“Who misses real lightbulbs, by the way?” asked Senator Mike Lee, sitting on the stage of the Heritage Policy Fest, as the Republican National Convention kicked off Monday. The crowd in the ornate hall of the Bradley Symphony Center in downtown Milwaukee went wild.
Yes to lightbulbs!
Yes, they said, to shower heads that “get the job done!”
Boo, they said to the administrative state, the target of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Donald Trump term that would do more than bring back incandescent lightbulbs—a pet issue for Lee.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP primary candidate turned Trump surrogate, told attendees here that it would not be enough to reform the administrative state: “The only right answer left is to get in there and actually shut it down.” Paul Dans, executive director of the project, likened the deep state to The Matrix: “This is the source code for how all this works,” he said. “This is really a way for us to make sure that when we ultimately get in the driver seat that we’re ready to move out.” Another one of the plan’s architects, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, has described the stakes in even more dramatic terms: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he told Steve Bannon recently.
Joe Biden and the Democrats have made Project 2025 a centerpiece of their campaign. Trump has sought to distance himself from it—“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he said recently—and the Heritage Foundation, in fact, seemed to literally put distance between its event and the convention itself, hosting its right-wing luminaries outside the hard perimeter. “We’re not running for president,” Dans told the conservative commentator Mollie Hemingway onstage, disavowing any links between the GOP standard-bearer and the transition plan. “President Trump is running for president.”
But, of course, the plan has deep links to Trump’s circle, and overlaps more than a little with his Agenda 47 platform, as my colleague Molly Jong-Fast noted recently. And even as its proponents sought to emphasize that the former president was in no way involved with the proposal, they touted him here Monday as a vessel to enact it—and as a near-messianic figure who was injured at a Saturday rally shooting, some speakers suggested, because of the Biden campaign’s efforts to highlight the project’s extremism. “That leads to what happened Saturday,” Dans said, accusing Democrats and the media of misrepresenting the plan. It is “an abuse of power,” Dans said of Biden, “for the most powerful person in the world to direct fire” on other Americans.
Biden, who immediately condemned the shooting, has used strong language to warn of the extremist threat of Project 2025. But to suggest he is responsible for the shooting—which left one dead and two others injured—is itself irresponsible and escalatory, especially given Roberts’s suggestion to Bannon earlier this month that the Project 2025 revolution would only “remain bloodless if the left allows it.” “Nobody has mischaracterized what’s in Project 2025,” Milwaukee County executive David Crowley, a Biden delegate and campaign surrogate, told me. “This is dangerous.”
The danger of the political moment loomed over the RNC as it kicked off here in Milwaukee, imbuing the normal business of the convention with a sense of unease—and drawing the former president’s already faithful supporters even closer to him as he announced his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, Monday.
“I personally believe that God did intervene,” Ramaswamy told a scrum of reporters in the hall of the symphony center. “Donald Trump has been given the second chance Abraham Lincoln didn’t have.”