President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have launched an all-out attack aimed at tying former President Trump to the platform of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, pushing back against critics who have called for the president to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race.
The effort comes as President Trump seeks to distance himself from Project 2025, a heavily scrutinized plan laid out as a blueprint for a future Republican administration to reorganize many parts of the U.S. government. Trump has described elements of the plan as “ridiculous” and “terrible.”
The announcement also comes amid growing calls from many in his party for Biden to drop out of the race following his disappointing performance in the first presidential debate last month.
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President Biden, former President Trump, and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)
“Donald Trump’s Project 2025 team is made up of the same extremists who disenfranchised women, rounded up and deported Latinos, and undermined our democracy during his first term,” Biden campaign spokeswoman Sarafina Chitica told Fox News Digital.
“If Trump wins this election, his allies in Project 2025 will be working around the clock to ensure he bans abortion nationwide, eviscerates Social Security and Medicare, and rules as a dictator from day one. Donald Trump and Project 2025 are one and the same, and voters will ensure they are both defeated this November.”
Though not officially affiliated with the Trump campaign, Chitika’s use of the term “Trump’s Project 2025 team” was a reference to the people who launched the effort in 2023, many of whom held positions in the previous president’s administration, including Paul Danz, who directed the project and served as Trump’s White House liaison to the Office of Personnel Management.
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Former President Trump attended a campaign event at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami on Tuesday. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Dans’ associates in developing the plan, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway, served as special assistant to President Trump and an employee of the Office of Presidential Personnel, respectively. In fact, 81% of the people who worked on the plan hold official positions in the Trump administration, and several current aides are also working on the project.
Biden and Harris have tried in recent weeks to shift the campaign’s focus to the project, not only to distract from the pressure Biden is facing but also because they see it as a winning message to moderate battleground state voters that could decide the election.
“Trump’s advisers have written a 900-page blueprint called ‘Project 2025’ that details everything they plan to do in a second term, including cutting Social Security, eliminating the $35 cap on insulin, abolishing the Department of Education and eliminating programs like Head Start,” Harris said while campaigning in Nevada on Tuesday.
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Vice President Kamala Harris addressed supporters at a campaign event at Resorts World Las Vegas in Las Vegas on Tuesday. (Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
“Donald Trump wants to turn our democracy into a dictatorship, and the Supreme Court has basically just declared that he can get away with it,” she later added, referring to the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that gave presidents effective immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office.
Trump disparaged Project 2025 in a Truth Social post last week, saying he didn’t know who was behind the initiative, which would recommend how a future Republican president should begin implementing conservative reforms once in office, as well as a review of legislation, including a constitutional amendment. Department of Justice We also work with the FBI on issues like abortion and immigration.
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“I don’t know anything about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” Trump wrote. “I don’t agree with some of the things they say and some of the things they say are just completely ridiculous and awful. I wish them the best of luck in whatever they do, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The Trump campaign on Thursday criticized efforts to link him to Project 2025, telling Fox News Digital that “Agenda 47 and President Trump’s Republican National Committee platform are the only policies President Trump will support for a second term.”
“The Biden campaign and the DNC are lying and fear-mongering because they have nothing else to offer the American people. Let’s not forget that this is the same group that has been lying to the American people for years and hiding Joe Biden’s declining cognitive abilities.”
Fox News’ Kyle Morris, Andrew Mark Miller and Cameron Cawthorn contributed to this report.
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