Trump No Longer Denies Project 2025

Trump swore he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Yesterday, his Truth Social rant proved he not only knew its architects; he hired them to dismantle democracy.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Follow him on Substack for more by clicking here.

Yesterday, Donald Trump proved beyond any doubt that his months of denials about Project 2025 were nothing more than another one of his signature lies. On Truth Social, in the middle of a government shutdown he helped engineer, Trump boasted about meeting with Russ Vought — “he of Project 2025 fame,” as Trump himself put it. He said the meeting was to determine which “Democrat Agencies” (his words) should be cut, and whether those cuts should be temporary or permanent. Then he added a taunt: “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. They are stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

There it is. Out in the open. The man who swore during debates and campaign rallies that he had “nothing to do with Project 2025,” that he hadn’t read it and didn’t want to read it, that it was the work of “the severe right,” just proudly tied himself to it. And not in passing, but directly, gleefully, as if he couldn’t wait to brag about it.

Here’s the kicker: not only did Trump know the writers of Project 2025, he hired one of the architects. Russ Vought, who literally authored sections of the 900-page plan, is the Director of the Office of Management and Budget — one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government. The man who helped design the playbook is now sitting in the very seat from which it’s being executed. Trump didn’t just “know” Project 2025. He institutionalized it by putting its chief architect in charge of the nation’s budget.

Trump’s defenders will wave this away as Trump being Trump. They’ll say it’s just rhetoric, or that presidents always pull ideas from think tanks. Don’t buy it. This isn’t a slip of the tongue or a careless exaggeration. This is the mask slipping. Yesterday’s post was confirmation that Project 2025 isn’t some fringe document floating around Washington. It’s the operating manual of his presidency.

Let’s be clear about what this means. Project 2025 is not just a stack of policy proposals. It is a 900-page roadmap for dismantling the federal government as we know it and rebuilding it into an authoritarian machine. It calls for purging career civil servants and replacing them with political loyalists. It seeks to erase birthright citizenship. It aims to wipe out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. It takes a wrecking ball to climate science, proposing the elimination of entire agencies like NOAA. It expands executive power to levels the Founders would never have tolerated. And it envisions a country where loyalty to Trump, not the Constitution, is the ultimate test of whether you get to serve.

For months, Trump denied all of this. Why? Because he knew voters wouldn’t stomach it. Project 2025 had become a political flashpoint, widely seen as extreme, dangerous, and un-American. He disavowed it because he needed plausible deniability. He knew if he owned it outright during the campaign, it could cost him the election. So he lied. He said he didn’t know anyone involved. He mocked it as too severe. And then, once he was back in power, he started executing it point by point.

Yesterday’s post tore that lie to pieces. By calling Russ Vought “of Project 2025 fame,” Trump all but admitted he not only knew of the plan but knew exactly who wrote it and what it contained. And he didn’t just acknowledge it. He embraced it. He held it up like a trophy. That’s not ignorance. That’s ownership.

And here’s why it’s so alarming: the federal government is currently shut down. Agencies are already paralyzed. Workers are unpaid. The country is teetering on the edge of chaos. And Trump is gleefully using this crisis — a crisis of his own making — to justify implementing Project 2025’s most radical ideas. He isn’t hiding it anymore. He’s saying, out loud, that he wants to dismantle “Democrat Agencies,” treat them like scams, and decide which ones to gut for good. With Russ Vought, Project 2025’s co-author, at the helm of OMB, those decisions carry the weight of real power.

This is not politics. This is sabotage. It is a deliberate effort to use dysfunction as a weapon against democracy. Trump has always thrived on chaos, but this is different. This is chaos with a blueprint. Project 2025 is that blueprint. And Vought is the contractor hired to build it.

Working for Trump taught me one brutal lesson: the lie always came first. He didn’t just bend the truth; he shattered it and forced everyone around him to live inside the rubble. He’d deny people, deals, and disasters that he personally created and demand loyalty in repeating the fiction. It was exhausting, corrosive, soul-crushing. And I see the same playbook now with Project 2025: deny, deny, deny; until the day he waves the lie in your face as proof of victory.

That’s exactly what he’s doing now with Project 2025. He lied his way through the campaign, telling Americans he had nothing to do with it. Now, nine months into his presidency, he’s cashing the check and writing the country’s future with someone else’s pen.

So let’s stop pretending this is normal. Stop treating Project 2025 like just another policy debate. It isn’t. It’s the scaffolding for autocracy. And Trump’s post yesterday proved he’s not just flirting with it; he’s married to it.

If we shrug this off as “Trump being Trump,” we will wake up one morning to discover that the America we knew — messy, flawed, but democratic — has been quietly replaced by something darker.

Trump’s lie about Project 2025 has finally collapsed. And in its place, he’s constructing the government he’s always dreamed of: loyalists in power, dissent erased, America bending to his will.

This isn’t politics. It’s autocracy knocking at our door; and if we don’t act, it will walk right in.

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