Staffers at the right-wing Heritage Foundation are gloating over their controversial Project 2025 plans for Donald Trump's next presidency.
The former president won re-election Tuesday despite being saddled with the deeply unpopular blueprint for remaking the federal government, from which Trump's team tried to distance themselves during the campaign, but sources told NOTUS that Heritage group chats have been how conservatives “tricked the Libs into believing Project 2025 wasn’t real.”
“Now Heritage isn’t going to be scapegoated,” said one former employee. “If we were planning some evil plan to take over the government and make Donald Trump a king and ship women off to colonies, do you think we would put it on a freaking PDF and post it on the internet? Like, what a joke. It was all lies, and the voters clearly saw through those lies.”
However, the project's authors are hoping the incoming Trump administration will seriously consider some of their proposals, although sources close to the think tank worry that Project 2025's notoriety could make them politically toxic as potential hires.
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“I still think there are residual hard feelings that are going to make it very hard for Heritage to tout successes on Project 2025 and influences in the administration,” said one former Heritage staffer.
“People who authored chapters of the book or have a lot closer ties with Heritage are going to be either shut out or a lot more slowly let in," said another former staffer.
Neither the Trump campaign nor the Heritage Foundation agreed to comment on the report, but a strategist close to the Trump campaign doubted that Project 2025 would not likely make the think tank's staffers untouchable.
“It’s pretty hard to run an entire conservative administration without having somebody who currently or formerly worked at Heritage,” the strategist said. “You know Trump. Nobody’s ever in the doghouse completely.”
Multiple sources said Trump's plans already mirror many Project 2025 proposals, which one former Heritage employee said was "boilerplate conservative stuff," and the strategist close to the campaign said the president-elect didn't need to worry about the optics of adopting politically toxic proposals.
“Frankly, he doesn’t have to worry about winning a second term, so he’s gonna go f*cking balls to the wall,” the strategist said. “He wants to make sh*t happen.”
The strategist then compared Trump to Grover Cleveland, the only other president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.
“He’s like, ‘F*ck yeah, I know what I’m doing – eat sh*t and die, all of ya,’” the strategist said.