Today, Explained - Project 2026

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Trump has delivered conservatives much of the Project 2025 wishlist already. The Heritage Foundation wants him to keep going. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. Donald Trump being sworn into office a year ago. Photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson - Pool/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen. It's been exactly one year since Donald Trump began his second term as president of these United States. And trying to recount the last 12 months is perhaps too much. Here's the last 12 hours. Trump's been screenshoting and sharing DM sent to him by France's president Emmanuel Macron and Mark Ruta, the head of NATO. They're trying to talk Trump off his plan to acquire Greenland, something that wasn't even mentioned in his inaugural address a year. ago. What was immigration, crime, oil, manufacturing? I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. And we are going to bring law and order back to our cities. See, we will drill,

baby, drill. Absent from that speech was Project 2025, this brick of policy proposals from the Conservative Heritage Foundation that Trump had distanced himself from. But one year in, the president has quietly met many of Project 2025's objectives. That's coming up on Today Explained. Adobe Acrobat Studio, your new foundation. Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves. AI levels of your pitch gets it in a groove.

Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those two. Drive design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing with Acrobat. Learn more at Adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. This is Today Explained. My name is David Graham, and I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the project, how Project 2025 is reshaping America.

People may remember 24, 7,000 years ago, President Trump, at the time, a candidate says, I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it. He's been in office for a year. Did his administration actually disavowed Project 2025?

No, and I've been surprised how much they have even embraced it. It's true that some of the high-profile figures involved are not the administration, but some of the high-profile figures involved also are in the administration. You know, people like Russell Vote, the budget chief. They call him Darth Vader. I call him a fine man. Or John Ratcliffe, the CIA director. I did not treat.

transmit classified information. Or Peter Navarro, a crucial tariff advisor. So first of all, Elon and I are great. It's not an issue. Even though he called you a moron and dumber than a sack of bricks? I've been called worse. And I think more importantly, if you look at the policies, Trump has picked up so many of the policy ideas and the kind of approaches to governance that Project 2025 laid out.

What was it laying out? Remind us what it was. So this is this huge project, and I'd say there are a few different things. One is a set of policies, really ideas for every department of the government and what they would be doing under the right-wing administration that Project 2025 foresaw. Our common theme is to take down the administrative state, the bureaucracy. And you're going to, yeah, it's not as easy done as it is said. The second thing was an approach to make those things happen. So how are we going to make the federal government do things that is not done before?

How are we going to seize control? how are he going to give the president powers that he hasn't had in the past in order to do those things? We are going to be prepared day one, January 20, 2025 to hit the ground running as conservatives to really help the next president. And then the third part was a big database of potential appointees, thousands of people who would be sort of on the team, trained, ready to go, and could fill executive positions as soon as a president came in and wanted to start appointing them. The bottom line is that we need. to have an army of conservatives ready to march in day one. When we covered Project 2025 before the election, I remember thinking, you know, there's a lot here. And it would take a lot to get all of this done.

And Trump is saying he doesn't really want to do it. Maybe everybody is over worrying. And then sometime in the last 12 months, things started to come into clear a focus. When would you say that it became clear that, like, okay, they are actually doing a project 2025 here? I think, you know, there were signs before he took office appointing Russell vote to head O&B would be one of those. We have Darth Vader. You know Darth Vader, right? For me, it really was like the first day of the administration.

And I had written this book and I submitted my first draft on January 15th and then sat for five days wondering if they would actually, if they would follow through. And on day one, we got all of these executive orders that followed almost verbatim from things in Project 2025. I thought, okay, no, there's really something here. All right, so you start seeing it on day one, and then we get 12 months. Give me the top lines of what you've seen get done. This is 900 pages of policy priorities. Group them for me and tell me how far along they are. Okay, sure.

if you look at, for example, gender, family, and rights, we've seen Trump pushing back really hard on anything that looks like wokeness. Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It's gone. It's gone. We've seen the attack on DEI programs, not only in the federal government, but in private institutions in universities. We have seen attacks on transgender rights attempting to write binary sex into the language of government. There are only two genders.

male and female. Undermining traditional tools as civil rights enforcement. So we've seen a lot of those things. I don't think we've seen that kind of pro-natalist policies that some of Project 2035's authors intended, but that's in the same area. Looking at immigration, which is obviously a big Trump priority for a long time. They're coming into our country.

We are seeing even in January the big push in Minneapolis and we've been seeing things like this basically constantly. On the economy, we've seen Trump pursue tariffs as part of Project 2025 suggests. I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary. And work to cut taxes. Some of the more fantastical ideas like abolishing the Fed or returning to a gold standard we haven't seen. Although he's gone after Jay Powell real hard in the last couple weeks. That jerk will be gone soon.

Yeah, it seems like Trump has realized he'd rather control the Fed than get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah. You're looking environmental regulation. This is a place where I think they've made a lot of progress. Encouraging drilling, encouraging oil and gas exploration. We have oil and gas more than anybody in the world. We're going to have more of it, too.

Cutting down on renewables. The wind doesn't blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad. Taking away mandates for renewables and really eliminating regulation and research on climate change and environment generally. And then, you know, the kind of last area I think about his foreign policy defense. And that's a place where, although we are seeing Trump, again, just in the last few weeks, you know, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, really taking a lot of action. I think that's far a little further afield from what Project 2035 envisioned, which was a kind of Trump-1 style isolationism, and it turned toward China rather than focusing on all these other things. Okay, so what you're pointing out is that this administration has actually gotten a fair amount done, maybe even a lot done.

Project 2025 was 922 or so pages. How much of what's in there has the Trump administration accomplished? You know, I find it really hard to quantify. And there's a good tracker out there online that puts the number right above 50%. And I think that's useful, but also a little bit, you have to take it with a grain of salt because some of these things are just hard to equate on a new. numerical level or like, you know, that tracker says Trump eliminated USAID, which is a goal. We have effectively eliminated the U.S. agency for international development, which was funding much of this lunacy. Project 2035 wanted to reform USAID, shrink it, use it in different ways, but not to abolish it. So it doesn't always fit one to one. But I think that's, you know, I think it's a good way to think about it, like how far they are. And the other thing that I would

say is so much of what they want to do depends on having. this really powerful president and sort of an unfettered, no checks and balances situation. And they've made so much progress on that in the first year. And I think that will enable more progress towards their goals in the future. How did they get so much done this administration? A way that I've heard people talk about it is you don't get a lot of chances for a president to try things, leave office for four years, and then get another shot at it. And I think that is a lot of this. So many of the people involved were veterans of the first Trump administration, had been closely related to it.

And they saw what went wrong. And they had theories of that. And they also learned a lot about how government works. And so that meant that they could come in on the first day and be just so ready, so organized and so energized. What we're doing is systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.

I think that gave them the chance to sort of conduct this blitzkrig that took the courts by surprise. It seems to have taken Congress by surprise. And I think it took a lot of the public by surprise as well. I think I hear you telling me that there is still a lot in that big book of ideas and policies

that they would like to get done. Oh, yes. You could spend years pushing a lot of these things. And the ambitions are pretty big. They really want to reshape society. And that is a project you can make some work on in a year, but I think they're on a time frame of years or decades. David Graham of the Atlantic.

When we come back, David's going to talk Project 2026. Support for today, explained, comes from Bambas. Perhaps you want to get in shape this year. Bombas wants to tell you about the all-new Bamba's sports socks engineered with sport-specific comfort for running, golf, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, and all sport. Meanwhile, for the loungers among us, Bambas has non-sport footwear available. But Bambas doesn't just offer sport and non-sport socks. They also offer super soft base layers that they claim will have you rethinking your whole wardrobe,

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Pshin, boom. Today, explained, we're back with David A. Graham from the Atlantic. David, in the first half of the show, we talked about what the Trump administration got done from Project 2025. What did they fail to get done? There are several areas where they haven't done much. I think one is, you know, in this area of sort of pro-family policy or socially conservative policy. We've heard these kinds of things from the right, and we've seen some incremental progress on in the past. But they really had large ambitions.

I mean, they want to ban abortion entirely at the federal level. And let me just be really clear, especially for conservative elected officials who are pro-lifers, the federal government does have a role in making sure there is no abortion in the United States, period. That is the heritage position. Short of that, they want to do everything they can to limit it. So that's, you know, withdrawing approval for Mitha of Prestone. It is surveilling abortion use in states. It is barring the mailing of these drugs under an 1873 law.

We haven't seen those things. We haven't seen a lot of kind of pro-family encouraging higher birth rates stuff either. We haven't seen the kind of labor policy that would bolster a more pro-family vision, like things that J.D. Vance was talking about in the campaign. I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family.

And we haven't seen a sort of major shift of social welfare programs away from the government and towards religious organizations. So that stuff feels a little bit undone. One thing that he has partially done is work to shut down the Department of Education. Oh, I'd like it to be closed immediately. Look, the Department of Education is a big con job. Not all the way there, but he has gotten a lot of carte blanche from the Supreme Court to do that. Going after big tech, rather than going after tech, I think we've seen instead a real embrace. They're leading a revolution in business and ingenious.

And in every other word, I think you can imagine, there's never been anything like it, the most brilliant people. And I think that has to do with the fact that tech CEOs cozyed up to Trump, and Trump was more than happy to have that. but there hasn't been much of a crackdown. There hasn't been this sort of progress there. And we haven't seen that kind of turned toward China that I think the authors argued was really important and should be basically the only thing that the U.S. was worrying about in the world for the near future. Trump and his people have been pretty honest while in office about what they want. Like they've said a lot of what they plan to do and then try to carry it out. In some instances, very successfully.

What do you think we're going to see more of in the year ahead? Like what maybe have we not been paying enough attention to that they've been banging the drum on and we should? Something that I think is underappreciated even as it has gotten attention is the takeover of the independent regulatory agencies. So, you know, this is the alphabet soup, the NLRB, the FEC, the FCC, the FCC in particular has gotten some attention. and we're expecting a Supreme Court decision soon that seems likely to basically give the president control over all these agencies with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve. And I think that's just going to change the way everybody interacts with the government. And the FCC is a great example. You know, we saw the chair of the FCC basically try to get Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel.

Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct. to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. Now, imagine that in so many other areas of life, the way you work through labor protections, the way you interact with the Social Security Administration, the way you interact with any number of walks of your life. I think we're going to see the president controlling that and making it an arm of policy. And we've seen what that looks like, for example, the Justice Department where he uses it for retribution. On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve

with grand jury subpoenas. I think that's something that people need to be paying more attention to, and they're not really going to appreciate it until it starts actually happening in their lives. The Heritage Foundation, where Project 2025 originated, has, of late, had a mess on its hands. The president, Kevin Roberts, defended this chummy interview that Tucker Carlson did with Nick Fuentes, the far-right anti-Semite. The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right. There was all of this conversation about Republicans like Nazis now. And has the upheaval there changed the administration's relationship with heritage? I think the administration already

had a sort of troubled relationship with heritage. You mentioned earlier the way that the Trump campaign sort of tried to disavow Project 2025. And they come up with this, I don't know what the hell it is. It's Project 25. He's involved. in Project, and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme. I mean, they're seriously extreme. But I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it. And I think there were a couple problems from the Trump administration point of view.

One of them was that Project 2025 was unpopular. Oh, boy, is it not popular? And when you look at what is the favorability rating of those kinds of proposals, Project 2025 overall, or than 30 percentage points underwater. And his agenda is all laid. it out in Project 2025, which I still must say, I cannot believe they put that in writing. It was becoming a campaign talking point, and they didn't want to be tied to something unpopular, even if they did intend to do it. And the second one is that Trump gets, he gets his back up

when anybody suggests that he's not the one in charge, you know, that somebody else is driving the agenda. President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk. No, no, that's not happening. And I think that was part of his problem with heritage there. I reprimanded the whole group. I said, you shouldn't have placed this document in front of the voters because I have nothing to do with it and I'm the one that's running. And so on the one hand, they had been extremely successful in setting the agenda for the Trump

administration. On the other hand, they're a little bit out on the outside. Many of their people have not made it in. They don't have a close relationship with the administration. So you see them, like a lot of other institutions on the right, I think, trying to understand how to fit in in the age of Trump and the age of MAGA. And as this is happening at Heritage, you see other groups trying to sort of vie for the future of MAGA and to provide the next blueprint or the thing that is the success sort of project 2025. Mike Pence's group has been poaching a lot of staffers away from Heritage. There are other big players in the conservative firmament that are trying to,

to drive the train in the next direction and see what the next turn might be. And Heritage still wants to keep to this plan, which they see is, I think, very long running. That is very interesting. And it makes me wonder whether they are taking credit for what's been accomplished so far, whether they've said, like, in 26, Heritage has additional agenda items, Mr. President, and we'd like you to, you know, take care of those too. You know, they have continued to push some of these things. The Washington Post just obtained very recently.

a big document that Heritage put out on marriage and family. Saving America by saving the American family lays out a clear path to rebuild marriage rates, low fertility rates, and the epidemic of broken homes. And these get at the kind of most deeply felt kind of Christian nationalist ideas in Project 2025. We must, not just as a country, but as a people, address this question of the deterioration of the family,

because as the family goes, so goes every, other American institution. And even as they've been successful on some of these other things, they still want to see their own core priorities happening more than they have. It is not just heritage, of course, that can't really figure out where it stands with the president. There are huge schisms in conservatism right now over, oh my gosh, U.S. intervention in Venezuela and elsewhere, the ACA premiums, the Epstein files. When you look at these splits, what do they tell you about how united or not the conservative movement is, behind what's in Project 2025?

I think the only thing that really unites the conservative movement right now is Donald Trump. And even then, we can see some of that looking shakier than it has for quite some time. Trump has been able to hold all of these things together. And you see even in Project 2025 these kind of schisms over, you know, everything from how best to provide child care in order to encourage higher birth rates to whether or not there should be tariffs. and so they're trying to bring together these people from across a lot of the right. And it worked in this context, and it works as long as Trump is there. If you look at somebody like J.D. Vance, I think he fits the project 2025 policy mindset better than Trump does.

Trump is not particularly devout. Vance is a very serious conservative Catholic. I think he thinks about policy more than Trump does. But I don't know if somebody like Vance can hold the coalition together like Trump has. I think it's a little bit of a free-for-all as you see these groups, whether it is, Heritage and the Project 2025 group or Mike Pence's group, kind of vying to see who can be the next power player in the next stage or whenever Trump exits the scene. I remember after Trump was elected, and of course, Republicans won the House and the Senate, and it was like, look, Americans voted.

If Trump proceeds to do a project 2025, that's what Americans voted for, right? So we have got the midterms coming up later this year. And I think there's a sense that Republicans are going to. want to need to moderate to some degree to hold on to the House and the Senate. And they're going to have to pull back on some of this stuff that strikes Americans as extreme. Do you see moderation coming this year? And do you see that affecting how Project 2025 plays out? I would say first that I'm not convinced that Americans were voting for that,

even though the administration acted that way. Project 225 was wildly unpopular. People knew about it, which is surprising for this kind of dry plan and hated it. So I do think there will be some pullback. And I think you see in the small bricks between members of Congress and Trump the beginnings of members trying to edge towards the center and away from these more extreme ideas. So then that brings us to perhaps our last question, which is the changes that have been made. Do you think that they are permanent changes? Like if Americans say we don't actually like what's gone on here, is this the way that we live three years from now, five years from now? here I'm thinking about ice in the streets. I'm thinking about midnight incursions into Venezuela. I'm thinking about a lot of the things that have got a lot of Americans on edge and that polling is showing Americans feel quite leery about. I think many of these things are not going to be easy to

reverse. You know, if there is a weakness to what Trump has done is that he has relied heavily on executive orders and not on legislation. And so a new Democratic president could come in, you know, on January 20th, 2029 and reverse a lot of those things. a Democratic Congress could push back on a lot of them. But these broader shifts in the way government power works and the relationship with citizens, I think are going to be a lot harder to undo. We have the most powerful presidency we've ever had.

And taking that back, you know, you can have a president who is more willing to be restrained in the way he or she uses that power. But unless there is a real effort to rebalance the way government works, to give Congress more power for Congress to be more forceful, to take back control over things like independent regulatory agencies. We're not going to see those things reversed, and any president could continue to act in these really kind of unrestrained ways

for whatever policies they might be proposing. And I think that is something that's going to take years to redo. David A. Graham, he's a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Project, how Project 2025 is Reshaping America. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Amin. El Sadi. Andrea Lopez Crusado checked all the facts and Patrick Boyden, David Tadishore engineered. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.