Just as Donald Trump again played dumb about the Project 2025 plans for his administration, his own running mate is publishing a forward to a book penned by the key architect behind the scheme.
Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from the plan, and called into "Fox & Friends" on Thursday to slam some points pushed by Project 2025 "absolutely ridiculous."
He added: "I have nothing to do with the document. I've never seen the document."
But his running mate is clearly thisclose to the plan.
J.D.Vance has written a forward to a book coming out in September penned by Kevin Roberts, the mover and shaker behind Project 2025, developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation which Roberts heads.
"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 gushes in a review on the book's Amazon page.
"We are now all realizing that it's time to circle the wagons and load the muskets," Vance adds ominously.
Roberts argues in the book that it's time to "burn down" institutions like Ivy League colleges, the federal Department of Education (whose elimination is a goal of Project 2025), the FBI, certain media and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, reports Vox, which has managed to obtain a copy of the book.
Roberts was the one who warned in a recent interview: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
The original title for his book was "Dawn's Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America" with an image showing a match over the word "Washington."
It has been changed to "Taking Back Washington to Save America" and the match has disappeared.
Among a range of controversial moves, the 922-page plan of Project 2025, which planners hope to launch next year, would create a historically powerful presidency, would eliminate Medicaid and many federal agencies, do away with regulations, totally support fossil fuel use and industries, ban abortions and porn (and imprison those who create and distribute porn). It also seeks to quickly put to death all prisoners currently on death row.
Under the plan, only "intact" heterosexual families would be officially sanctioned because all other relationships are unstable and create "bad behavior," it states.
Once the Project 2025 plot became more widely known in the public, Trump has tried to back away from it, and called some issues in the plan, which he hasn't detailed, too extreme.
But he has already pushed some of Project 2025's goals, including eliminating the Department of Education. More than 70 Trump White House staffers have helped develop Project 2025, including some of his top aides.
Yet he said at a Michigan rally earlier this week as a product of "some on the severe right" and said some proposals were "seriously extreme."
On Wednesday, he again insisited on Truth Social: "I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25." Reports that he is linked to the right-wing tract is "disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs," he added.
Two years ago Trump spoke at a Heritage Foundation event as the organization began working of Project 2025. He praised Heritage as "a great group" that was going to "detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."