Republicans recognize that publicizing their policy views was a mistake

Republicans are pretending to “shut down” Project 2025, but of course in every meaningful sense it remains alive:

The confusion led to some bad initial takes. For example, the Post released this headline, saying that Project 2025 is no longer doing policy work.

But this doesn’t really make any sense. Project 2025 already has finished its policy work. It did so in 2023. The primary product was “Mandate for Leadership” – a 900 page guide for how to run the federal government. Project 2025 might continue to promote this document with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but there is no new policy work coming out, and there never was.

Remember that the purpose of “Mandate for Leadership” is to be adopted by the Trump administration. In 2016, Heritage claimed that 2/3rds of its proposed policies in the equivalent year “Mandate for Leadership” was adopted. We don’t know yet how much a second Trump administration would adopt the current version, but the whole point was that the document was authored by Trump officials (including Dans), so its likely that a very high number of these policies would have been welcomed.

Saying that Project 2025 is no longer doing policy work is sort of like saying God is no long producing new bibles. Technically true, but misses the way in which the document exerts influence.

The other component of Project 2025 is a recruitment component, which seeks to hire 20,000 potential appointees for a second Trump administration. As Roberts notes, this component remains ongoing.

In short, Project 2025 is continuing to do what it would have been doing anyway.

Other than the fact that Trump winning would involve hyper-partisan hacks in the Trump administration trying to implement the stated goals of Project 2025, Project 2025 is totally dead!

Meanwhile, Peter Thiel hand puppet JD Vance has written the foreword for Heritage Foundation Führer Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book, which you can peruse here. The violent metaphors will get the most attention, but I thought this paragraph was the most telling:

Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred—and to the extent possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families. But we should also do something else: create the material circumstances such that having a family isn’t only for the privileged. That means better jobs at all levels of the income ladder. That means protecting American industries—even if it leads to higher consumer prices in the short term. That means listening to our young people who are telling us they can’t afford to buy a home or start a family, not just criticizing them for a lack of virtue. Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.

We should “listen” to families who can’t afford to raise families. Should we offer them assistance from the government, like Democrats tried to implement during the Biden administration? LOL no, we should just hope that with the help of a combination of upper-class tax cuts and a massive regressive and inflationary tax increase this will be provided trickle-down style by the free market. MAGA “populism” is just a word for Reaganism with nothing left to lose.