trump campaign, which is Agenda 47, but we will not continue the intellectually dishonest reporting that claims ‘Project 2025’ is an official platform of the Trump campaign or the Republican Party because it is neither. New Mexicans deserve to hear about the actual policies from each side to make an informed decision, and we hope you would reconsider promoting this lie that Project 2025 is a platform of the Trump campaign or the Republican Party.” 

Huh? 

In the kindest of readings, “Agenda 47” is a vacuous collection of almost entirely rhetorical policy positions that contains no data, no figures, no substantive analysis of any kind. Rather, it reads like a rough outline for one of Trump’s rally speeches: Play the hits, boss; that’s what they came to see. 

Still, fair enough. If the New Mexico Republican Party wants to talk about Agenda 47 because that is The One True Plan, we’re open to that. Senior Producer Lou DiVizio made the offer, and Soular’s reply came thusly: 

“I appreciate you hearing us out. This is the thing. We don’t know about Project 2025; again, that is not our policy nor that of the Trump campaign. Everything I’ve learned about it has been from Democrats in the media. It’s almost ridiculous how Democrats seem to know more about what’s in Project 2025 than most Republicans. From what I understand, it is the Heritage Foundation that makes these policy books every election and then shops them to either side of the political aisle, depending on who’s in office. Democrats seem to think it’s a talking point they can use, and it’s a diversion and distraction from the actual policies Republicans or Trump are running on.” 

Right, right, Project 2025, never met the guy. 

If “Democrats in the media” are the only ones talking about what a Trump Redux would mean for New Mexico — and the rest of the country — perhaps the state GOP should have accepted our invitation. 

Alas. 

– Jeff Proctor, Executive Producer