The Claremont Institute, of course, is one of the conservative outfits pushing the Agenda 2025 platform Trump, and some of his campaign team, insist upon continually lying about.
"J.D. Vance Apparently Thinks Amazon Funded the Black Lives Matter Movement It’s increasingly hard to believe they vetted this guy."
Could be simply that Trump thought, Vance is so much a younger me that i want him. He may have left the first bit out when he pressured the RNC.
"Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos,” Mr. Vance said, referencing the riots that broke out in the summer of 2020, amid a wave of racial justice protests. “The people who are invested in destroying America via our corporate class are also getting rich from it. This is an important piece of the puzzle to understand. P - If you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefiting financially from it,” he argued in the speech at a conference in suburban Washington, D.C., hosted by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing California think tank that has emerged as an ally of the MAGA movement. P - Please believe that this is not an example of some sort of new conservative “populism.” Vance aimed at Bezos not out of a desire to break Amazon’s monopolistic power in the marketplace but because, by the strange lights of the modern conservative brains, Bezos is guilty of “woke capitalism.”"
Trump disavows Project 2025, but he has long-standing ties to some key architects
Former President Donald Trump has claimed to know “nothing” about the conservative road map for a second term, but some of his top former advisers are heavily involved with it.
VIDEO - 'Not convincing' that Donald Trump knows nothing about Project 2025
July 12, 2024, 6:27 AM GMT+10 By Vaughn Hillyard and Alexandra Marquez
As President Joe Biden’s campaign seeks to rebound from his rough debate performance two weeks ago, it has increasingly tried to turn the attention to former President Donald Trump about Project 2025, an expansive conservative plan backed by more than 100 groups for Trump’s potential second administration.
Over the last week, Trump has tried to put some distance between himself and Project 2025.
"I know nothing about Project 2025," he said in a Truth Social post Friday. "I have no idea who is behind it.”
He doubled down in a social media post Thursday morning, saying, "I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it."
But many of Trump’s key allies have been directly involved in producing the project, which includes a 900-plus page policy road map and personnel database gathered by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank leading the effort.
President Donald Trump projected on a screen at the Heritage Foundation's President's Club meeting in Washington on Oct. 17, 2017. Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
Trump also spoke highly about the group's plans at a dinner sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, saying: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
The project’s website bills it as a “governing agenda” that would “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”
The website also notes that the project is backed by over 100 conservative organizations, many led by close allies of Trump, including Turning Point USA, the Center for Renewing America, the Claremont Institute, the Family Policy Alliance, the Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty and America First Legal — the latter of which is led by Stephen Miller, a top former Trump adviser.
Former Trump administration officials who have been directly affiliated with Project 2025 include former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn and former Justice Department senior counsel Gene Hamilton.
Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, is also the Republican National Committee’s platform policy director.
Kristen Eichamer at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on Aug. 14. Charlie Neibergall / AP
Despite the differences between the official platform and Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation is intertwined with the RNC and has been for years.
A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told NBC News that it will have a sponsored presence at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, as it did at the GOP conventions in 2016 and 2012.
The group was also intimately involved with Trump's transition to the White House in 2016. Beginning that August, top Heritage officials — including Ed Meese, Ed Feulner, Bill Walton and Kay Coles James — became key players in identifying personnel to fill out the administration.
The Trump campaign declined to comment on who could be a part of a 2025 transition team. Typically, a party’s nominee selects a transition team several months before the general election.
In a statement to NBC News, Biden campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitka called Project 2025 "extreme," and said it's, "written and led by [Trump's] own inner circle — the same extremists who stacked Trump’s first administration with loyalists and fired anyone who opposed his dangerous instincts, and the same enablers who will help Trump go even further to ‘terminate’ the Constitution, get ‘revenge’ on his enemies, and govern as a ‘dictator on day one’ if he wins this November. Donald Trump and Project 2025 are one in the same — and they’re both going to lose this November.”
He has also promised to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden, alleging that the justice system under the Biden administration is “two-tiered” and “weaponized.”
Project 2025’s handbook echoes that .. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-17.pdf , saying the Biden administration has executed an “unprecedented politicization and weaponization of the [Justice] department,” which demands “a comprehensive response from the next Administration.”
Still, Trump’s campaign denies that the authors of Project 2025 are in any way shaping his plans for a potential administration.
Senior campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement last year that “unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”
Vaughn Hillyard is a correspondent for NBC News.
Alexandra Marquez is a politics reporter for NBC News.
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