ATLANTA — A new front in the presidential campaign opened Friday as Democrats posted billboards in metro Atlanta critical of Project 2025. The billboards tie it to former Republican President Donald Trump, raising a question: What is Project 2025?
The billboards urge viewers to Google Project 2025. The document itself is online, and it’s a 900-plus-page proposed roadmap for a potential Trump second term.
Its critics claim it would fundamentally change the US government, removing partisan safeguards.
"We are at war against MAGA, Project 2025, white nationalism," Bishop Reginald Jackson said Thursday at the Georgia capitol.
The gathering of Donald Trump critics invoked several unflattering references to Project 2025. This is a thick document produced by the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank.
Though Trump did not produce it, Project 2025 is the product of Trump backers who want the Republican to have a coherent plan if he starts a second term next year. It's "to really articulate an agenda for an administration," said Republican Jason Shepherd, a former Cobb GOP chairman.
He said Trump’s previous administration spent months trying to find its footing and hire knowledgeable people.
"And if you wait two years, two and a half years, three years to get everyone through, then that’s a lot of time wasted," Shepherd said.
It would eliminate the US Department of Education and sweep out civil service government workers, replacing many of them with political appointees. On policy, it calls for big tax cuts for corporations and individual incomes, including the wealthy.
It would cut funding for renewable energy and cut carbon reduction goals, with more fossil fuel energy production.
It describes life as beginning at conception. It also targets what it calls ‘woke culture warriors’ by cutting ‘sexual orientation’ and 'gender identity’ from government literature.
Critics say it’s an appalling agenda.
"What troubles me most is the explicitness of the extremism. We’ve never seen them talk in this kind of swaggering explicit way about basically gutting our democracy," said US Rep. Jared Huffman in an interview with NBC News.
But Shepherd says it’s merely a possible framework for Trump to use as needed if he's elected in November, consistent with much modern-day conservative doctrine.
"This is why we have two parties. There are policy differences. And most of them are things that everyone knows," Shepherd said. "And I think it will probably become the model for Democrat administrations... taking over from Republicans - or at least hoping to take over from Republicans."
Though Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its bullet points are tenets embraced by conservatives and Trump himself on the campaign trail.