Project 2025 Head Resigns After Backlash From Trump

The director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, announced Tuesday that he is stepping down from his role.

The move comes after a wave of public criticism, led by Democrats, over the conservative manifesto and the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that backs it. The project’s agenda items include everything from the dismantling of government agencies, such as the Department of Education, to the implementation of national abortion bans and contraception restrictions.

Dans said in his email that others on the project’s team will continue to push for its implementation in a conservative presidential campaign, and that he will be directing his efforts toward “winning, bigly!” in November. He also told Heritage Foundation staff earlier this week about his departure.

Thanks to the increased public attention on the project, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from the 900-page document. According to Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast, Dans’s departure comes after pressure from the Trump campaign, partially due to a power struggle for control over staffing in a possible Trump presidential administration.

This would seem to align with what Trump campaign officials have said publicly. One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, recently called Project 2025 a “pain in the ass.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is annoyed that it has received so much attention, and he resents the implication that the project is behind his policies and choosing his presidential staff.

On Tuesday, after the news of Dans’s resignation spread, the Trump campaign celebrated in an email written by LaCavita and co-campaign manager Susie Wiles.

Bizarrely, Dans’s departure seems to be yet more evidence of Trump’s influence on Project 2025. Vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance also has connections to the project, and Trump’s decision to make him his running mate made one of its key architects, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, very happy.

The move will likely do little to halt Democratic attacks against Project 2025, particularly as those behind it say that their efforts will continue. It’s one of the many weird things that Democrats are successfully tying to the GOP, who are having a tough time convincing voters that any of their policies are normal.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed up a blatantly antisemitic claim about Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband.

During an interview on WABC 77’s radio show Sid & Friends in the Morning, Trump agreed with host Sid Rosenberg, who criticized Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, on the basis of his faith.

“They tell me that this Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, Mr. President, is Jewish,” Rosenberg said. “He’s Jewish like Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Are you kidding me? He’s a crappy Jew, he’s a horrible Jew!”

“Yes, yes,” Trump replied under Rosenberg’s rant. As Trump made perfectly clear throughout the interview, to him, the only good Jewish person is one who’s voting Republican.

During the interview, Trump repeated his old attack against Jewish Americans who refused to support his presidential bid.

“Any Jewish person that voted for her, or him, or whoever it’s going to be, I assume it’s going to be her; anybody that did that should have their head examined,” Trump said. “If you love Israel, or if you’re Jewish—because a lot of Jewish people do not like Israel, and they happen to be in New York, you know that?”

“Yes,” chirped Rosenberg, whose radio talk show is local to New York City.

“If you are Jewish,” Trump continued, “regardless of Israel, if you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat you’re a fool. An absolute fool.”

Trump has previously suggested that any Jewish person who did not vote for him “does not love Israel” and “should be spoken to.” The former president seems to have a pretty limited idea of what a Jewish person can and cannot think. He also claimed in March that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

On Tuesday, Trump complained that Democrats no longer felt afraid to criticize Israel.

“You know, 15 years ago the strongest lobby in all of Washington was Israel. It was by far the strongest. Nobody would say anything bad about Israel! Today, it’s like nobody says anything good—except for Republicans by the way,” Trump griped.

While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is not the biggest lobby in U.S. politics, its impact is still felt in crucial races. Earlier this year, AIPAC gave a whopping $14.5 million in the New York Democratic primary election to George Latimer, funding his ultimately successful effort to unseat progressive Representative Jamaal Bowman, a staunch critic of Israel.

During the radio interview, Trump also claimed that Harris looked uncomfortable during her meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he said suggested that she secretly dislikes Jewish people—despite being married to one, of course.

“You can see the disdain,” Trump said. “Number one, she doesn’t like Israel. Number two, she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it, and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it.”

Trump’s lack of logic on this subject is nothing new. The Republican presidential nominee has previously asserted that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party had “abandoned” Israel, despite the fact that the U.S. has continued to fund Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 40,000 Palestinians and created an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis.

J.D. Vance is not beating the weird allegations, even from his allies.

In a Monday night segment on Fox News, host Jesse Watters highlighted how Democrats such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and others are aligning in a “coordinated attack” that Trump’s vice presidential candidate is just plain weird.

In doing so, however, Watters just made a supercut that did nothing to push back on the talking point.

As Rolling Stone points out, the host’s attempt to dispel the controversy by playing the compilation is the perfect example of the Streisand effect, or when you try to hide something but end up only drawing more attention to it. By highlighting the couch controversy and politicians calling the vice presidential candidate weird, Watters is only making the situation worse for Vance.

To be clear, Vance did not have sex with a couch. But his off-putting nature may be a liability for the Trump campaign.

It looks like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had his mind made up on presidential immunity from the start, and made no effort to negotiate with the court’s liberal justices.

According to a stunning new report from CNN citing unnamed sources, Roberts looked past any chance of coming to a compromise outside of the conservative majority on the court, as was typical in past cases on presidential power. He instead thought that he could persuade the court’s liberals to look beyond Donald Trump.

The oral arguments for the case on April 25 didn’t indicate such a clear-cut breakdown, as justices seemed ready to vindicate Trump in only some of his legal team’s arguments, while also accepting some of special counsel Jack Smith’s points.

But the justices’ private session the next day did not reflect any of that, with votes quickly breaking down on ideological lines and Roberts ready to rule that presidents have near-absolute immunity for all “official acts.” He tried to steer the conversation away from Trump, writing in his opinion that ​​“unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.”

Roberts’s actions flew in the face of his previous rulings, such as the court’s 2022 decision Jackson v. Women’s Health Organization. While Roberts sided with the conservative majority in that case in ruling against the organization, he dissented on overturning the abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. And a decade earlier, he cast the deciding vote that upheld the Affordable Care Act, breaking with his fellow conservatives in a 5–4 decision.

But this time, Roberts did not seem amenable to compromise, and in fact one of Trump’s appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was the lone conservative on the court who sought any kind of compromise with the liberal justices. In her opinion on the immunity case, she said the Trump plan to use alternative slates of electors should be considered a “private” and not an official act, and thus subject to criminal prosecution.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, led by Roberts, has upended precedent and put all of Trump’s legal cases in jeopardy. The one criminal case that was decided prior to the court’s ruling has had sentencing delayed. Of the two federal cases that are still being decided, one was dismissed pending appeal by a judge seemingly on Trump’s side, and the other is in limbo. In short, Roberts may have presented himself as moderate before, but his decision on immunity shows that his conservative beliefs come first.

Elon Musk, a self-declared “free speech absolutist,” has been accused of suspending the account of a group organizing voters to support Vice President Kamala Harris.

Leaders of the newly formed Democratic outreach group “White Dudes for Harris” hit back at technocrat Musk after the group’s X (formerly Twitter) account was temporarily suspended Monday night, following a wildly successful fundraiser earlier that evening.

More than 190,000 people tuned into a massive virtual call, reportedly raising more than $4 million for Harris’s campaign. The group had originally hoped for a turnout of 10,000 people, and to raise $50,000, a milestone they passed before the call even began, according to the organizers.

There were appearances from a few white guys who are reportedly in contention to be Harris’s vice presidential nominee, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Shortly after the call ended, the group’s organizers said they had received notice that their account on X, which Musk owns, had been suspended for supposedly “violating our rules against evading suspension.”

“Seems like @elonmusk might be a little scared,” wrote Ross Morales Rocketto, one of the group’s organizers in a post on X, adding a screenshot of the email.

Mike Nellis, another organizer, also posted a screenshot of the email. “We scared @elonmusk and @DonaldJTrumpJr so much tonight they suspended our account and won’t let us back in,” he wrote. “These guys are running scared of the success we’ve had tonight, but we’re not going to quit. More coming tomorrow (unless they shut down my account too!)”

The group’s account was restored by Tuesday morning.

It’s not clear that Musk was involved in the account’s suspension, but Rocketto and Nellis aren’t all that crazy to think that the X CEO might be behind it.

Musk endorsed Trump earlier this month and has since been increasingly outspoken about the presidential race online, repeatedly claiming that President Joe Biden has been “importing” immigrants into the country to illegally vote for Harris. Last week, Musk posted a parody ad for Harris, which used an A.I.-generated version of her voice to call Harris the “ultimate diversity hire,” raising concerns about the use of A.I. in political campaigns.

While Musk boosted the conspiracy theory that Google was suppressing answers about Donald Trump, many have accused him of making it difficult to follow Harris’s campaign’s X account in the days after she became the presumptive nominee.

Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees Tuesday, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate revealed new details on a social media account believed to belong to Trump’s attempted assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks.

In his opening remarks, Abbate said that the FBI has not yet determined Crooks’s motive, but investigators have discovered a social media account “believed to be associated with the shooter in about the 2019–2020 timeframe,” when Crooks would have been roughly 15–17 years old.

The activity of the account, which posted over 700 comments, Abbate said, “appear[s] to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and [is] described as extreme in nature.”

While stressing that investigators are still working to confirm that the account belonged to Crooks, Abbate said, “We believe it important to share and note it today, particularly given the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter’s potential motive and mindset.”

If verified, the indications of Crooks’s political extremism would shed light on the would-be assassin’s yet obscure politics; Crooks made a $15 donation to a progressive organization in 2021 but was a registered Republican.

Donald Trump couldn’t come up with a single coherent explanation for why his supporters should also back J.D. Vance.

During an interview on Fox News Monday, host Laura Ingraham pushed Trump to explain his decision to tap Vance despite widespread criticism from Republicans, whom she readily dismissed as longing for “the days of open borders and perpetual war.”

“How do you expect to use him in this campaign, and what can you say to our viewers tonight to reassure them that this was an excellent pick?” Ingraham asked.

“Well, first of all, he’s got tremendous support, and he really does among a certain group of people—people that like families. He made a statement having to do with families,” Trump said. “He’s not against anything, but he loves family. It’s very important to him. He grew up in a very interesting family situation, and he feels family is good.”

So, that’s Trump’s main selling point to the public on Vance: He was an “excellent pick” because he “feels family is good.”

Setting aside the fact that it’s a canned answer, Trump purposefully presented a gross mischaracterization of Vance’s incendiary comments.

While pronatalism is at the core of many of Vance’s outlandish policy ideas, the Ohio senator is currently facing the most backlash for his claim that Democrats are all “childless cat ladies,” which is presumably the statement Trump was referring to in his answer.

Vance later doubled down on this comment, saying that Democrats had become “anti-family,” and “anti-children.”

CNN reported Monday that Vance has made multiple disparaging remarks about childless Americans in the past, calling Democrats without kids “childless sociopaths.” On a podcast in 2020, Vance said that America’s “leadership class” was “more sociopathic” than those with children, resulting in a “less mentally stable” country.

The reason Trump actually picked Vance has nothing to do with families at all: According to Trump’s advisers, Vance was picked to appeal to white men.

Yet another video of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has resurfaced, and unfortunately for him, he explicitly said in it that racism helped elect Donald Trump president.

Mother Jones reports that in February 2017, Vance gave a talk at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics as part of a series called “America in the Trump Era” after his book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a bestseller.

Discussing the 2016 presidential election, journalist Alex Kotlowitz asked Vance, “Where do you think race played into all this? Because I think the sort of myth is that all these Trump supporters are vehement racists and anti-immigrant. And so where do you think it played?”

Vance gave an answer that seems surprising today.

“Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election. I think race will always play a role in our country, It’s just sort of a constant fact of American life. And definitely some people who voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him for racist reasons,” Vance responded.

Vance couched his answer by saying he didn’t think racism was the main motivator for Trump voters, but jobs were. But he did say that the 2016 election was “hyper-racialized,” and he blamed conservative extremists.

“The people that I blame for that are actually typically well-educated coastal elitists, people like Richard Spencer and the alt-right,” Vance said. “It’s telling that the alt-right is driven by primarily very well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people. It’s not driven by people in the Rust Belt who go on 4chan and talk about Michelle Obama in these really nasty ways.”

“Like Steve Bannon?” Kotlowitz asked.

“Right,” Vance replied, taking a shot at the Republican strategist who is now serving a prison sentence for contempt of Congress.

In an answer quite different from his present-day half-hearted defense of his Indian American wife, Usha, Vance addressed racism against his marriage head-on back then.

“There were all these alt-right people, and I’m in an interracial marriage, and I got a lot of stuff directed at me and my wife on online message boards and Twitter and so forth. So I definitely buy this was a racialized discourse unlike any that we’ve had in a really long time,” Vance said.

Vance’s political career soon ended his criticisms of Trump and the MAGA movement, as he quickly became one of its rising stars and ardent defenders. Ever since he was chosen as Trump’s running mate earlier this month, the Ohio senator has been on the defensive as Kamala Harris’s campaign has effectively landed attacks calling him “weird.” More and more videos from his past are resurfacing where he either criticizes Trump or embraces some kind of extremism. All of this is starting to have the GOP question whether he was the right choice at all.

As Republicans begin developing lines of attack against Vice President Kamala Harris, many on Team Trump worry that those on their side—including Trump himself—will make disparaging comments about Harris’s identity, alienating key voters.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s allies believe attacks on Harris’s political record are more effective than personal insults, but “they also worry that Trump and some of his more extreme supporters will be unable to refrain from deploying sexist and racially fraught language, which they fear will hurt him with crucial voting blocs.”

A source “familiar with the Trump campaign’s thinking” who spoke with the Post “on the condition of anonymity to share candid views,” seemed to think that it’s all but inevitable that Trump will make problematic comments toward Harris. “We hope he doesn’t act like a crazy racist and sexist person, but we can’t control him,” the source said. “There are probably dog whistles and racist and sexist tropes he’ll stumble into. His campaign is going to try to keep him out of that rhetoric, but it’s going to be difficult.”

This isn’t the first time that Republicans have fretted about the bigotry in their own ranks affecting their electoral prospects. Last week, Politico reported that leading House Republicans had to tell “lawmakers to focus on criticizing [Harris’s] record without reference to her race and gender,” following “a series of comments by their members that focused on Harris’ race as well as claims she is a ‘DEI’ pick.”

Over the weekend, several Republican lawmakers and Black Trump supporters told Reuters they worried about “demeaning racist and sexist attacks” and “whether the onslaught could harm Republicans at the ballot box.”

Earlier this week, a Republican pollster warned that Trump “taking shots at [Harris’s] race and her gender,” as “some of the irresponsible members of Congress” have, would be a political liability.

But the expectations of those close to Trump, not to mention his history of racism and misogyny, including toward Harris, suggest that he might be unable to help himself.

Senator J.D. Vance knows that Vice President Kamala Harris is a big threat. While he may not be willing to say it publicly, he’s certainly admitting it to donors.

In a new recording released Monday by The Washington Post, Vance spoke candidly at a fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minnesota, on Saturday, where the Ohio senator’s line to donors was far different from the about-face that he and former President Donald Trump had been presenting publicly.

“All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” said Vance. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”

While Vance’s admission was not particularly surprising given Harris’s slate of high-profile Democratic endorsements and how successful her initial fundraising efforts have been, it was a tune that the public hasn’t heard Vance sing.

As CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed out Monday night, this line was extremely different from what Trump was saying concurrently, over on Fox News.

“I think she’s a worse candidate than him,” Trump said in an interview with Laura Ingraham. She’s far more radical left. She is younger, but I mean she’s 60 years old. A lotta people—I didn’t know she was 60 years old, I thought she was a little younger.”

In general, the “Kamala’s worse than Biden” line seems to be the main strategy for the Trump campaign, but it certainly isn’t the reality they’re facing.

In the leaked audio, Vance admitted that the Trump campaign had the “unique opportunity” to shape public perception of a candidate that voters are far less familiar with, trying out different lines of attack to see what has the most impact.

“Love ’em or hate ’em, everybody has an opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden after the past eight years,” Vance said to the room of donors. “But Kamala Harris, people don’t really know.”

But shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out, Vance acted like nothing had changed.

“I don’t think the political calculus changes at all,” Vance told reporters on July 22. “We were running against Joe Biden’s open border, Kamala Harris’s open border. Kamala Harris supported the Green New Scam. Kamala Harris, frankly, covered Joe Biden even though it was obvious he was mentally incompetent for a very long time.”

Vance spokesman Will Martin released a statement Monday in response to the leaked audio. “Poll after poll shows President Trump leading Kamala Harris as voters become aware of her weak, failed and dangerously liberal agenda,” Martin said. “Her far-left ideas are even more radioactive than Joe Biden, particularly in the key swing states that will decide this election like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”