He’s shifted from not knowing about iot, to dismissing it as irrelevant, to quietly surrounding himself with its architects, to now wielding it as an open framework for governance.
By Matthew A. McIntosh
Public Historian
Brewminate
Introduction
Donald Trump once insisted he knew “nothing” about Project 2025, dismissing the sweeping conservative blueprint as the work of outside groups. That posture offered him plausible deniability, a way to distance himself from a document widely criticized as a playbook for authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, and the dismantling of the federal civil service. But as the government shutdown drags into its second week, the president is no longer hiding the association. Instead, he is embracing the plan as both roadmap and weapon.
In recent days, Trump has publicly touted meetings with Russ Vought, a key Project 2025 architect and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, who is now steering White House strategy. Vought’s proposals to slash so-called “Democrat agencies” and strip away regulatory authority align almost line-for-line with Project 2025’s prescriptions, and Trump is using the shutdown as leverage to push them forward. At the same time, he has empowered a newly created Religious Liberty Commission, charged with advancing school prayer, Bible classes, and state funding for religious education, a commission critics argue is the clearest sign yet of a federal government pivoting toward sectarian rule.
The reversal is striking. What was once portrayed as a fringe wish list of the religious right has now entered the center of executive power. Civil liberties groups and constitutional scholars warn that the convergence of Project 2025 with the machinery of the presidency signals a sharp turn toward what some have called a form of religio-fascist governance. The blueprint’s strategy of purging the civil service, consolidating authority in the executive, and embedding Christian nationalist policies echoes historical precedents in which democratic systems hollowed out from within, from the collapse of Weimar institutions in 1930s Germany to the blending of church and state in authoritarian regimes across Europe and Latin America during the twentieth century.
The shutdown itself has become a stage for this transformation. Trump frames it not as a crisis but as an opportunity, boasting that furloughs and halted services are proof that the federal government can be cut without consequence. In that sense, the standoff resembles tactics employed by leaders who deliberately manufactured crisis to concentrate power, a calculated gamble that scarcity and disruption will break public resistance and normalize executive overreach.
For Trump, the denials are over. The line between distance and ownership has blurred, leaving a political landscape where Project 2025 is no longer a shadowy blueprint, but a living policy agenda. The implications for American democracy, and for the constitutional wall between church and state, are only beginning to unfold.
Background: What Is Project 2025?
Project 2025 began as an initiative of the Heritage Foundation and a coalition of more than 100 conservative groups who sought to prepare a blueprint for a Republican return to the White House. The goal was simple in concept but radical in scope: engineer a ready-to-implement plan that would dismantle much of the modern federal state and replace it with a centralized, ideologically aligned executive branch. The effort combined policy papers, a personnel database of vetted loyalists, and a training program designed to ensure that a future administration would not waste time filling seats or negotiating with career civil servants.
The Heritage Foundation’s own description presents the project as a “governing agenda” rather than a campaign platform. In practice, however, it outlines proposals that would upend decades of institutional norms: mass firings of federal workers, the elimination of agencies deemed hostile to conservative goals, and the creation of loyalty oaths for government service. Many of its provisions revolve around culture-war priorities (abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, education, and religious expression) with a heavy emphasis on embedding Christian nationalist values into public policy.
At its core, Project 2025 calls for the president to assert unprecedented control over the executive branch. Career civil servants, often viewed as stabilizers in the American system, would be stripped of protections and replaced with ideologically vetted appointees. Agencies such as the Department of Education would be gutted or transformed, while regulatory bodies would be neutered to favor corporate and religious interests. The project’s designers argue this will “restore accountability,” but critics point to the unmistakable echoes of authoritarian consolidation, where neutral institutions become extensions of a single leader’s will.
The blueprint also includes a sprawling personnel database, which identifies thousands of potential hires committed to its vision. This element is especially significant because it provides not just ideas but people ready to implement them, ensuring that from day one, a compliant bureaucracy can execute radical policy shifts without the delays of Senate confirmation battles or the inertia of existing staff.
While Project 2025 was not an official campaign document, its fingerprints were evident throughout Trump’s circle. Dozens of former administration officials, from Cabinet members to senior advisors, helped draft its chapters or now serve as public advocates for its proposals. During the campaign, Trump claimed ignorance, insisting “I know nothing about Project 2025,” but his reliance on figures like Russ Vought makes that denial increasingly implausible.
As watchdogs like Americans United for Separation of Church and State warn, the project is not just about administrative efficiency or government reform. Its ideological thrust is to weave a particular brand of religious conservatism into the very fabric of governance, redefining liberty not as freedom from state-sponsored religion, but as the government’s active promotion of it.
Trump’s Public Denials and Distance during the Campaign
During the 2024 campaign season, Donald Trump repeatedly sought to distance himself from Project 2025, framing it as a document written by think tanks and activists, not by his campaign. When pressed on its content, Trump often insisted he had “nothing to do with it”, dismissing the 900-page manual as irrelevant to his plans for a second term. His campaign amplified that message, insisting that Trump’s agenda was outlined in his own “Agenda 47” platform, not in the Heritage Foundation’s pages.
The denials were strategic. By keeping Project 2025 at arm’s length, Trump could avoid direct accountability for its more extreme proposals, which included mass firings of federal workers, the elimination of entire agencies, and a dramatic reshaping of civil rights law to favor conservative religious interpretations. Democrats, meanwhile, warned voters that Project 2025 represented the true face of a second Trump term, a warning the campaign sought to deflect by casting the project as external and unofficial.
Yet the overlap between Trump’s world and Project 2025 was impossible to ignore. Key figures associated with the blueprint, from former Trump Cabinet officials to senior advisers, authored chapters, directed working groups, or appeared at Project 2025 promotional events. Among them was Russ Vought, who served as Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and became one of Project 2025’s most visible champions. Despite Trump’s insistence that he “didn’t know anything” about the initiative, his orbit was deeply intertwined with its architects.
This pattern mirrors a familiar tactic in political history: leaders distancing themselves from radical platforms until the moment is ripe for adoption. In Weimar Germany, the Nazi Party’s early economic blueprints were derided by elites, only to be enacted once the party secured full control. In mid-20th century Latin America, military juntas often denied connections to religious or corporatist programs until they seized power, at which point those agendas became state policy. Trump’s strategy of denial followed that playbook: dismiss, downplay, then deploy.
By the time of his inauguration, the line between denial and embrace had already begun to blur. While his campaign maintained rhetorical distance, Trump was staffing his administration with Project 2025 alumni, setting the stage for the pivot that would come as the shutdown crisis unfolded.
Signs of Convergence and Embrace after Inauguration
If Trump’s campaign-era stance was one of denial, his actions after returning to the White House have charted the opposite course. Within weeks of his inauguration, Project 2025 was no longer a distant playbook; it was operating blueprint.
The clearest evidence came through personnel. Trump elevated Russ Vought, one of the project’s leading architects, into a central role shaping White House policy. Vought’s influence was visible in budget proposals that targeted what he and Trump derisively called “Democrat agencies,” including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, and health regulatory offices. These moves closely tracked with Project 2025’s prescriptions for dismantling agencies deemed resistant to conservative priorities.
The government shutdown became both symbol and tool of this convergence. As agencies shuttered and services halted, Trump framed the crisis not as a failure but as proof that vast portions of the federal state were unnecessary. In press conferences, he echoed Vought’s rhetoric, promising that furloughs would become permanent cuts and vowing to “purge the swamp” by refusing to reinstate thousands of career employees once the shutdown ended. The Washington Post reported that White House aides saw the shutdown as an opportunity to test Project 2025’s strategy in real time, using disruption to accelerate executive consolidation.
At the same time, Trump empowered a newly created Religious Liberty Commission, signaling that Project 2025’s social agenda was moving from paper to policy. The commission’s stated goals included promoting school prayer, expanding Bible instruction, and diverting public funding toward private religious education, all core tenets of the blueprint’s cultural vision. Trump showcased the commission in televised events featuring prayer circles and hymn singing, further eroding the constitutional line between church and state.
For critics, these moves confirmed long-standing fears. Project 2025 had always been more than a conservative wish list; it was a framework for transforming government into an engine of sectarian ideology and personal power. Trump’s embrace of its policies in the midst of a shutdown crisis echoed strategies seen in authoritarian regimes, where leaders exploit emergencies to rewire institutions before opposition can mobilize.
The president’s shift was not subtle. Having once denied knowing anything about Project 2025, Trump was now using the federal government’s paralysis as proof of its necessity, not to govern better, but to govern differently. What had begun as a think tank’s radical proposal was now, unmistakably, the playbook of an American presidency.
The Religious Liberty Commission: Structure, Purpose, and Agenda
Trump’s establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission marked one of the boldest signals yet that Project 2025 was moving from blueprint to practice. Framed by the administration as a body to “protect and promote religious freedom,” the commission’s mandate has gone far beyond safeguarding individual rights. Instead, it has pursued a sweeping agenda to embed Christian nationalist priorities into the heart of federal policy.
Created by executive order in May 2025, the commission immediately drew scrutiny for its overtly sectarian framing. Meetings opened with collective prayers and hymn singing, with Trump himself presiding over events described by supporters as “America Prays” ceremonies. Its leadership includes prominent evangelical allies and advisers linked directly to Project 2025, whose chapters on education and culture wars outlined a near-identical agenda.
Among its most controversial proposals are initiatives to reintroduce school prayer and Bible-based instruction in public classrooms, echoing long-defeated policies from the mid-20th century that courts had ruled unconstitutional. The commission has also pushed to expand federal funding for religious charter schools and voucher programs, diverting taxpayer money from secular public education to faith-based institutions. As Americans United for Separation of Church and State has documented, these measures are less about protecting religious liberty than about privileging one form of religion at the expense of pluralism.
The commission’s rhetoric frames these policies as a “restoration” of America’s founding values, a narrative Project 2025’s authors promoted in their chapters on cultural renewal. But critics warn that the agenda aligns with patterns seen in authoritarian regimes where religion becomes a tool of political control. By fusing sectarian doctrine with state power, the Religious Liberty Commission positions itself as both policy-maker and moral arbiter, eroding the First Amendment’s guarantee of separation between church and state.
Historians note the resonance with past episodes in which religion and state fused to advance authoritarianism. Francoist Spain, for example, wielded Catholic institutions to consolidate power, while military juntas in Latin America during the Cold War framed repression as moral renewal under God. Trump’s commission, while operating within a constitutional system, has evoked similar concerns: that the state is being refashioned not as a neutral arbiter but as an instrument of religious conformity.
The symbolism is as important as the policy. By elevating religious spectacle into official government functions, Trump signals to his base that faith is not only welcome but privileged in the public sphere. For opponents, it confirms their worst fears: that the wall separating church and state, long a cornerstone of American democracy, is being deliberately dismantled brick by brick.
The Government Shutdown as a Tool of Consolidation
The ongoing government shutdown has become more than a budgetary standoff; it is the proving ground for Project 2025’s most radical ambitions. Far from treating the shutdown as a crisis to be resolved, Trump has reframed it as an opportunity, a live experiment in downsizing the state and consolidating executive power.
At rallies and press briefings, Trump has repeatedly promised that furloughed positions may never return, vowing that “Democrat agencies” will be permanently cut. This language mirrors the proposals of Russ Vought, who has openly advocated using fiscal pressure and shutdowns as a mechanism to force structural change. The president’s refusal to negotiate with Congress has therefore taken on a deeper dimension: not simply a dispute over spending priorities, but a deliberate attempt to hollow out institutions he views as hostile.
According to the Washington Post, Trump’s advisers see the shutdown as a strategic stress test for Project 2025’s agenda. By keeping agencies shuttered, they can both demonstrate the “expendability” of civil service functions and create political leverage to implement mass layoffs. Trump himself has boasted that the disruption shows “how little people need Washington,” a line that resonates with his base while alarming economists, veterans’ advocates, and civil liberties groups.
The shutdown has also provided cover for executive overreach. With Congress deadlocked, Trump has issued executive directives reallocating resources to favored programs, including military deployments and religious education initiatives. Legal analysts warn that these moves test the limits of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending money not appropriated by Congress. If challenged, the courts could strike down these maneuvers, but in the meantime, the White House has effectively turned fiscal paralysis into an excuse for unilateral action.
Observers note the historical parallels. In moments of political upheaval, leaders from Rome’s late Republic to modern populist regimes have exploited crisis as pretext for consolidating authority. Julius Caesar leveraged the chaos of debt and grain shortages to expand his emergency powers; in more recent memory, Viktor Orbán in Hungary used constitutional standoffs to centralize control of media and judiciary. Trump’s use of the shutdown to impose Project 2025’s agenda echoes that pattern: crisis as catalyst, paralysis as permission.
The effects are already visible. Essential services have slowed to a crawl, regulatory enforcement has weakened, and thousands of federal workers face financial precarity. Yet rather than seeking compromise, Trump frames the suffering as proof of success, evidence that the “deep state” can be cut without consequence. For his critics, this is not simply political brinkmanship but a calculated demolition of government itself, executed under the banner of efficiency and liberty.
In this sense, the shutdown is not merely a clash over budgets. It is the arena in which Project 2025 is being operationalized, a demonstration of how executive power, fused with ideological zeal, can bypass normal governance and remake the state in real time.
From Denial to Embrace: What Trump’s Pivot Reveals
Trump’s evolution from claiming ignorance of Project 2025 to openly wielding it as a governing playbook is more than political maneuvering; it is a roadmap of authoritarian consolidation. The denials of 2024 functioned as a political shield, insulating his campaign from charges of extremism. The embrace of 2025 has functioned as a weapon, legitimizing policies that would have once been unthinkable by cloaking them in the language of governance.
The shift matters for three key reasons:
- First, it signals to his base. By aligning with Project 2025’s religio-nationalist agenda, Trump reaffirms his commitment to the culture wars that fuel his movement. School prayer, Bible education, and the purging of “woke” agencies provide symbolic victories that bind his supporters together in a common vision of cultural restoration. The new Religious Liberty Commission embodies this strategy, presenting the fusion of church and state not as radical, but as patriotic.
- Second, it consolidates power within the executive. By leveraging the shutdown, Trump has shown that government dysfunction can be reframed as proof of government excess. Project 2025’s proposals for mass firings and agency eliminations are not theoretical; they are being tested in real time. As the Washington Post reported, Trump’s aides are treating the shutdown as a stress test for implementing the project’s most aggressive reforms. In this model, crisis becomes not a bug but a feature, an intentional tool for centralizing authority.
- Third, it lays bare the ideological thrust of the administration. Trump is no longer content to disguise the role of Project 2025 as external or unofficial. His appointments, rhetoric, and executive directives show deliberate overlap. The firewall between campaign promises and governance blueprints has collapsed, leaving little doubt that the project is shaping policy at the highest level.
Historically, this pattern is not new. In Weimar Germany, Hitler downplayed the radicalism of the Nazi Party’s platform until he consolidated power, then elevated its most extreme elements to law. In Francoist Spain, the Catholic Church became a state partner, legitimizing authoritarian control in the name of religious order. Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 follows a similar arc: deny, delay, then deploy, using crisis as justification and religion as moral cover.
Yet Trump’s America is not 1930s Germany or postwar Spain. The U.S. still has strong institutions, independent courts, and a federal system that resists centralization. Critics argue that these safeguards can withstand the pressure. But supporters of Project 2025 see the current moment as one of rare opportunity: with Trump in office, a government shutdown in hand, and a religious commission empowered, they can accelerate changes before resistance coalesces.
The danger lies in normalization. Each step (a shutdown repurposed as reform, a prayer meeting reframed as policy, a denial turned into embrace) shifts the boundaries of the possible. What was once fringe becomes official, and what was once unthinkable becomes law. That is the true legacy of Trump’s pivot: the transformation of Project 2025 from blueprint into governing reality.
Implications and What to Watch
Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 through both the Religious Liberty Commission and the ongoing shutdown represents more than a policy shift; it’s a structural gamble with the future of American democracy. By leveraging dysfunction as a governing strategy, he has transformed the shutdown into a live experiment in authoritarian administration.
The short-term implications are already visible. Federal workers face uncertainty, regulatory agencies operate in paralysis, and essential services grind to a halt. Trump, however, frames these outcomes as proof that the government is bloated and unnecessary. If these furloughs are made permanent, as he has promised, the United States could see the most significant contraction of the civil service since the New Deal.
In the medium term, the courts will play a decisive role. Legal experts point to the Antideficiency Act, civil service protections, and veterans’ preference laws as potential guardrails against Trump’s mass layoff strategy. Yet lawsuits take time, and in the interim, the administration may succeed in reshaping the federal workforce to align with ideological loyalty rather than professional expertise.
Long-term implications are even more profound. If the Religious Liberty Commission’s agenda gains traction, the constitutional wall between church and state may erode beyond repair. Embedding sectarian doctrine in public education and governance would not only reshape policy but redefine the very meaning of liberty, privileging one religion as the moral core of the state. This shift, if normalized, could echo theocratic experiments abroad, fundamentally altering the pluralistic foundation of American democracy.
The coming months will reveal whether Congress, the courts, and state governments can slow or reverse this trajectory. But one truth is already clear: Project 2025 is no longer a distant plan. It is a governing reality, and its influence will shape the contours of American politics for years to come.
Conclusion
Donald Trump’s political arc on Project 2025 has come full circle. From dismissing it as irrelevant, to quietly surrounding himself with its architects, to now wielding it as an open framework for governance, the evolution reveals a calculated strategy: deny while campaigning, embrace while ruling.
The ongoing government shutdown and the establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission have exposed how Project 2025’s ideas are not just alive but thriving at the heart of the Trump presidency. For supporters, this is the fulfillment of a long-awaited conservative revolution. For critics, it is the clearest sign yet that American democracy is being reshaped under the guise of religious liberty and fiscal reform into something far more dangerous: a system where crisis becomes opportunity, faith becomes policy, and power becomes centralized in the hands of one man.
History teaches that such shifts rarely declare themselves all at once. They unfold step by step, denial by denial, embrace by embrace. The question now is whether America recognizes this transformation in time to resist, or whether Project 2025 will succeed not as a think tank’s wish list, but as the enduring legacy of Trump’s second presidency.
Originally published by Brewminate, 10.06.2025, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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