Project 2025 Leader Celebrates Donald Trump’s Victory

One of the key figures behind the Project 2025 policy manifesto extended enthusiastic congratulations to former President Donald Trump following his victory in the 2024 presidential election.

After Trump’s victory in Wisconsin put him over the 270 threshold needed to seal another term in the White House, world leaders and domestic allies have raced to commend the soon-to-be 47^th Commander in Chief.

“President Trump has achieved a historic and hard-fought victory: overcoming four sham indictments, surviving two assassination attempts, and overcoming an unprecedented mid-race candidate swap to become the first president since Grover Cleveland to win two nonconsecutive terms,” Kevin Roberts said in a statement issued Tuesday evening.

Roberts is president of The Heritage Foundation and its sister organization Heritage Action, the former of which is the think tank behind the contentious policy document Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project.

Published in 2023, the 900-page document contains 30 essays penned by various conservative political thinkers and former officials, which together outline ways in which the federal government could be reshaped to tackle the “moral and foundational challenges America faces in this moment of history.”

The document’s recommendations on abortion, immigration and executive control over the federal bureaucracy saw it dubbed by the ACLU “a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals,” and attempts to link the project with Trump became a key line of attack for Democrats throughout the campaign.

Donald Trump has repeatedly denied any formal links to Project 2025, after Kamala Harris alluded to it during her speech at the Democratic National Convention, telling his followers on Truth Social that he had “absolutely nothing to do with” the document.

Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign for its response to Roberts’ message, and to inquire what role the Heritage Foundation will play in the upcoming administration.

However, a July review of the document by CNN found that “at least 140 people” who had worked in Trump’s previous administration had been involved in Project 2025. These included former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during Trump’s first term, and who co-edited the policy initiative.

In 2018, The Heritage Foundation claimed that Trump had “embraced nearly two-thirds” of the policy recommendations outlined in an earlier Mandate for Leadership publication, of which Project 2025 was the ninth iteration, during his first year in office.

Photos obtained by The Washington Post in August showed Trump onboard a private jet with the think tank’s Roberts, as the pair traveled to a Heritage Foundation event in April 2022. The Post pointed out that this contradicted the former president’s previous claim that he had “no idea who is in charge” of Project 2025.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump reportedly said in his keynote address at the conference.

The foreword for Roberts’ upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, was written by Trump’s running mate JD Vance, in which the Ohio senator wrote that the Heritage Foundation had been “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” according to an early copy obtained by The Associated Press.

“We look forward to this historic term, during which President Trump has an opportunity to make America great, healthy, safe, and prosperous once again,” Roberts said on Tuesday.

“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state.”

Following Trump’s victory, pundit Matt Walsh took to X to claim that Project 2025 would donate the guiding principles to Trump’s imminent administration.

“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” Walsh wrote,

Steve Bannon, a former chief strategist in the Trump White House administration, remarked on Walsh’s post a few hours later during the first post-election episode of his War Room podcast.

“Matt Walsh, I think, is a very smart and funny guy,” Bannon said, before reading out the comment. “Now that the election is over, I think we can finally say that, yeah, actually, Project 2025 is the agenda.”

Do you have a story we should be covering? Do you have any questions about this article? Contact LiveNews@newsweek.com.

Update 11/06/24 1:36 p.m. ET: This article was updated to include comments from Matt Walsh and Steve Bannon