On the trail, Trump claimed he'd never read Project 2025 but he's stocking his cabinet with 2025 contributors

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

Here’s a current events quiz:

After their Sept. 10 presidential debate, which candidate said, “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.” 

Hint: It’s the candidate who won.  

Project 2025 is the book-length blueprint for a second Donald Trump term produced by the rightwing Heritage Foundation. "The Project 2025 policy agenda is far-ranging and includes many of the nostrums advanced by rightwing Republicans, including abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, slashing taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, further restricting abortion, increasing oil and gas production, maintaining a 'biblically based' definition of marriage and family, and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs," wrote historian Lawrence S. Wittner in Z online. "But few of the project’s recommendations are as extreme as those dealing with America’s unions and the workers they represent."

Project 2025 calls for old-time Robber Baron style, bare-knucks union-busting. 

When word of Project 2025 spread, the tome proved to be about as popular with most voters as a wet dog at a wedding, Trump, on the campaign trail, protested, Sgt. Shultz-like, “I know nothing!” Never mind that "at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025," CNN reported.  

Even so, Trump kept sprinting from the controversial document right up to election day. So did his courtiers. In a Sept. 16 interview with CNBC, Howard Lutnick, a Trump transition team leader, emphatically denied any Trump-Project 2025 link, reported  The Washington Post’s Patrick Svitek. “‘Absolutely zero. No connection. Zero,’" he quoted Lutnick.

Lutnick also promised, " “I won’t take a list from them. I won’t take a topic from them. I won’t touch them. They made themselves nuclear.”

Of course, the president-elect is filling his cabinet with-you guessed it-MAGA loyalists closely tied to Project 2025.

Svitek cited Russ Vought as “the most striking example” of a potential Project 2025 pick. Trump is inclined to choose  Vought to head the White House budget office, according to Svitek. "Vought, who held the role during Trump’s first term, was an architect of Project 2025, writing a chapter on the executive office-and advocating that the next president more aggressively wield his power.”

Svitek pointed out that Trump has tapped at least a quartet of others “who are credited by name in Project 2025...Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for ‘border czar’; John Ratcliffe, Trump’s planned nominee for CIA director; Brendan Carr, his selection to head the Federal Communications Commission; and Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s selection for ambassador to Canada. Homan, Hoekstra and Ratcliffe were listed as contributors to Project 2025’s 900-plus-page manifesto. Carr wrote an entire chapter on the agency that Trump now wants him to run.”

There’s more. “One of the groups that advised Project 2025, America First Legal, is led by Stephen Miller, a former top Trump aide whom Trump has now picked to return to the White House as assistant to the president, deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.”

Svitek also quoted a statement from Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt: “As President Trump said many times, he had nothing to do with Project 2025.”

Trump's penchant for prevaricating-shared by his flaks-is well-documented. Svitek’s paper tallied 30,573 false or misleading statements Trump made when he was president. 

I haven’t seen a total of the times candidate Trump violated the Biblical proscription against “bearing false witness” in the Ten Commandments.

"For the third consecutive presidential election, the Republican presidential nominee is running a relentlessly dishonest campaign for the world’s most powerful office," CNN's Daniel Dale reported on Nov. 1. "Wildly exaggerating statistics, grossly distorting his opponent’s record and his own, regularly just plain making stuff up, Trump is lying to American voters with a frequency and variety whose only precedent is his own previous campaigns."

Added Dale: "Trump made thousands of false claims as president, picking up the pace during  crises and elections. But that he has himself done the same thing before doesn’t make it any less noteworthy that he is doing it now. All presidents lie. Historians say, however, that there has never been a president who has lied this much, has lied about so many different things, or made up so many things out of whole cloth."

Doubtless Trump's truth-torturing figured into a survey released last February in which 154 scholars rated Trump the worst-ever president. 

Think Trump can't get any worse? think again. Think hard again. Think of former Marine Gen. John Kelly's warning about his old boss in the White House. Trump synchs with "the general definition of fascist” and "certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”