Don’t Lose Sight of Project 2025. That’s the Real Trump.

I’m not going to speculate about the effect of Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump on the 2024 presidential race. I will, however, make one observation: Some on the political right are using the attack to imply that the criticism of Trump’s past efforts to overturn the results of the last election, and any suggestion that he poses a threat to democracy, is now out of bounds.

But two things are true at the same time: Political violence is unacceptable, full stop. And the efforts by Trump and his most hard-core supporters to undermine American democracy continue to be unacceptable. As Republicans head into their convention this week, it’s important to understand the potential ramifications of both their official platform, about which I wrote last week, and their unofficial aspirations, embodied by Project 2025.

For anyone new to this: Project 2025 is a blueprint by and for some of Trump’s close allies, put together by the Heritage Foundation, to ensure that if Trump wins in November, MAGA will hit the ground running. It seeks to provide “both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.” The particulars are laid out in a roughly 900-page document, “Mandate for Leadership,” with specific action plans for many parts of the federal government.

How radical is the Project 2025 agenda? Earlier this month, Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

Republicans seem, however, to have belatedly realized that much of what’s in Project 2025, especially its multipronged attack on reproductive rights, is deeply unpopular. Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, claiming last week that he knows “nothing” about it, even though quite a few of the people who’ve worked on it are former Trump officials and aides, and even though in 2022 Trump told a Heritage conference that its people were “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

More generally, since Trump has never shown himself to be a policy wonk, there’s every reason to believe that if he wins he will, as he did in his first term, leave a lot of the granular policymaking to people who do sweat the details — so it’s more than reasonable to think of Project 2025 as a guide to what could happen in a second Trump term.