Leaked Project 2025 Training Videos Show Former Trump Officials Detailing Plans to Dismember Gov’t

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. It’s “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

We look now at the far-right policy plan to overhaul the federal government, known as Project 2025. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is trying to downplay his connection to the plan. And last week, Kevin Roberts, head of the influential right-wing Heritage Foundation, postponed the release of his Project 2025 book until after the November election. The book’s foreword is written by Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance.

Trump’s campaign insists it has no connection to the right-wing blueprint for immigration, almost a thousand pages long — a blueprint for immigration, reproductive rights, climate policy and more. But many of the key figures working for Project 2025 are former top Trump administration officials, some of them featured in newly released videos that were created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy.

In a major new development, the independent news outlets ProPublica and Documented have now published dozens of these videos, some of which we’ll feature today. In this clip, Trump’s former deputy chief of staff at USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bethany Kozma, discusses climate change.

BETHANY KOZMAN: Climate change, allegedly, is everywhere. And if the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere. And according to our intelligence community, the number one threat facing our country today is — drum roll — climate change — not Russia, not China, not AI, climate change. This shows how the federal government is all in on this issue. And climate change activists wield a lot of power. This is an issue to pay attention to, as it has infiltrated every part of the federal government.

Now, when I think of climate change, I immediately think of population control, don’t you? I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the “impact” on the environment. Perhaps not everyone will make that connection, but after spending time in the international space trying to protect life, I can tell you that this is part of their ultimate goal: to control people.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s conservative activist and former Trump official Bethany Kozma in a newly released Project 2025 training video.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Andy Kroll, investigative reporter for ProPublica, whose new exposé is headlined “Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.” ProPublica has posted the full 23 videos, totaling more than 14 hours of content, on its website.

Andy, welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain how you got the videos and their significance as we go through some of them.

ANDY KROLL: Yeah, the videos come from the Presidential Administration Academy, which is one of the main pillars of Project 2025. We’ve heard a lot about, you’ve talked about on this show, the extreme policy proposals that Project 2025 put out in its 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” document. What’s gotten less attention but is no less important to Project 2025’s long-term goal here is to train thousands of future political appointees, so that if a conservative president, which, of course, now means if Donald Trump — a conservative candidate wins in November and we have a Republican president, that there will be a bench of thousands of vetted and trained appointees who can go into the government and fill openings in that government, so that, as Project 2025 itself says on its website, that conservative administration can be ready from, quote-unquote, “day one.”

Now, these videos were provided to us by a source who had access to them. I won’t get into the sourcing on it, but with any kind of situation like this, the key things for us at ProPublica are: Are these videos real? Are they authentic? And are they newsworthy? Obviously the substance is newsworthy. In our reporting process, we talked to people who are in the videos. We verified them, authenticated them and fact-checked them ourself. And now we’ve published on them and, as you helpfully pointed out, also published all of these 23 videos, totaling more than 14 hours, on our website. Anyone watching today can go and watch them now.

AMY GOODMAN: Andy, if you can just give us some background again on Project 2025? Because, of course, President Trump has disavowed this, but, meanwhile, the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, a former top adviser in Trump’s administration, has been forced to step down, and, of course, that book which is headed by the head of Heritage Foundation, which is behind this blueprint, is now — they are putting off the publication of this, with the foreword by none other than Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance.

ANDY KROLL: The Trump campaign has clearly come to the realization that Project 2025 and the policies that it lays out are extremely unpopular. And it’s not really surprising to understand why. Just a few of those policies are, for instance, closing the entire Department of Education; further restricting abortion rights in this country, especially mifepristone, also known as the abortion pill; slashing Medicaid; and then, of course, reclassifying tens of thousands of career government employees so that they can be more easily fired and then replaced by more loyal, vetted political appointees chosen by the next conservative president, which, again, in this case would potentially be Donald Trump. So there’s a reason the Trump campaign is distancing itself from those unpopular policies: It is hurting their campaign.

However, as you pointed out and as we report in our story, the number of connections between Trump’s political operation in his administration from ’17 to ’21 and Project 2025 are many. As we write in the story, of the 36 different speakers in these videos, 29 of them have a connection to Mr. Trump. They worked in his administration across the government — the White House, National Security Council, a number of departments, including Justice, Interior, Health and Human Services, Office of Management and Budget, Presidential Personnel Office, across the board. There are people who ran his 2016-’17 transition team, that led him into the first presidency, and, lastly, I would point out, the Trump reelection campaign spokeswoman, who sent us a comment reiterating, in their view, that there’s no connection between 2025 and the Trump campaign. She herself, Karoline Leavitt, actually appears in the videos that we posted on our site. So, it’s really impossible to say that there is some bright line here between Trump’s political campaign, his team, and this Project 2025 effort.

AMY GOODMAN: Andy Kroll, I want to play a series of clips that you have just released. This is another Project 2025 training video featuring Katie Sullivan, who was acting assistant attorney general at Department of Justice under Trump. In this clip, Sullivan says the next conservative administration will need to eradicate all equity plans.

KATIE SULLIVAN: I think you can expect that equity and all of the equity executive orders under Biden will be repealed early in the next administration. This is going to require a very detailed plan to execute the eradication of the dictates in the equity orders. For instance, there’s a gender adviser position created by one of these executive orders. That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another Project 2025 training video, featuring Dan Huff, former legal adviser in the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, laying out how political appointees should be ready to enforce dramatic changes and face blowback when they do.

DAN HUFF: If the next Republican president does not execute a dramatic course correction, there may never be another chance. So, if you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it will damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially, look, I get it. That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But, please, do us all a favor and sit this one out.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another Project 2025 training video, titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide.” It features Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration.

MAX PRIMORAC: Now, in terms of a tip, survival tip, do not let career bureaucrats hinder you from advancing the president’s agenda. Keep in mind, you’re coming into a place, Washington, D.C., that does not share your conservative values. They’re even hostile to it, because you’re here to do something that’s not in their interest. They’re not going to be your friend, or they’re not going to help you succeed.

What are you doing? You’re here to cut government. You’re here to cut spending. You’re here to cut regulations. You’re here to stop the waste, fraud and abuse that’s going on. But a lot of careers have been made from that. A lot of money has been made from that. Fiefdoms have been built around it. So you’re going to get a lot of opposition here. It’s an entire industry of opposition, from lobbyists, professional associations, contractor groups and, disappointingly, faith-based organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, I want to turn to a Project 2025 training video featuring Alexei Woltornist, a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. In this video, he encourages future appointees to avoid mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, instead take their message to conservative media.

ALEXEI WOLTORNIST: The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times. They’re not reading The Washington Post. Actually, to the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Andy Kroll, investigative reporter for ProPublica, if you can respond? This is just an excerpt of the videos that you have released, “Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.”

ANDY KROLL: Yeah, I would pull out a couple of key points for your audience, Amy. I would say first that there is a level of extreme rhetoric in these videos, even down to the choice of words in these different clips. We hear the word “eradicate” a lot, and then we hear “eradicate” in the context of removing the word “climate change” from any federal government document that a future appointee sees. Obviously, that would not move the country in the right direction in terms of combating this existential threat that we face with climate change. You hear “eradicate” in terms of getting rid of policies that are responding to gender inequality, racial inequality. I mean, those executive actions that Katie Sullivan in the second clip discussed, those are things responding to the abuses surfaced by the #MeToo movement or the abuses surfaced, the injustices surfaced in 2020 during the racial uprisings then, as well, getting rid of all of those.

And then you have, with this last clip, the former DHS press secretary, you have someone basically saying, “When you get into government, just talk to conservative media. Shut out everybody else. I mean mainstream media, but just about everyone else, as well. Only talk to the people who you agree with, who like you.” That the audiences served by those conservative outlets are the only ones that matter, that’s not what a presidential administration, Democratic or Republican, is supposed to do. You’re supposed to serve the whole country. But clearly, that is not the advice that they’re getting in these clips.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting that they advise the right-wing administration not to leave a paper trail, yet they have left quite a video trail. As we wrap up, Andy, the most important takeaways at this point?

ANDY KROLL: Yeah, the most important takeaways, I think, for people watching are, the first time that Trump ran and then, surprisingly to many, got elected, his operation was very unprepared. They did not have a bench of people ready. There was chaos. There was confusion. And that set back that administration for perhaps months, maybe even a year or two into the Trump first administration. If he is elected again, that will not be the case. These videos have a lot of extreme content in them, a lot of eyebrow-raising advice, for instance, like don’t leave a paper trail, which you just referenced, but really what they are trying to do is prepare these thousands or tens of thousands of people to get in government and enact a pretty conservative, a right-wing agenda and be prepared and trained to do it from the moment that administration starts. That is different from before. And the voting public needs to understand that when they think about these two candidates, when they think about what that Trump agenda would be if he gets elected in November and takes office in January.

AMY GOODMAN: Andy Kroll, we want to thank you so much for being with us, investigative reporter for ProPublica, his new exposé titled “Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.” ProPublica has posted the full 23 videos, totaling more than 14 hours of content, on its website. We will link to it.

Coming up, the Summer Olympics held its closing ceremony in Paris Sunday. We’ll look at some of the controversies over the 2024 Summer Games. And as the Paralympics is set to start later this month, we’ll speak with the Palestinian Paralympian from Gaza, disabled since he was shot by an Israeli soldier in Gaza City in 2001. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Our Time Is Now” by the French heavy metal band Gojira. It was the Paris Olympics opening act.