Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is launching a new ad campaign this week that will continue to tie Donald Trump to Project 2025, an aggressive right-wing agenda touted by the former president’s allies and written by several of his former administration members and appointees.
As part of a major ad push leading up to the first scheduled presidential debate between Harris and Trump on Sept. 10, the campaign plans to run daily television and digital ads in battleground states warning of the dangers of Project 2025, seen as a blueprint for a possible second Trump term — though one Trump has recently disavowed.
“Donald Trump’s back, and he’s out for control,” a narrator says in one of the new ads, dubbed “Control,” that is cut with footage of Trump saying he would “have every right to go after” his political opponents.
“And he has a plan to get it. … It’s called Project 2025, a 922-page blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president ever,” the narrator continues.
Project 2025 calls for, among other things, dismantling the Education Department, passing sweeping tax cuts, imposing sharp limits on abortion, giving the White House greater influence over the Justice Department, reducing efforts to limit climate change and increasing efforts to promote fossil fuels, drastically cutting and changing the federal workforce, and giving the president more power over the civil service.
It also includes building an “army” of conservatives ready to take jobs should Trump take office in 2025. The project was partially fueled by a desire to be ready for “Day 1” of a conservative presidency. During Trump’s first term, vacancies in key jobs contributed to chaos.
In response to Project 2025’s notoriety, Trump has tried to distance himself from the blueprint, even as its origins are with his political allies and former administration officials.
Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about the Heritage Foundation-led policy blueprint or the people behind it. “Have no idea who is in charge of it,” he wrote in a social media post in July. But in April 2022, Trump shared a 45-minute private flight with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to a conference where Trump delivered a keynote address that gestured to Heritage’s forthcoming policy proposals.
“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in the speech.
And this month, a British journalism nonprofit released footage of Project 2025 author Russell Vought, Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget director, boasting about the program’s ties to the former president.
Democrats have steadily attacked Trump over Project 2025, despite his and his campaign’s denials over their knowledge of it. Several speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week used an oversized copy of Project 2025 onstage as a prop as they centered their remarks on the far-right policy agenda.
“Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is a threat to every value that Americans hold dear … there are no limits to the extreme steps Donald Trump will take if he wins,” Quentin Fulks, a deputy manager with the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement.
Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
