'They're Going to Lay the Groundwork,' Trump Once Said of Group Leading Project 2025

Republican nominee Donald Trump's claims that he "knows nothing about" Project 2025 and has "no idea who is in charge" of it were further exposed as lies Wednesday as The Washington Post revealed that the former president shared a private jet flight with the leader of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank spearheading the far-right agenda.

The Post published a photograph of Trump posing on the 2022 flight with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who has faced national scrutiny in recent weeks over his role in crafting Project 2025 and his comments suggesting bloodshed could follow if the left refuses to capitulate to "the second American revolution" led by the former president.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the trip, Trump traveled with Roberts to a Heritage Foundation conference where the former president delivered a keynote address.

During his remarks, which resurfaced last month as Trump's campaign attempted to distance itself from Project 2025, the Republican candidate said of Heritage that "they're going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."

The Post also cited an interview it conducted this year with Roberts, who told the newspaper that he had "personally" spoken to Trump about Project 2025—something a Trump campaign spokeswoman denied.

"The flight, Trump's speech, and Roberts' interview cut against the former president's recent efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 once Democrats turned some of its most controversial proposals into a frequent campaign attack," the Post noted. "The proposals came from alumni of Trump's first term and often overlap with his own official campaign pronouncements, such as eliminating the Education Department, weakening protections for career civil servants, ending affirmative action, and reversing restrictions on greenhouse gases."

Roberts and the Heritage Foundation appear to be actively aiding the Trump campaign's attempt to detach Project 2025 from the GOP nominee's agenda. Roberts announced this week that he would delay the publication of his book, which contains a forward by Trump running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and Heritage recently issued talking points urging Project 2025 architects to stress that the agenda and Trump's White House bid are separate.

The efforts amount to a tacit acknowledgment of the far-right agenda's unpopularity with the American public, which has rapidly soured on Project 2025 as it has learned more about its proposals.

Democrats—including Vice President Kamala Harris, the party's 2024 nominee—have worked to connect Trump to Project 2025, releasing analyses highlighting the similarities between the agenda and the former president's campaign platform. In June, House Democrats launched a task force with the specific goal of "highlighting, preempting, and counteracting this right-wing plot to undermine democracy."

"The head of Project 2025 confirmed it and Donald Trump said it himself, Project 2025 will 'lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,'" James Singer, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, said in response to the Post's reporting. "Just so everyone is clear, those plans include: banning abortion, monitoring women's pregnancies, raising costs on families, and firing public servants to install extreme Trump loyalists."

During a packed rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday, Harris called Project 2025 "a plan to weaken the middle class."

"If he is elected, Donald Trump intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations," Harris said to boos from the crowd. "He intends to cut Social Security and Medicare. He intends to surrender our fight against the climate crisis and he intends to end the Affordable Care Act."