Late this summer, a prominent right-wing think tank invited conservatives from across the country to learn how to operate in the second Donald J. Trump administration.
In a series of training sessions in Washington, former Trump officials shared with participants strategies for combating left-wing civil servants in the federal government and dealing with the mainstream media. Participants went home with thick binders filled with materials for further study. One section is titled “Stories from the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump.”
The class may be the work of Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint and personnel project created by Trump supporters and Democrats seeking to tie the most radical prescriptions to the former president. turned into a political bludgeon. .
But the meeting had nothing to do with the company or its main supporter, the Heritage Foundation. Rather, these are the work of the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank that, with little publicity or scrutiny, has been working on developing concrete plans for regaining power. established itself as a key partner of the Trump campaign.
Founded in late 2020 by three wealthy Texans, the group known as AFPI has quickly infiltrated nearly every corner of Mr. Trump’s political machine and is playing a role in Trump’s plans for a second term. Closer than any external participant.
Trump has selected one of his leaders, Linda McMahon, a former Trump Cabinet member and longtime friend, to co-chair his official transition team. Brooke Rollins, who also served in the Trump administration and is currently the chief executive of a nonprofit organization, is being discussed as a possible candidate for Trump’s chief of staff. The institute’s leadership includes other former Trump administration officials who have been planning their return over the past few years, and several have quietly moved on to work full-time on the campaign’s transition team in recent weeks.
Similar to Project 2025, the institute developed staffing and policy agenda-setting plans for each federal agency, prioritizing loyalty to Trump and aggressive flexibility in executive power from day one. Rollins declined to be interviewed, but AFPI said: has already drafted nearly 300 executive orders, ready for Trump to sign if he wins the election.
It’s impossible to predict which policies Mr. Trump will prioritize, and Mark Lotter, a spokesman for the nonprofit, said the group “does not represent any candidate, campaign, or transition.” It’s not something I’m going to say.”
But unlike the authors of Heritage’s Project 2025, the key architects of AFPI’s transition plan are currently advising the Trump campaign, a testament to the organization’s strategy and discretion.
Heath Brown, a professor of public policy who studies presidential transitions at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said, “Heritage understood what we didn’t understand. Transition work is always best kept very quiet.” That’s what it means,” he said.
agenda
The institute’s policy book, titled “America First Agenda,” is thinner than the much-discussed plan put forward in Project 2025’s 900-page “Leadership Mission.” High-profile proposals such as banning pornography, banning mail-in abortion pills and ending the Justice Department’s status as an independent agency are absent.
But that vision is no less Trumpian, calling for an end to federal funding for Planned Parenthood and mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including medication abortions. It would mutually recognize concealed weapons permits in all 50 states, increase oil production, remove the United States from the Paris climate accord, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and establish only two legal genders. I’m aiming for it.
It also goes much further than Project 2025 in one important area, calling for eliminating nearly all civil service protections by making federal employees at-will employees. Supporters believe this strategy allows Trump and his inner circle to eradicate their careers. These are officials who they believe got in his way during his first administration.
“Government agencies should be free to terminate employees for any non-discriminatory reason without any outside complaints,” the institute’s policy statement states.
The changes could allow officials to try to fire civil servants for almost any reason, including rebelling against Mr. Trump or taking positions that challenge his administration’s policies, such as acknowledging climate change. There is sex.
Within the official transition team, McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration during the Trump administration, has been indicted for policy issues, while her co-chair, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Mr. Lutnick is preparing to hire thousands of people. The people who run the agency.
Mr. Lutnick said in a television interview last week that his main priority in selecting nominees was loyalty to Mr. Trump. “He’s the CEO,” he said.
landing pad
Immediately after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, AFPI reported that Rollins and McMahon approached Texas billionaire oilman Tim Dunn about a national organization that could lay the foundation for a second Trump administration. The company was born after we were approached about establishing it.
Mr. Rollins, who served as Mr. Trump’s domestic policy director, previously served as chairman of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Mr. Dunn is a longtime director. Together, they supported Mr. Dunn’s pursuit of an agenda to reshape Texas politics, lobbying the state Legislature to direct public funding to private schools and increase the role of Christianity in civic life.
Within weeks, Mr. Dunn and two other wealthy Texas nonprofit directors, Cody Campbell and Tim Lyles, were registered with AFPI, with Mr. Dunn and Mr. Campbell remaining on its board. There is. Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanyu and Florida philanthropist and Scientologist Trish Duggan.
The group quickly became a landing spot for President Trump’s former aides to collect six-figure salaries while awaiting the next election. Dozens of Trump administration officials attended, including Hogan Gidley, who served as deputy press secretary. Chad Wolf, who served as interim Secretary of Homeland Security. Douglas Hoelscher heads the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and recently left the think tank to join Trump’s transition team.
The Trump transition organization, officially known as Trump Vance Transition 2024, did not respond to requests for interviews with McMahon or Hoelscher.
AFPI has had Trump’s blessing from the beginning, and his leadership PAC donated $1 million to the institute in 2021. The former president also spoke at the institute’s first policy summit in July 2022, his first major speech in Washington since leaving the White Party. house.
The nonprofit appears to have found a way to keep Trump’s attention, reaching every corner of his political campaign.
In total, current board members have donated more than $31 million to Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc. during the current campaign, including $20 million from McMahon alone. Also includes dollars.
Its sister organization, America First Works, is one of three groups working directly with the Trump campaign to get out the vote in battleground states.
Its legal department, led by Trump’s former lawyer Pam Bondi, is also filing voting lawsuits in battleground states. For example, in May, we sued the Fulton County, Georgia, elections board on behalf of election board members who sought the right not to certify the election based on allegations of fraud.
A county judge rejected that argument last week, saying, “Our Constitution and election laws do not allow for such a thing.”
The group has sought to continue to benefit from Mr. Trump. Although the former president has privately complained that AFPI is raising money based on his “America First” slogan, the institute has reliably transferred some of the funds to the president. .
All three of the organization’s annual fundraisers are held at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. The organization said it spent a total of $1.7 million on these events in 2021, according to its tax filings. 2022, including fees paid to Mr. Trump’s business as facility usage fees. Rotter, the nonprofit spokeswoman, said the payments included other events at nearby properties and did not go to Mar-a-Lago in full.
“Brook, what a great job you’re doing,” Trump said during his keynote speech at the organization’s 2021 fundraiser, which will be donated to the nonprofit after expenses. It brought in about $385,000 in profit.
A contest that takes advantage of tradition
But the core of the institute’s mission is to prepare for the inauguration of a new Republican administration. And there was competition on that front.
For more than two years, since officially launching the transition project, AFPI has been vying with the Heritage Foundation to be the gatekeeper to a second Trump administration. Heritage, a much larger organization in the conservative movement that has helped Republican presidential candidates plan their rise to power for decades, was not kind to this race.
Tensions first came to the fore just over a year ago, when a Heritage employee accused AFPI of “plagiarizing” the migration project “down to the name, language, and logo” in an email that appeared in news reports. That’s what happened. Rollins responded that the groups were “perfectly aligned.”
Last November, Trump’s top campaign advisers, Chris Lacivita and Susie Wiles, said they were “increasingly reporting on the intentions of various groups seeking to lead the transition to the Trump administration.” He publicly complained, adding: “These stories are neither appropriate nor constructive.” ”
AFPI seems to have gotten the hint. Its leadership remained silent and made little public comment about the transition plan. Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage and former director of the Texas Public Policy Institute, went in the opposite direction, using Project 2025 to raise more money and promote his unpublished book. .
The race ended abruptly this summer when the Trump campaign roundly rejected the Heritage project in the face of growing public opposition to Project 2025’s widely known policy goals.
“We welcome the report regarding the end of Project 2025,” Lacivita and Wiles said in a statement at the end of July.
But despite its best efforts, the Trump campaign has been unable to dissociate itself from Project 2025, which has become a favorite punching bag for the political left.
Project 2025 was a continuing theme at the Democratic National Convention, and since then, Vice President Kamala Harris has rarely missed an opportunity to mention Project 2025, with several creepy campaign spots referencing “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda.” It was broadcast.
The campaign runs a website dedicated to Project 2025, and during last month’s presidential debate, Harris repeatedly talked about “a detailed and dangerous plan that the former president is trying to implement called Project 2025.”
She did not mention the America First Policy Institute.
Karen Yourish contributed reporting.
