Since it unexpectedly became a viral phenomenon earlier this year, Project 2025 has become extraordinarily large compared to the presidential campaign.
Kamala Harris on the debate stage say it “A detailed and dangerous plan” that Donald Trump “intends to implement if he is re-elected.”
Trump, meanwhile, insists we shouldn’t focus on that 922-page policy plan Behind the scenes, claiming that he “nothing to do“with and have”any ideas Who is behind this”.
In fact, Project 2025, an initiative put together last year by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to plan for the next GOP administration, was long in the making. close friend Trump’s Detailed plans for a second Trump term agenda along these lines are very real, and although the Project 2025 initiative itself is seemingly Fizzle outother group there is to pick until relaxation
Moreover, many of the key proposals of Project 2025 – decentralizing presidential power, cracking down on unauthorized immigration, prioritizing and eliminating the fight against climate change. Department of Education – Fully and publicly supported by Trump.
Yet Trump’s intentions are less clear on one very important issue where Project 2025 makes some particularly extreme proposals: abortion.
The project’s plan calls for using the president’s power to aggressively limit abortion in several ways. Wary of the unpopularity of these proposals, Trump said during the campaign that he will not support Some of them he obviously is too Hesitating A direct repudiation of the social conservatives who have long been a core part of his base.
Harris, meanwhile, wants to associate Trump with the most extreme version of the conservative anti-abortion agenda. “Understand that his plan is to have a national abortion ban in 2025,” he said said in the debate. This is not strictly true, in that the project does not call for any explicit bans, but it does include a proposal that some experts say is a “Backdoor abortions are prohibited,” depending on how it is implemented. Additionally, it is certainly true that anti-abortion activists received important appointments in the Trump administration last time and hope to do so again.
At this point, Trump is trapped in the fear of electoral defeat if he espouses the unpopular ideas of social conservatives and their desire to reward their loyalty to him and keep them on their side. This explains Trump’s delicate dance where he is said Project 2025 has some “absolutely ridiculous and unusual” ideas but never specifies what those bad ideas are, as doing so might anger its supporters.
If he wins, the question will be whether Trump feels free to reward his longtime allies with taking control of federal abortion policy, as he did last time he appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
Project 2025 contains a broad set of proposals designed to limit abortion in the United States.
Although Trump was not personally involved with Project 2025, much of it was clearly written in hopes of appealing to him. The group’s key policy document clearly avoids taking sides on key issues where Trump has broken conservative doctrine, such as trade and the future of Social Security and Medicare.
But one issue where they’ve really come out in front of Trump, it seems, is abortion.
Project 2025’s policy plan was put together months after the Supreme Court overturned a long-standing priority of social conservatives. Roe v. Wade. The anti-abortion movement doesn’t want to stop at rolling back abortion policies in the states, though. It argues that abortion should be understood as the killing of unborn children, and it wants to use federal power to further curtail abortion.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, wrote in Project 2025’s foreword, “State and Washington conservatives, including the next conservative administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. Policy planning
The plan recommends many anti-abortion policies, but three stand out in particular.
1) Implementation of the Comstock Act: Project 2025 calls for prosecuting “the suppliers and distributors of abortion pills using the mail” through an outdated anti-obscenity law called the Comstock Act — a law that, my colleague Ian Milheiser writes, “hasn’t been seriously enforced in nearly a century.”
Reproductive rights activists warnedIncluding fears, that the Comstock Act could be used to implement “a backward abortion ban” nationally. That’s because the very broad law says that not only pills, but any “thing designed, adapted or manufactured for the purpose of producing an abortion” is illegal to ship across state lines through the mail or in interstate commerce. If it were seriously enforced, they argue, sending basic supplies to abortion clinics would be effectively illegal.
“If the Comstock Act is implemented, it will override state laws that protect abortion rights and states that have ballot initiatives and states that have other protective laws,” UC Davis law professor Mary Ziegler said. Mother said to Jones In April
Some anti-abortion activists have similar interpretations. “We don’t need a federal ban if we have Comstock on the books,” said Jonathan Mitchell, an influential conservative lawyer (who Represented Trump in a legal proceeding), told the New York Times In February, however, he added, “The extent to which this is done will depend on whether the president wants to take the political heat and whether the attorney general or the secretary of health and human services is on board.”
2) Banning the abortion pill mifepristone: Claiming that “abortion pills are the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Ro world,” Project 2025 calls for withdrawing FDA approval of the mifepristone pill, which is used in nearly half of all U.S. abortions.
Because mifepristone is under legal challenge, many abortion providers have braced for such a ban and said they may switch to a different method that requires only the drug misoprostol. But they fear the drug will become the next target of anti-abortion campaigners NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin writes Earlier this year.
3) Demanding data from states on who is having abortions: Alleging that liberal states are “sanctuaries for abortion tourism” (because residents of red states can travel there for the procedure), Project 2025 says HHS would require each state to ensure reports to the feds “exactly how many abortions occur within its borders”. Including data such as “mother’s state of residence.” The document recommends cutting federal funding to states if they refuse to provide this data.
Trump doesn’t seem to be the only one to spare anti-abortion activists
It is the above proposals of Project 2025 that have proved politically inconvenient for Trump during this campaign. He refrained that he simply wanted to let the states decide on abortion policy. saying “The federal government has nothing to do with this issue.” But he keeps promising that new details about his intentions for federal policy are forthcoming — details that somehow never come.
Trump asked about the implementation of the Comstock Act last month started to say He wouldn’t, but he hedged a bit: “No, we’ll discuss the specifics of that, but generally speaking, no.” Regarding banning mifepristone, Trump’s campaign line The Supreme Court settled the matter – which makes no sense because the court only ruled on a procedural matter.
So Trump is claiming that if he wins, women will have nothing to fear from his abortion policies. But there are many reasons to believe him.
The reality is that some of Trump’s most important political allies are deeply committed to limiting abortion in the United States. Take, for example, his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance. In 2022, Vance called Enacting the Comstock Act And said: “I definitely want abortion to be illegal nationally.”
Trump’s top appointees who will be tasked with setting federal policy in his second term are likely to include many committed social conservatives. Notably, the chapters in Project 2025 that touch on abortion were written by two key Trump administration officials: Roger Severino, who worked at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Gene Hamilton, who worked at the Justice Department (and is a longtime close ally of Trump policy guru Stephen Miller ).
Trump “has been the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policies of any administration in history,” Severino said. told the New York Times in February. “That track record is the best evidence, I think, you can have of what a second term might look like if Trump wins.”
have a Classic political quote“Dance with, cotton with” explains why politicians feel compelled to stick with their loyal supporters. Although Trump is currently trying to strike a more moderate tone on abortion, he is a transactional figure and knows that social conservatives are among his most important and loyal supporters.
It appeared in late August: Several days after Trump took heat from anti-abortion groups, he announced that, a Florida abortion ballot measureHe will stand with them.
