Project 2025: How the right-wing playbook is reshaping the US

First presentation in a series by UCCS Center for the Study of Evangelicalism

Project 2025 - the 900-plus page right-wing gameplan to reshape U.S. culture and the federal government - is driven by Christian nationalism, and its architects are "working actively towards implementing every single word" of it, a speaker said at a presentation on Project 2025 to hundreds of people in a Colorado Springs church on July 9.

"Christian nationalism is rooted in every part of this document," Rob Rogers, a leader of the political and management consulting firm Subterra Insights, told the standing-room-only audience at the First Congregational Church. Christian nationalism is not a formal movement but an ideology that sees America as fundamentally Christian and believes the government should operate as such.

Rogers and his colleague Melissa Hendrix, who have been researching Christian nationalism in the United States for several years, were invited by the Center for the Study of Evangelicalism at UCCS to present on Project 2025 - which is deeply intertwined with Christian nationalism, Rogers told the Pikes Peak Bulletin.

Founded in 2024, the Center for the Study of Evangelicalism is a think-tank that researches and explores the cultural, political, religious and social impacts of evangelicalism.

At audience capacity, the church had to turn some would-be attendees of the two-hour talk away as Rogers kicked off the presentation with a history of Project 2025.

According to Rogers, the right-wing manifesto first took shape when President Richard Nixon left office in 1974 and a former official lamented that there was no playbook for a conservative administration in Washington, D.C.

Eighteen months earlier, Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner co-founded The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank intended to advance conservative policies and act as a counterweight to liberal and middle-of-the-road nonprofits like the Brookings Institution. The main cash injection for the Heritage Foundation came from Colorado beer magnate Joseph Coors.

Among the successes claimed by The Heritage Foundation on its website is that nearly two-thirds of the 2,000 policy recommendations made in its "Mandate for Leadership" publication were implemented by the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

"Mandate for Leadership" is the true name of Project 2025, Rogers said. Project 2025 is its ninth iteration.

"So if you ever hear, 'Oh, Project 2025 won't be implemented,' I beg to differ," Rogers said. "They've been doing it since 1981 and they will continue to do it."

A 'sick joke'

Rogers and Hendrix showed videos of Trump saying in the run-up to the 2024 election and even years before that he had no idea what Project 2025 was - and other videos saying he did.

In one video, Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 until July 2024, said the playbook of the American right would allow them to "march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state."

To sidestep "staffing challenges" such as those that were widespread during the first Trump administration, operatives on the political right developed a personnel database that would allow them to fill positions with vetted and ideologically aligned conservatives, Hendrix said.

Selected candidates attended programs at The Heritage Foundation's "Presidential Administration Academy," where one of the trainers was Karoline Leavitt, the current White House press secretary.

There, they learned how to put Project 2025 proposals into action, including mass deportations, which have been trumpeted as a priority by the second Trump administration, Hendrix said.

As she spoke, a video compiled by the White House played on a large screen in front of the church's organ. The video, which appeared to be staged, showed a manacled person who was allegedly being deported. It had the letters "ASMR" in its title.

"That stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response," a feeling of well-being experienced by some people in response to certain stimuli, Hendrix said. The implication of the video's title is that some people have a feel-good response to deportations.

It was "a sick joke," Hendrix said.

The Trump administration's promise to carry out mass deportations is anything but.

Ending multiculturalism

Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought told an investigative journalist from the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and a professional actor, masquerading as relatives of a wealthy donor to conservative causes, in an interview conducted months before the election that "the largest deportation in history" would be implemented when Trump returned to office.

Vought, who is now director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a position he also held in the first Trump administration, also told the undercover team that a proposal was in the works "to use the military against U.S. citizens to suppress large-scale protests in response."

The aim was to end multiculturalism in the United States, the CCR quoted Vought as saying.

The Trump administration started to make good on its deportation threat within weeks of the start of his second term. Many of Trump's ardent MAGA supporters cheered as migrants, mostly Latinos, were rounded up, detained and some were sent out of the country.

Tens of thousands of people have been deported so far, although it's hard to obtain exact numbers. Domestic and international human rights groups and the United Nations' Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have expressed concern over the lack of due process provided to deportees - a Constitutional right - and the fact that some have been sent to third countries such as El Salvador and South Sudan.

Using the military to quell protests by U.S. citizens, meanwhile, is prohibited by an 1878 law that bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement unless they are authorized to do so by law. The Posse Comitatus Act was passed after the end of Reconstruction and "the return of white supremacists to political power in both southern states and Congress," according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Its aim was to ensure that the "federal military would not be used to intervene in the establishment of Jim Crow" laws that maintained racial segregation in southern states until well into the 20th century.

'Pushing women back into the home'

Project 2025 has "a white supremacy aspect" and is deeply misogynistic, Rogers and Hendrix said.

"Throughout the document … they restrict the rights of women and promote the rights of white men," Rogers told the Pikes Peak Bulletin in a phone conversation after the presentation at the church.

Christian nationalism is rooted in every part of this document. - Rob Rogers

Abortion is mentioned scores of times in Project 2025, which also calls for policy changes such as "removing condoms as women's preventative services because … women's health resources should not incorporate exclusively male contraceptive methods," Hendrix said.

It puts more hurdles in front of LGBTQ women who want to start families, and strips single mothers of "crucial support systems that allow them to sustain their families," including the federally funded Head Start program, which provides early childhood education, health, nutrition and other services to low-income families with young children.

"Numerous studies show that access to affordable child care is critical to a woman's success in the workplace," Hendrix said.

Men are portrayed as struggling to provide for their families, and needing assistance, guidance and financial breaks, while women - especially those who may not adhere to "traditional marriage norms" - are "expected to navigate economic and familial struggles with zero protections," she said.

"How many women were out there on the front row of a Trump rally, cheering him on while they had already been stripped of their rights?" Rogers said. "They are pushing women back into the home to have babies."

"They're saying whatever is needed in order to get someone to vote a certain way, knowing full well that they're going to turn on them and betray that vote, betray that trust later on.

"And they're going to do it to Christians, too, eventually," he told the Bulletin.

In fact, they may have already started. Latino immigrants have bolstered the numbers attending evangelical and charismatic Christian churches in the United States, which, Rogers said, play a lead role in pushing Christian nationalist rhetoric.

Forty-two percent of Latinos voted for Trump in 2024, a record for a Republican candidate.

Weeks into his second term, the same percentage of Latinos said they were worried that they or someone close to them could be swept up in the Trump deportations, which have mainly targeted their community.

"They're like, 'You never think that the tiger is going to eat your face,'" said Rogers, using a phrase coined on social media to describe voters who vote in a way that probably isn't in their best interest, and are then surprised when their own lives are negatively impacted as a result.

The Project 2025 presentations are Wednesdays in July from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church (20 E. St. Vrain St.). The next presentation, on July 23, will cover "Family, Education and Rights." The final talk on July 30 is titled "Where Do We Go From Here?" and will feature Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham, author of the book "The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America."