Project 2025: How the Religious Right Captured Trump's Agenda [WATCH]
According to one tracker, Trump has already adopted 100 policies from the 920-page document.
Just as the Republican primaries were kicking off in the spring of 2023, The Heritage Foundation—a giant in the world of far-right politics—released Project 2025, a 922-page document laying out plans for a Republican presidency. While Trump remained close with The Heritage Foundation during his first term, he insisted throughout his campaign that he was not affiliated with Project 2025—calling it “seriously extreme” with some “ridiculous and abysmal” proposals. Even though at least 140 Trump administration officials contributed to the report, he claimed he didn’t know who was behind it, and his campaign advisors said that “[r]eports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
But Trump’s first five months in office paint a very different picture. According to the independently run Project 2025 Tracker, the administration has already implemented over 40% of the document’s policy proposals. These include a slew of anti-LGBTQ actions, such as un-banning health care discrimination based on gender identity, ending trans-related data collection and defining sex as an immutable biological fact.
To understand the implications of Trump’s alignment with Project 2025, we spoke with three experts on Christian extremism and the far right. Tina Fetner, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer and Peter Montgomery offer their insights here.
Watch the full interview above or read the transcript here:
Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, I'm Spencer Macnaughton. Today I am here with a panel of three certified experts on far-right extremism in the United States as well as Project 2025. All, thank you so much for being here today.
Peter Montgomery: Great to be here, thanks.
SM: What did Project 2025 promise, in a nutshell, as it relates to LGBTQ rights?
PM: In a very big picture sense, Project 2025 laid out a Christian Nationalist vision for the country that is threatening, obviously, to LGBTQ rights. And in the introduction to the big tome, Kevin Roberts, the head of The Heritage Foundation, laid out a pretty restrictive view of freedom. Which was that freedom is not the ability to live how you want, it's the ability to live how you ought to according to the Bible. And so while there weren't a lot of details on anti-gay things that I can recall from the 900 pages, they certainly laid out an attack on trans Americans that we've seen unfold[ing].
Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer: The conservative movement writ large, and The Heritage Foundation in particular, they’ve done a very good job of couching their language in a way that doesn't raise alarm bells to mainstream readers. It's hard to find things that are very explicitly anti-gay, although they have no qualms hiding their anti-trans stances, probably because they think that that's like a winning wedge issue. But when it comes to, say, lesbian and gay families or sexual orientation, they try to tone that language down. So they'll talk about traditional families or they'll talk about traditional gender roles, which are dog whistles or not, depending on how good you are at listening to those things.
SM: What do we know about The Heritage Foundation, the authors of Project 2025, and what they think when it comes to LGBTQ rights?
PM: They're against [them]! So Heritage is the granddaddy of right-wing think tanks and, in many ways, it's one of the major hubs of the right wing and religious right movements in the U.S. And Brian Anderson, who used to be at Heritage, laid out a plan to overturn marriage equality even before the Supreme Court had finalized that ruling 10 years ago. And so Heritage has always been an opponent of legal equality for LGBTQ people. And the thing to remember about Project 2025 is that it was housed and launched from Heritage, but there's a hundred right-wing organizations who endorsed [it], who took part [in it], and it includes the legal groups who are actively opposing our equality and who are actively trying to overturn Obergefell.
Tina Fetner: I see The Heritage Foundation as being that face of right-wing activism that makes really extremist views palatable, makes it seem less extreme in order to package it in a way that facilitates the policy moves that it's making.
SM: Can we unpack that a little bit more? What do you think's going on behind the scenes in terms of strategy talks to create a message that is still intentionally trying to roll back all LGBTQ rights but is still presented in a way that it winds up being digestible to a large proportion of Americans?
MSR: The way they use appealing and neutral and legitimate language of science and expertise to appeal to large groups of people in a way that allows them to neutralize what could be the stigmatizing language of, say, right-wing conservative Christian viewpoints that don't appeal to broad audiences. But the idea that something is based in science, or is based in a rational judgment, makes their language appealing both to a broad public and also to decision-makers, particularly judges, but also lawmakers who can use the language that's produced by these organizations in order to justify their decisions in a way that doesn't seem like it's based on religious animosity or non-religious animosity. And so The Heritage Foundation is really useful because it has a lot of resources and a lot of people cycle in and out of its fellowship programs and connect to the galaxy of other organizations. They’re very effective at then providing a veneer of legitimacy by doing the networking without the more extreme groups being visible in the process. And I think that's a key aspect of what they do is provide–they have their Heritage Foundation location right next to Union Station in D.C. that's very professional. It doesn't at all evoke what we might imagine when we think of an extreme organization.
PM: There's a huge emphasis on being winsome, on making your arguments in ways that will be appealing to people outside just the right-wing bubble. And so I think we've seen a lot of that hijacking of the language of civil rights and talking about efforts to promote diversity and inclusion and to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. And we see the right try to turn that around as discrimination against straight white Christian men. And we see this rhetoric that the most discriminated against, the most persecuted people in this country are white Christian men. And of course that is ludicrous, but it's the kind of twisting of messaging that we see from folks like Heritage and their allies.
TF: The very way that The Heritage Foundation message appeals to neutral audiences or professionals or policymakers or the Republican Party, for example? It doesn't necessarily appeal to the on-the-ground evangelical constituencies that form the base of anti-gay activism and the religious right. Those communities are much more interested in an explicitly religious [country]. They genuinely believe in the devil.
MSR: The problem is that they've been very skillful at using concepts that are broadly appealing and that are difficult to argue against logically. Who's against viewpoint diversity, right? It's difficult to argue against that. But as we know, viewpoint diversity is also being used right now to target universities and scientific knowledge producers. And it's being used in a way to explicitly ban and censor scholars.
SM: During the campaign, obviously, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even though over 140 of his former administration officials contributed to the document. Since then, according to Project 2025 tracker online, Trump has adopted 100 policies and put them into effect officially and 62 more are in progress of being adopted. As folks who have been researching this as your day job, what are your biggest concerns as you see this happening in real time in the U.S.?
TF: I think it's useful to compare Trump's first term with this term, right? Because I think one of the things that helps me understand what's going on is to draw a line of distinction between the kind of cultural antagonism that Trump has always embraced. That's there and it's still there, but it didn't result in the kind of widespread policy change. The difference between then and now is exactly Project 2025 and other similar kinds of efforts where the on-the-ground activist organizations institutionally decided to take this on at the policy level and wrote the policies and put the pen in his hand in a number of different ways, and they were ready for this moment to get their own agenda at the forefront of national, state and local policies. And so the difference is that the activist groups really prepared for this moment and now we have no end of things to keep our eye on.
PM: What I'm most afraid of is that we're really only four months in. And that this was, as Tina said, the whole right-wing movement envisioning that they could use an authoritarian-minded president to really advance their very big and very long-term agenda, which is to eliminate a century of progressive reform and progress. To roll back the constitutional underpinnings of the New Deal and the Great Society. They have very big ideas. And now that Trump has a completely compliant and complicit Congress that is not willing to challenge him, it's full speed ahead on Project 2025. And part of Project 2025 is just ignoring and steamrolling over the built-in checks and balances. And that, I think, is another part of the very scary parts of this.
MSR: From a European and comparative perspective, what we know is that authoritarian regimes target women and LGBTQ people as part of a process to undermine democracy. And so we have plenty of examples from other cases, including Hungary, which Trump and his allies cite as an example to look up to to reproduce in the United States where targeting LGBTQ people and women is not just a canary in the coal mine, it's actually a core part of the project. So you attack women and LGBTQ people in order to justify and also implement anti-democratic processes. And we're seeing that happen right now. And that one thing that seems to be happening now that Project 2025 helped happen is to paper over divisions among right-wing organizations and groups, that they could all coalesce around a common goal and have less dissension than they might otherwise have and that has so far been effective.
TF: This is exactly the point that I was going to make, that the groups on the ground don't necessarily have the same agenda. There are plenty of groups that want the authoritarianism to turn into a Christian theocracy. And they're explicit about that. But other groups are industrialists that want deregulation. Other groups are just rich people that want tax cuts. Other groups are anti-abortion. This is pushing in a direction where all of these different kinds of smaller groups are getting what they want.
SM: What is incentivizing Trump to be in bed with Project 2025 and the religious right?
TF: I think probably the main policy outcome that he's interested in is tax cuts on the rich for himself, right? I think he's a very self-serving kind of person. And in order to do that, he will embrace whatever community is willing to support him on that path. And so this is just useful to him in that way.
PM: He's already this huge egotistical narcissist, right? Well, then he's got this whole group of people who are constantly telling him, “God chose you to be where you are, you are on a divine mission.” So they sort of put this whole right-wing Project 2025 agenda as part of a divine mission. And you see Trump adopting their rhetoric more and more. I don't know what's inside his heart. So I can't judge how much of that might be him starting to believe it, or if it's just instrumental and transactional and political. But we see more and more of that.
SM: My concern when I think about this is that a lot of far-right Christian people in the United States genuinely believe that patriarchal governance structures are the way we should be living. So how far could it go?
PM: I do think that's one of the things that has happened under Trump and with the MAGA movement, right? It has created space for people that might've been considered really fringe not long ago to now be part of basically the regime's governing coalition. And so we have some of these explicit white Christian nationalists who are very happy to say, “I don't think non-Christians should be able to hold public office. I don't think women should be in political leadership.” They're out there saying that. And some of these people are very closely tied to MAGA insiders like Russ Vought. Like Pete Hegseth, who goes to a church that's part of Dominionist Doug Wilson's network. And he's very much part of this explicit, patriarchal, Christian nationalist agenda. And to get to a point Tina made earlier, some of these same folks are also very happy to talk about gay people as perverts, and perversion, and going back to the language that the religious right had kind of cleaned themselves up from. But now we have these more hardcore folks who feel empowered to just embrace the bigotry and to say, “Yeah, it's not just about marriage equality. We need to fight these perverts. We need to say that homosexuality itself is something horrible that society should not tolerate.”
MSR: One thing that we know from the scholarship is that when it comes to regressive regimes, authoritarian regimes, strict gender roles are often a crucial component. It was the Department of Transportation that put together a proposal that in parts of the country where you have the highest marriage rates and the highest birth rates that those regions would receive more funding and grants and you also see other explicit proposals to encourage natalism. And as we know from other locations and from the past when you've got pro-natalist policies, those are very much anti-gender equality policies.
TF: Taking away women's right to vote, having one vote per family that is organized around the male head of household. And so these arguments are out there in mainstream discourse again now, and so there are no limits to how far some parts of the population want to go. And these are not very popular ideas. And this is the open question right now: How long will this moment last? How much retrenchment of rights will be possible? And how much resistance is gonna hold the line before we fall fully into an authoritarian regime that leans heavily into Christian theocracy?
SM: What are your biggest concerns as it relates to gay, lesbian and bisexual rights now? I mean, thinking about what Trump's doing with Project 2025. And then also having Speaker of the House Mike Johnson having a horrific track record with LGBTQ rights, having compared gay marriage to giving your pet or pedophiles the right to marry?
TF: It feels very much like we're back in the 1990s again to me. The LGBTQ movement had a time when it was not taking on trans issues as part of the coalition. And for these same kind of scarcity of rights kinds of reasons that, “Oh, they won't come after me. They won't come after us if we keep some distance from the trans community.” When the organizations on the ground decided that they were going to fight not just for rights based on sexual orientation, but also on gender identity and explicitly put those into the anti-discrimination policies that they fought for from one state to another state. That was the way it has been for a couple decades now. And it's absolutely possible for that very tight coalition to fall apart again, and it's really up to the activists and the people on the ground to decide what direction they're going.
PM: I would say that pushing that wedge was an explicit strategy from the religious right. I mean, I was at a religious right event maybe six or seven years ago, but this was a panel and it was like, “We are going to wedge the T from the LGB.” And they talked about that in the context of winning school board races by demonizing trans people because they knew that the American public no longer was willing to accept that kind of demonization when it comes to gay people. And so trans people were more vulnerable, and the religious right has really taken advantage of that. I think the idea of these so-called “LGB activists” who wanna jettison trans people from the coalition, they think that somehow the religious right and Christian Nationalists are gonna stop and that appeasement is gonna help them. And it's not. The Alliance Defending Freedom is not just going after trans people. They want to reverse marriage equality. They want the laws to reflect their religious beliefs about gender, traditional family roles, and everything like that. All the other religious right groups that are part of the Project 2025 Coalition? They not only oppose marriage equality, they oppose Lawrence v. Texas. They were arguing that states should still be able to criminalize gay people and their relationships. So we should all keep that in mind.
SM: Do you think gay marriage will be overturned?
PM: I think there's a very good chance that it will. I'm not a lawyer, I'll say that up front, but the Liberty Council is one of the legal religious right groups that's pushing the court to overturn it. They take a lot of hope from just how strident Chief Justice John Roberts' dissent from Obergefell was. Whether some of the right-wing justices will decide it's too early, whether they'll hang their hat on some version of stare decisis, I don't know. But I would not be at all surprised to see it overturned.
MSR: I think whether or not they overturn Obergefell outright is an open question, but it's no doubt going to be the case that they will find other ways to diminish the capacity of same-sex couples to get married in one way or another. Whether that be allowing states to create certain kinds of exemptions. We've already seen other cases that aren't actually about getting married, but about recognizing marriages: 303 Creative, or the Masterpiece CakeShop case, all of those are examples of using religious freedom as an excuse to diminish access to certain rights.
TF: There's a lot of fronts on which the right-wing organizations are willing to place their resources to attack that's short of undermining marriage equality. But I do think that LGBT activist organizations and all the organizations that fight for equality are gonna need a strategy to hang on to these laws.
SM: What do you think folks can do to push back against all this? Because I think to be an LGBTQ person in this country right now is very, very intense and concerning.
TF: The LGBT community has been fighting for decades and centuries. It’s capable of fighting. It has got a lot of organizational capacity and more resources than it's ever had before. And it's time to get on the ground and keep fighting, form coalitions with all of the other issue groups. Form the coalitions with the people fighting for immigrants' rights. Form the coalitions with the people that argue against all of the attacks on DEI and all the racist attacks that are going on. Form the coalitions with the pro-life groups.
PM: Most Americans support our legal equality, including marriage equality. It's more than two-thirds in the latest Gallup poll. And so, we should be confident in saying that the people that are trying to take away our rights do not represent most Americans. The people who oppose our equality have power right now. And they're gonna cause harm with it. But we still have the majority of the American people. I think people should plug in with their statewide equality groups and local groups. Because a lot of these attacks come at the state level, and local level, and it may sometimes feel like you can have more of an impact there.
MSR: I would also add that we should, on a really basic level, think about the messaging that has worked in the past, and also think about the messaging that works for conservatives. So conservatives are really good at mobilizing moms and using mom expressions, like Moms for Liberty. Well, lesbians are some of the fiercest moms I know. So if you're a lesbian mom, maybe you could use your voice as a mom to get out there and speak as a mom. And we see this also as parents of trans kids. Talking, using the language of the right. The right is very good about parents' rights, and parental autonomy, and let me as a parent decide what's right for my kids. I think that LGBTQ people and their allies can use that kind of language too to speak to other people.
SM: How do you think we'll look back on this moment in 2025 in America?
TF: The people who have fought for LGBTQ rights throughout the last hundred years did so under circumstances that were less favorable in terms of public opinion. And they stood up bravely and fought for rights anyway. And this is the moment, when we're writing the history that other people are gonna read 20, 40, 50 years down the line. And so I really think it's important to get the inspiration from those stories and then put both your feet on the ground and think, “Okay, how do we take the next step now?”
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This was not an objective article! What a joke!