Project 2026

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Project 2026"

Podcast: Today, Explained (Vox)
Hosts: Noel King, with guest David A. Graham (The Atlantic)
Date: January 20, 2026

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Overview: Main Theme and Purpose

This episode marks exactly one year since the start of Donald Trump's second term as President of the United States. Host Noel King and journalist David A. Graham explore how Trump's administration has implemented Project 2025—a vast set of conservative policy proposals devised primarily by the Heritage Foundation—despite Trump's initial public disavowal. The episode analyzes what parts of Project 2025 have been achieved, what remains, political dynamics among conservatives, and whether these sweeping changes are likely to endure.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Trump’s Relationship to Project 2025

• Despite distancing himself during the campaign, Trump’s administration has quietly adopted much of Project 2025.
• David A. Graham: "I've been surprised how much they have even embraced it ... Trump has picked up so many of the policy ideas and the kind of approaches to governance that Project 2025 laid out." [02:53–03:28]

2. What is Project 2025?

• A comprehensive policy blueprint covering every federal department, targeted at reshaping U.S. governance along hardline conservative lines.
• Includes:
  • Policy Proposals: Guides for every federal department.
  • Implementation Approach: Tools to consolidate presidential power and reduce checks on the executive.
  • Personnel Planning: A “database of potential appointees”—thousands ready to fill government roles.
• Quote from a conservative activist: "The bottom line is that we need to have an army of conservatives ready to March in day one." [04:43]

3. How Much Has Been Done?

• Immediate Action: Major executive orders tracked almost verbatim from Project 2025 were issued on day one of Trump’s second term.
• Major progress has occurred in the following areas:
  • Culture and Social Policy:
    • Pushback against “wokeness”; attacks on DEI and transgender rights; attempts to encode binary gender into federal language.
    • Donald Trump: "Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone. It's gone." [06:16]
  • Immigration:
    • Aggressive crackdowns and policy changes, including actions in cities like Minneapolis.
  • Economic Policy:
    • Expansion of tariffs; attempts to cut taxes.
    • Unrealized ideas: abolishing the Fed, gold standard.
    • Donald Trump: "I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary." [07:13]
  • Environmental Regulation:
    • Massive reduction in renewables support; increased drilling; rollback of climate research and regulations.
    • Donald Trump: "The wind doesn't blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad." [07:54]
  • Foreign Policy:
    • More action-driven than isolationist; engagement with Venezuela, Greenland, Iran—not strictly as Project 2025 foresaw.
  • Quantification:
    • Online trackers estimate 50%+ of Project 2025’s aims are fulfilled, though the reality is complex.
    • David A. Graham: "You know, I find it really hard to quantify ... a good tracker out there puts the number right above 50%." [08:51]

4. How Did They Achieve So Much So Quickly?

• Experience Factor: Many officials are veterans from Trump’s first term who learned from previous mistakes and arrived organized and energized.
• Quote from a conservative organizer: "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." [10:20]
• David A. Graham: It was a "blitzkrieg" that caught the courts, Congress, and public off guard. [10:35]

5. Areas Where Project 2025 Fell Short

• Pro-family and Social Conservative Policies:
  • Ambitions to federally ban abortion, restrict abortion drugs, or encourage higher birth rates not fully realized.
  • Conservative spokesman: "The federal government does have a role in making sure there is no abortion in the United States, period. That is the Heritage position." [16:03]
• Labor and Welfare:
  • Plans to shift social welfare delivery from government to religious orgs remain largely undone.
• Department of Education:
  • Trump made partial moves to shut it down but hasn't gone all the way.
  • Donald Trump: "Oh, I'd like it to be closed immediately. Look, the Department of Education's a big con job." [17:17]
• Big Tech Regulation and China Focus:
  • Instead of cracking down on tech giants, Trump has embraced them.
  • Plans for singular focus on China not fully executed.
• David A. Graham: "We haven't seen a major shift of social welfare programs away from the government and towards religious organizations." [17:03]

6. What’s Likely to Come Next: Project 2026

• Independent Agency Takeover:
  • Underappreciated but critical: presidential control of regulatory agencies (FEC, FCC, NLRB, possibly excluding the Fed).
  • Supreme Court is expected to hand such power to the White House soon.
  • David A. Graham: "We're expecting a Supreme Court decision soon ... likely to basically give the president control over all these agencies." [18:29]
  • FCC Example: Attempts to pressure Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel.
• Heritage Foundation’s Internal Conflict:
  • Leadership controversies (e.g., over a Tucker Carlson interview with Nick Fuentes) have distanced them from the administration.
  • The administration remains wary of being seen as following outsider agenda-setters.
  • Donald Trump: "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." [21:49]
  • Other groups, e.g., Mike Pence’s, are poaching staff and vying to become the next conservative vanguard.
• Continued Advocacy: Heritage is still pushing for deeper family and Christian nationalist policies, recently releasing new documents on marriage and family. [23:09]

7. Conservative Movement: United or Fragmenting?

• Only Trump truly unites the right; significant divisions exist on abortion, tariffs, childcare, foreign intervention, and more.
• Uncertainty about whether anyone else—potentially JD Vance—could hold the coalition together post-Trump.
• David A. Graham: "I think it's a little bit of a free-for-all, as you see these groups... vying to see who can be the next power player in the next stage or whenever Trump exits the scene." [24:17]

8. Electoral Calculations and Public Backlash

• Project 2025 is “wildly unpopular,” more than 30 points underwater in favorability.
• With midterms ahead, a need for moderation is anticipated; the administration may pull back on more extreme items to retain congressional support.
• David A. Graham: "Project 2025 was wildly unpopular. People knew about it ... and they hated it. So I do think there will be some pullback." [25:58]

9. Are These Changes Permanent?

• Some Trump initiatives reliant on executive orders could be readily reversed by a new president/Congress.
• Deeper structural changes—especially expanded presidential power and weakened independent regulatory agencies—will be hard to undo and may have enduring effects.
• David A. Graham: "We have the most powerful presidency we've ever had, and taking that back ... unless there is a real effort to rebalance ... we're not gonna see those things reversed." [26:54]

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Project 2025's scope:
  Noel King: "Project 2025 was 922 pages. How much has the Trump administration accomplished?"
  David A. Graham: "A good tracker puts it right above 50%... but some things are hard to equate numerically." [08:36–09:09]

• On administrative style:
  David A. Graham: "They conducted this blitzkrieg... took the courts by surprise, took Congress by surprise, and I think it took a lot of the public by surprise as well." [10:35]

• On enduring changes:
  David A. Graham: "We have the most powerful presidency we’ve ever had ... unless there is a real effort to rebalance ... we’re not gonna see those things reversed." [26:54]

• On intra-conservative strife:
  David A. Graham: "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." [20:25]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:03] – [02:20]: Setting the scene: Trump’s year-two headlines; Greenland gambit; Project 2025’s background.
• [02:20] – [05:19]: What is Project 2025? Who’s involved—including former Trump officials.
• [05:19] – [10:47]: Implementation: concrete policies enacted, strategic approach, areas of progress.
• [10:47] – [11:17]: Remaining ambitions: reshaping society, what hasn’t been done.
• [15:32] – [19:54]: Failures and unfinished business: abortion policy, pro-family measures, regulatory agency takeover, big tech.
• [20:25] – [23:53]: Heritage Foundation's role, internal conservative schisms, vying for future leadership.
• [24:17] – [26:24]: Fragmentation in conservatism, viability of new leaders, midterm moderation.
• [26:24] – [28:06]: Permanence of changes; structural transformation of the presidency and federal power.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a detailed assessment of the Trump administration’s broad adoption of Project 2025’s conservative roadmap—highlighting both ambitious implementation and areas of struggle—while probing the profound and potentially durable reshaping of U.S. governance. While some changes could be swiftly reversed by future administrations, the fundamental expansion of presidential power and transformation of the regulatory state pose more lasting challenges. The future of the conservative movement, particularly post-Trump, remains highly uncertain, with deep internal divisions and ongoing debates over both policy and strategy.

For listeners seeking to understand not just what happened in Trump’s second year but how and why it unfolded—and where the conservative movement may be headed—this episode provides a thorough, engaging exploration.

Transcript

[Donald Trump]

Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen.

[Noel King]

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 screenshotting and sharing DMs sent to him by France's President Emmanuel Macron, and Mark Rutte, 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?

[Donald Trump]

I will declare a national emergency at our southern border and we are going to bring law and order back to our cities. We will drill, baby, drill.

[Noel King]

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.

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[David A. Graham]

This is Today Explained. My name is David Graham and I'm a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of the how Project 2025 is reshaping America.

[Noel King]

People may remember 2024, 7,000 years ago. President Trump at the time, a candidate.

[Donald Trump]

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.

[Noel King]

He's been in office for a year. Did his administration actually disavow Project 2025?

[David A. Graham]

No. And I was. 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 Vogt, the.

[Donald Trump]

Budget chief, they call him Darth Vader, I call him a fine man.

[David A. Graham]

Or John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, I did not transmit classified information. Or Peter Navarro, crucial tariff advisor.

[Donald Trump]

So, first of all, Elon and I are great. It's, it's not an issue.

[Noel King]

Even though he called you a moron and dumber than a sack of bricks.

[David A. Graham]

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.

[Noel King]

What was it laying out? Remind us what it was.

[David A. Graham]

So this is this huge project and it was, I'd say there are a few different things. One is a set of policies, ideas for every department of the government and what they would be doing under the right wing administration that Project 2025 foresaw.

[Conservative Organizer/Activist]

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.

[David A. Graham]

The second thing was an approach to make those things happen. So how are we going to make the federal government do things it has not done before? How are we going to seize control? How are we going to give the president powers that he hasn't had in the past? In order to do those things, we.

[Conservative Organizer/Activist]

Are going to be prepared, day one, January 20, 2025, to hit the ground running as a, as conservatives, to really help the next president.

[David A. Graham]

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.

[Conservative Organizer/Activist]

The bottom line is that we need to have an army of conservatives ready to March in day one.

[Noel King]

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 Clearer focus. When would you say that it became clear that, like, okay, they are actually doing a Project 2025 here?

[David A. Graham]

I think, you know, there were signs before he took office, appointing Russell vote to head OMB would be one of those.

[Donald Trump]

We have Darth Vader, you know, Darth Vader.

[David A. Graham]

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 15, 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. There's really something here.

[Noel King]

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.

[David A. Graham]

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.

[Donald Trump]

Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It's gone. It's gone.

[David A. Graham]

We've seen the, you know, 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.

[Donald Trump]

There are only two genders, male and female.

[David A. Graham]

Undermining traditional tools is civil rights enforcement. So we've seen a lot of those things. You know, I don't think we've seen the kind of pronatalist policies that some of Project 25's authors intended, but that's in the same area looking at immigration, which is obviously a big Trump priority for a long time.

[Donald Trump]

They're coming into our country.

[David A. Graham]

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, you know, pursue tariffs as part of Project 2025 suggests.

[Donald Trump]

I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary.

[David A. Graham]

And work to cut taxes. Some of the more fantastical ideas, like, you know, abolishing the Fed or returning to a gold standard, we haven't seen.

[Noel King]

Although he's gone after Jay Powell real hard in the last couple weeks.

[Donald Trump]

That jerk will be gone soon.

[David A. Graham]

Yeah. It seems like Trump has realized he'd rather control the Fed than get rid of it.

[Noel King]

Yeah, yeah.

[David A. Graham]

You look at environmental regulation, this is a place where I think they've made a lot of progress, encouraging drilling Encouraging oil and gas exploration.

[Donald Trump]

We have oil and gas more than anybody in the world. We're going to have more of it, too.

[David A. Graham]

Cutting down on renewables.

[Donald Trump]

The wind doesn't blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad.

[David A. Graham]

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 is 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 won style isolationism and a turn toward China, rather than focusing on all these other things.

[Noel King]

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?

[David A. Graham]

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 use, 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 numerical level or like, you know, that tracker says Trump eliminated US Aid, which is a goal.

[Donald Trump]

We have effectively eliminated the U.S. agency for International Development, which was funding much of this lunacy.

[David A. Graham]

Project 2025 wanted to reform USAID, shrink it, use it 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 that's a good way to think about it, like how far they are. 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.

[Noel King]

How did they get so much done, this administration?

[David A. Graham]

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 or 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.

[Conservative Organizer/Activist]

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.

[David A. Graham]

I think that that gave them the chance to sort of conduct this blitzkrieg 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.

[Noel King]

I think I hear you telling me that there is still a lot in that big book of ideas and politics that they would like to get done.

[David A. Graham]

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 are on a timeframe of years or decades.

[Noel King]

David Graham of the Atlantic when we come back, David's Gonna Talk Project 2026. Support for Today Explained comes from Bombas. Perhaps you want to get in shape this year. Bombas wants to tell you about the all new Bombas sport socks engineered with sport specific comfort for running, golf, hiking, skiing, snowboarding and all sport. Meanwhile, for the loungers among us, Bombas has non sport footwear available. But Bombas 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. Underwear, T shirts, flexible, breathable, buttery, smooth, premium everyday. Go to's they say you won't want to leave the house without here's Nisha Chital. I've been wearing Bombas for several years now. I have several pairs. My whole family loves to wear Bombas. I have several pairs of Bombas ankle socks and I have some no show socks as well that are great for things like loafers and ballet flats. For every item you purchase, Bombas says an essential clothing item is donated to someone facing housing insecurity. One purchased, one donated. Over 150 million donations and counting, I'm told. You can go to bombas.com explained and use code explained for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O-M-B-A-S.com explained explain code explained at checkout.

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[Donald Trump]

I mean I see this I like. It's so incredible. Ding ding ding ding ding ding bom okay.

[Noel King]

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 prior 2025. What did they fail to get done?

[David A. Graham]

There are several areas where they haven't done much. I think one is 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.

[Conservative Commentator/Politician]

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.

[David A. Graham]

Short of that, they want to do everything they can to limit it. So that's, you know, withdrawing approval for mifepressone. 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 rate 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.

[Conservative Commentator/Politician]

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.

[David A. Graham]

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.

[Donald Trump]

Oh, I'd like it to be closed immediately. Look, the Department of Education's a big con job.

[David A. Graham]

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.

[Donald Trump]

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.

[David A. Graham]

And I think that has to do with the fact that tech CEOs cozied 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 the kind of turn toward China that I think the authors argued was really important and should be basically the only thing that the US Was worrying about in the world for the near future.

[Noel King]

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 tried to carry it out in some instances very successfully. What do you think we're gonna see more of in the year ahead? Like what? What Maybe have we not been paying enough attention to that? They've been banging the drum on, and we should.

[David A. Graham]

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 sort of 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, at the Justice Department, where he uses it for retribution.

[Conservative Commentator/Politician]

On Friday, the Department of justice served.

[David A. Graham]

The Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas. I think that's something that people need to be paying more attention to and. And they're not really going to appreciate until it starts actually happening in their lives.

[Noel King]

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.

[Conservative Commentator/Politician]

The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.

[Noel King]

There was all of this conversation about Republicans, like Nazis now and has the upheaval there changed the administration's relationship with Heritage?

[David A. Graham]

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.

[Donald Trump]

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 that 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.

[David A. Graham]

And I think there were a couple problems from the Trump administration point of view. One of them was that Project 2025 was unpopular.

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[David A. Graham]

And when you look at what is the favorability rating of those kinds of proposals, Project 2025 overall, more than 30 percentage points underwater.

[Noel King]

And his agenda is all laid out in Project 2025, which I still must say I cannot believe they put that in writing.

[David A. Graham]

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.

[Donald Trump]

President Trump has ceded the presidency to El Musk. No, no, that's not happening.

[David A. Graham]

And I think that was part of his problem with Heritage there.

[Donald Trump]

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.

[David A. Graham]

And so, on the one hand, they have 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 Successor to 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 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 as, I think, very long running.

[Noel King]

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 2026, Heritage has additional agenda items. M. And we'd like you to, you know, take care of those, too.

[David A. Graham]

You know, they have been 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.

[MIDI Health Advertiser]

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.

[David A. Graham]

And these get at the kind of most deeply felt, kind of Christian nationalist ideas. In Project 2025, we must, not just.

[Conservative Commentator/Politician]

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.

[David A. Graham]

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.

[Noel King]

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, US 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?

[David A. Graham]

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 childcare in order to encourage higher birth rates to whether or not there should be tariffs. And so, you know, 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 JD 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 Project22.5 group or, you know, 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.

[Noel King]

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 extre. Do you see moderation coming this year, and do you see that affecting how Project 2025 plays out?

[David A. Graham]

I would say first that I'm not convinced that Americans were voting for that, even though the administration acted that way. Project 2025 was wildly unpopular. People knew about it, which is surprising for this kind of dry plan, and they hated it. So I do think there will be some pullback. And I think you see in the small breaks between members of Congress and Trump, the beginnings of members trying to edge towards the center and away from these more extreme ideas.

[Noel King]

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? And 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.

[David A. Graham]

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 20, 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 gonna 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 gonna take years to redo.

[Noel King]

David A. Graham He's a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of the how Project 2025 is reshaping America. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Amina El Saadi. Andrea Lopez Crusado checked all the facts and Patrick Boyd and David Tadashore engineered I'm Noel King, It's Today, explained.

[David A. Graham]

Sam.