Politiken’s analysis traces large parts of Trump’s policies back to Project 2025

A Christian nationalist project

Besides The Heritage Foundation a long list of partner organizations is behind Project 2025. Across 922 pages the contributors lay out their vision for America and offer specific recommendations across the government.

»It is a manifesto and as much of a blueprint as it can be«, Niels Bjerre-Poulsen points out, »and it is a self-declared Christian nationalist project«.

That is evident in the four promises identified by Project 2025 as the most important for the next conservative President to fulfill: restore the family as the centerpiece of American life, dismantle the administrative state, defend the nations’ sovereignty, borders and bounty against globale threats and secure Americans’ »God-given individuals right to live freely.

Among the recommendations in Project 2025 is a yes to eliminating the Department of Education, mass deportations of immigrants who reside in the United States illegally and an energy policy which embraces Trump’s »drill, baby, drill« as opposed to green transition – and a no to abortion and transgender persons, many international organizations and treaties, like the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement, and everything having to do with diversity, equality and inclusion.

Derek Beach, professor at the Institute of Political Science at Aarhus University, agrees to some extent that Project 2025 is Christian nationalist but hesitates to characterize it as conservative.

»This is perhaps more how the alt-right’s answer would be to the challenges«, he says.

The first edition of ‘Mandate for Leadership’ came out in 1981 and became sort of a Bible to the Reagan Revolution. A new edition has been put together for all Presidential Elections ever since, but none has had the same impact as Project 2025 – including the one that was published in three parts leading up to the Presidential Election in 2016 which Donald Trump shockingly won against Hillary Clinton.

Project 2025 Tracker which began on the social media Reddit but evolved into its own online platform follows the implementation of Project 2025 in real time. It shows that 51 percent of the 320 recommendations that are being tracked have been implemented during the first year of Trump’s second term.

»The first time, they were almost shocked to have won, and that slowed their momentum. This time, they arrived with a far more detailed plan for how to use executive power and reshape federal institutions«, says Jacob Smith, associate professor of political science at Fordham University.

A string of executive orders

The well-prepared exercise of power became evident a mere six hours after Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time on January 20, 2025. In Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., he settled in behind a desk upon which nine folders with a document in each sat in a pile and instructed Staff Secretary William O. Scharf by his side to read aloud into the microphone what he would be signing.

»The first item President Trump will be signing is the rescissions of 78 Biden-era executive actions, executive orders, presidential memoranda and others«, William O. Scharf proclaimed before Trump with a serious expression held up the signed document for the TV cameras and the cheering crowd.

And so, it went on for five more minutes before Trump got up. He was far from finished, though. Later, he signed 37 additional documents in The Oval Office. An early indication of Trump’s approach to the Presidency.

During the first year of his second term Trump has primarily governed by executive order. 229 executive orders to be precise.

By comparison Trump, in his first term, signed 220 executive orders. In four years. Joe Biden totaled 162 executive orders. Only Franklin D. Roosevelt and his predecessor Herbert Hoover surpass Trump in number of executive orders on average by year – as you can see in this graphic going all the way to Roosevelt’s second term in 1937.

Performative use of emergency powers

There are also many executive orders, memoranda and proclamations which don’t overlap with Project 2025. Some reflect the President’s pet issues, such as the declassification of files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In other documents, Trump invokes emergency powers to justify measures ranging from the introduction of retaliatory tariffs to the deployment of the National Guard in cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., even though emergency powers are not mentioned in that way a single time in Project 2025.

»He is trying to use retaliatory tariff under emergency powers that clearly have nothing to do with national security«, Niels Bjerre-Poulsen says, adding:

»One cannot claim that 150 countries are threatening national security«.

But why is Trump inventing national emergencies and issuing orders that, by all appearances, are illegal?

Derek Beach has a suggestion.

»Deploying the National Guard to fight crime is purely performative. And a lot of what Trump does is. The National Guard has no authority. It is not allowed to fight crime. And usually, it is not deployed where crime is supposed to take place«, he says.

The use of emergency powers is now before The Supreme Court, along with several other orders including the attempt to revoke birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

No legislative agenda

Not everything in Project 2025 can be carried out by executive order. Some things take an act of Congress. As the President is not a member of the legislative branch, he is forced to rely on his acolytes in Congress if he wants to introduce a bill.

»What’s striking about Project 2025, though, is that none of the proposals requiring legislation have been enacted. Everything that has happened so far has come through executive actions. The things Trump could eliminate with a stroke of a pen, he has. But the larger structural dismantling — changes to commissions, agencies, or statutory programs — requires Congress, and Congress isn’t doing anything«, Thomas Balcerski says.

The Republican Party are even in the majority in both chambers of Congress. Still, only 64 bills were passed in 2025, Congressional data show according to The New York Times, marking the second-lowest total since 2001.

»Relying so heavily on executive orders comes with risks. If someone like Gavin Newsom were to win in 2028, he could reverse many of these policies on day one«, Jacob Smith explains referring to the Governor of California who very well could be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028 and has drawn attention for his very direct criticism of Trump, whom he has also parodied on social media.

Gregg Nunziata, director of the conservative legal organization Society for the Rule of Law and former advisor of Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he served as Senator of Florida, points to something else as the overriding reason for the limited number of enacted laws.

»The President has no legislative agenda«, he says, calling it »shocking, remarkable and, in some ways, a bit of a paradox«.

»In our country, in our system, you really cannot make lasting change without legislation«, Nunziata who started his career as an intern at The Heritage Foundation elaborates.

When Trump bypasses Congress, and it voluntarily cedes power to the President, it ironically runs counter to a key concession in Project 2025, Derek Beach points out.

»They want a stronger executive branch, but Project 2025 still acknowledges that Congress is the primary actor in government«.

Hostility to the civil service

That brings us to the parts of Project 2025 that worry experts the most.

To Project 2025, the main enemy is not Congress, but rather the civil service.

»The federal government is a behemoth weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before«, it reads in the foreword.

The claim aligns with the conspiracy theory of ‘the deep state’ – an alleged hidden power structure within the government – which in Project 2025 is referred to as ‘the administrative state’ and is supposedly run by a woke elite in the civil service who sympathizes with the radical left and looks down on »the workers who shower after work instead of before«, as the document puts it.

»The way they talk about the woke elite is really disparaging and far removed from the traditional, polite conservative language. We saw that anger expressed with someone like Newt Gingrich in the 1990s but it has really intensified in Project 2025«, Derek Beach says with regards to the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Russell Vought who has prepared Trump’s implementation of Project 2025 has taken credit for the strategy of labelling the federal government »woke and weaponized«.

»If you’re watching television and the words ‘woke and weaponized’ come out of a politician’s mouth, you can know that this is coming … from the strategies we’re putting out«, Vought boasted in a recording obtained by ProPublica.

Russell Vought worked in the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the first Trump White House and is now once again leading it. Behind closed doors he has stated that the goal is for bureaucrats to be seen as »villains« and be »traumatized«.

In order to dismantle ‘the administrative state’, Project 2025, drawing on the Reagan-era motto ‘Personnel is policy’, aims at expanding the number of politically appointees from the roughly 4,000 that is customary when a new president takes office to 50,000. By reclassifying career officials to political appointees under the category Schedule F, they will be easier to fire and replace with loyalists.

»Loyalty to the President is valued more than almost any form of expertise«, Niels Bjerre-Poulsen says.

Or, as Derek Beach puts it:

»You remove many of the career officials who actually knows something and insert yes-men«.

Schedule F was initially implemented late in Trump’s first term but was rescinded by Joe Biden. When Trump returned to The Oval Office, he reinstituted it with an executive order on day one.

It is nothing new for Republicans to hold the position that it should be harder for career officials to retard or undermine the President. But Project 2025 and Trump »runs with it in a direction which I think gets disturbed«, Gregg Nunziata says.

»A hostility to expertise writ large is wedded to a President who is pretty open about his desire to bend the government not just to his policy agenda, but to his personal whim. And so I think it’s really dangerous«, he says, adding:

»A presidency that is so committed to governing through executive orders and transactions with individual companies is really erosive to how we understand government or a normal system of government. It undermines the rule of law in a very direct way. It’s kind of teaching the people, stakeholders, companies that it’s not the law that matters. It’s the preferences of the people in power«.

Unprecedented concentration of power

That is why Schedule F is »absolutely crucial« to Project 2025 and »the most dangerous part« of the document according to Niels Bjerre-Poulsen and Derek Beach whose concern is shared by several American experts.

Another element that is cause for concern entails the legal theory known as The Unitary Executive Theory.

»That is the interpretation Project 2025 opens with: that the President is the only one elected by all Americans, and therefore he should have more power, while Congress should have less. The overall theme is to weaken the checks and balances and shift more power to the President and the people handpicked to work for him«, Niels Bjerre-Poulsen says, adding:

»It is a very radical interpretation and, in my opinion, a clear misreading of the spirit of the Constitution«.

The theory is based on a very narrow interpretation of Article 2 which opens with the words: »The executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States«.

»Under that theory, the president wields vast authority to direct the government at every level. And we’re seeing that play out«, Thomas Balcerski points out.

Derek Beach concurs.

»The strong executive in Project 2025 reflects a form of populist nationalism that Trump shares, centered on the will of the people. The idea that the President embodies the will of the people«, he says.

The result is an unprecedented concentration of power in The White House which Trump in several cases – based on the false claim that he won in a landslide – has used, at breakneck pace, to push beyond Project 2025.

Since taking office he has initiated what he has labelled »retribution« against political adversaries with the help of the Justice Department and the FBI, a white-washing of American history, a trade war and a regular – and according to multiple experts illegal – war on what his administration has defined as »narco-terrorists«. He has even ended eight wars – at least according to himself.

Along the way he has enriched himself, his family, friends and allies, sued media outlets and universities, ignored court orders and Congress, acted as the language police, named multiple things after himself and demolished one part of The White House and gilded other parts. He has demonized his opponents while pardoning many of his criminal supporters – including the roughly 1,500 who was convicted of their role in the attack on the Capitol – and in doing so condoning political violence. Most recently, he has captured the president of Venezuela and threatened Denmark and other NATO-countries with retaliatory tariffs unless he gets to buy Greenland against the will of Greenlanders and Danes, thereby undermining the defense alliance and the rules-based world order.

The cage is gone

None of this appears in Project 2025. In many ways, reality has dramatically outpaced the script.

»The policies of the Trump administration have been far more revolutionary, ambitious and far-reaching«, Derek Beach observes.

In his view, this is because the authors of Project 2025 focused more on what they thought would be feasible to get implemented.

»What they didn’t anticipate was the extent to which The Republican Party would become Trump’s party. It was not like that in his first term. To use a metaphor: the first Trump administration was like a lion in a cage. With Trump 2.0 the cage is gone. There are no restraints«, he says, pointing to, among other things, the Supreme Court ruling that granted the President virtually full immunity for official acts.

Although more radical than Project 2025, the Trump administration is still using the document as the foundation for how it defines the Office of the President, Thomas Balcerski argues.

»In many ways, Project 2025 provides the ideological justification: as long as the president is doing it, it is presented as legitimate. And that, more than any specific policy, represents the shift toward a more authoritarian presidential model«, he says.

Thus, author and public intellectual Noam Chomsky who is highly critical of Trump has compared Trump to a gangster. Journalist and author Jonathan Rauch describes Trump’s rule as patrimonialism, in which the President treats the state as a family business and governs like a patriarch, and where personal loyalty is paramount and the shamelessness, abuse of power, corruption and incompetence unprecedented.

»He behaves like a king. When Trumps speaks of the office, he says: »I’m President of the United States, and I can do whatever the hell I want«. Project 2025 provides some of the ammunition for that«, Niels Bjerre-Poulsen says.

Who can stop Trump?

Based on a report by Steady State, a network of former employees in the American intelligence community, professor emeritus Tim Knudsen even argued in an op-ed here in Politiken that Trump may be in the process of a gradual coup.

»That sound about right«, Niels Bjerre-Poulsens says.

»Trump is an authoritarian leader, and Project 2025 is a blueprint for a far more authoritarian society. Does that mean that the political system is authoritarian? Not yet. Congress has failed to live up to its responsibility, but the free media and the courts are still ready to thwart Donald Trump«, Niels Bjerre-Poulsen maintains.

But does Trump feels obligated to abide by the courts? On the international stage he only recognizes one limit to his power according to a recent interview with The New York Times.

»My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me«, he said.

And so, Democratic State Senator Mallory McMorrow turned out to be more right than she realized. Although she was referring to Project 2025 in her speech at the party’s convention, her remark also fits Trump’s presidency:

»Whatever you think it is, it is so much worse«.