The alarming world of ‘Project 2025’ training videos featuring Trump officials and allies
A series of leaked training videos provides new insights into Project 2025, including appearances by officials and allies of former President Donald Trump - who has disavowed the proposal despite numerous direct ties to the effort.
Across 14 hours of videos, obtained by ProPublica and Documented, a series of 36 speakers, more than two-thirds of whom worked for the Trump administration or one of Trump’s campaigns,
Project 2025 is a think tank proposal for policies and efforts under Trump should he win in November. Many are far-right priorities and target Social Security cuts, ending abortion rights and numerous other objectives.
The videos, part of the program’s Presidential Administration Academy initiative for members of an incoming administration, include a guest casting doubt on climate change and gender equity, as well others offering tips such as avoiding reading mainstream newspapers and suggesting not leaving a paper trail of government documents to avoid future public scrutiny.
In “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” a video about watchwords and key concepts to be aware of, activist Bethany Kozma, a former deputy chief of staff for the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, describes climate policies as part of an “ultimate goal to control people.”
“Climate change, allegedly, is everywhere and if the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” she says in the video.
“When I think of climate change, I immediately think of population control, don’t you?” she adds. “I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the ‘impact on the environment.’”
In the same video, Katie Sullivan, a former assistant acting attorney general under Trump, argues a new president should take aim at school curricula on LGBTQ+ issues and roll back Joe Biden’s initiatives to promote gender equity within government.
“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” Sullivan says in the video.
Other videos contain advice to future staffers to avoid readining The New York Times or Washington Post and choose conservative media sites intead. Others suggest handling sensitive matters in person to avoid creating documents that could later be subject to the Freedom of Information Act or reported by the press.
The Independent has contacted Kozma, Sullivan and the Heritage Foundation, creator of Project 2025, for comment.
The Trump campaign has maintained it doesn’t have ties to the project, and that its campaign platform is Trump’s only official agenda, despite numerous links between Trump, running mate JD Vance and the right-wing wishlist.
During a recent rally, Trump dismissed the project as “seriously extreme,”
“Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, I don’t even know, some of them I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative,” Trump said. “They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left.”
“But I don’t know anything about it, I don’t want to know anything about it.”
The denial came after Democrats increasingly campaigned using warnings about Project 2025, and flies in the face of numerous connections.
Vance wrote the foreward to a forthcoming book about the project by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, describing the agenda as an “essential weapon.”
In 2022, Trump took a private jet flight with Roberts to a Heritage conference, and Roberts told The Washington Post this month, “I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025.”
Paul Dans, a former Trump adviser who directed Project 2025, stepped down from the initiative in July, and the book about Project 2025 has been delayed until after the election.
“There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours – and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country,” Roberts toldThe Independent in a statement. “That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”