jd vance at a rally
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How JD Vance is connected to the plan that could jeopardize Trump’s 2024 election victory

By now, you’ll probably have heard whispers about Project 2025. Is it a plan to sell Vance-brand eyeliner? Perhaps it’s an upcoming Vance-penned book titled How To Win Friends and Influence People at the Donut Shop? Unfortunately, I’m afraid it’s something far more sinister—so sinister, in fact, it could prove too much even for Trump.

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What’s the plan? Project 2025.

Project 2025 is unusual as far as group projects go. Rather than seeing one poor and unfortunate far-right sucker do the work for the entire group like it’s high school all over again, Republicans are coming out of the woodwork to endorse and facilitate a project that could spell the doom of American democracy. So, what exactly is Project 2025? It’s an initiative arranged by the ultra-conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation that essentially provides a blueprint for the next Republican president to overhaul the executive branch of government entirely, effectively destroying checks and balances between the branches of government, downsizing federal institutions related to business regulation, the environment, and social issues, and turning the president into a de-facto dictator.

Spoiler alert: it ain’t pretty. Project 2025 is so ugly, so heinous, so fundamentally unconstitutional that Trump and his campaign are actually trying to distance themselves from it. One would think that Trump would jump at another chance at demagoguery, but then again, it sounds like a lot of work for a guy who prefers to spend his time sucking at golf and posting rants on Truth Social.

Trump’s running mate JD Vance didn’t seem to get the memo, though.

Vance praised Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ dystopian vision for the future of America in the foreword for one of Roberts’ upcoming books, Dawn’s Early Light. Whether Vance will include the same forward in his hypothetical upcoming books How To Win Friends and Influence People at the Donut Shop or Hillbilly Elegy 2: Whiter and Sadder remains to be seen. “Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance wrote in the foreword. “The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” Dammit, Reagan, your jellybean-guzzling ghost continues to haunt us to this day.

Vance’s spokesman William Martin attempted to distance his employer from Project 2025. “The foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025. Senator Vance has previously said that he has no involvement with it and has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for”. Right, it must be praising some other Heritage Foundation idea and not the “Second American Revolution” that Roberts himself says Project 2025 represents. Perhaps musket training for teens? Who’s to say?


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Jack Doyle
Jack Doyle (they/them) is actually nine choirs of biblically accurate angels crammed into one pair of $10 overalls. They have been writing articles for nerds on the internet for less than a year now. They really like anime. Like... REALLY like it. Like you know those annoying little kids that will only eat hotdogs and chicken fingers? They're like that... but with anime. It's starting to get sad.