'Project 2025' insiders see Trump’s disavowal as 'two siblings in a fight' — not a rejection

MILWAUKEE — The brain trust behind “Project 2025” isn’t sweating former President Donald Trump’s disavowals of their wide-ranging presidential transition plan and policy roadmap for a potential second Trump administration.

At recent events in Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, Project 2025 proponents and allies sought to defuse tensions and go on offense against the press and Democrats, after Trump took the wind out of their sails with critical social media posts as Democrats oriented their campaign around the plans.

“The lesson of the last few days and the motivation for something like Project 2025 is to make Washington a heck of a lot less important in our lives,” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which is leading the project, said Monday during the think tank’s Policy Fest at the Republican National Convention, pointing to the assassination attempt against Trumpon Saturday.

Earlier,at the three-day National Conservatism Conference in Washington last week, more than a dozen leaders, advisers and contributors to Project 2025 and their allies made their case for drastically reconstituting the civil service, retaliating against Democrats for the ongoing prosecutions of Trump, launching mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and countering “anti-white” discrimination.

Since its 2019 launch, the conferencehas become a favored stop for the pro-Trump intelligentsia, think tank leaders and politicians who are pushing the conservative movement to keep marching in a right-wing populist and nationalist direction. Though the conference organizers are separate from Project 2025, activists connected to the effort had a strong presence there, while Project 2025 had a booth at NatCon.

Amid a stream of