‘What a Joke’: Heritage Staffers Are Only Laughing About Project 2025 Now That Trump Has Won

Democratic operatives turned Project 2025 into an election season punching bag. Now, conservative trolls are turning it into a postelection punch line.

Tweets are flying around X about how, actually, now that Donald Trump has won, Republicans can admit that Project 2025 really is the agenda.

And the thing is, no one is laughing harder than the actual staffers at The Heritage Foundation.

Sources told NOTUS that, in recent days, Heritage group chats have been filled with these sorts of tweets, celebrating how conservatives “tricked the Libs into believing Project 2025 wasn’t real.”

Staffers have been anxious that Project 2025 could have played a role in a close loss for Trump. One former Heritage employee said they were “relieved” that the think tank avoided the backlash that would’ve followed had Kamala Harris narrowly won.

“Now Heritage isn’t going to be scapegoated,” the former employee said, adding that the Democratic attacks have always been sort of laughable to Heritage staff.

“If we were planning some evil plan to take over the government and make Donald Trump a king and ship women off to colonies, do you think we would put it on a freaking PDF and post it on the internet?” the former employee said. “Like, what a joke. It was all lies, and the voters clearly saw through those lies.”

But more than a joke, Heritage is hoping Trump and the incoming White House will now take Project 2025 seriously.

The fact that the document was made so famous — and that Trump won in such dominant fashion — appears to be an argument for Heritage that Project 2025 should be treated as an actual road map instead of an anvil.

Of course, there is some lingering concern that the incoming Trump administration may think twice about hiring Heritage staffers, particularly the ones involved in drafting Project 2025.

“I still think there are residual hard feelings that are going to make it very hard for Heritage to tout successes on Project 2025 and influences in the administration,” one former Heritage staffer told NOTUS.

Another former Heritage staffer had a similar assessment, telling NOTUS that “people who authored chapters of the book or have a lot closer ties with Heritage are going to be either shut out or a lot more slowly let in.”

(Neither the Trump campaign nor The Heritage Foundation commented on this story.)

But if a No Heritage Employees Allowed rule ever existed, such an emphatic win seems to have changed the transition team’s mind. A strategist close to the Trump campaign told NOTUS that the Project 2025 fiasco will soon be water under the bridge.

“It’s pretty hard to run an entire conservative administration without having somebody who currently or formerly worked at Heritage,” the strategist close to the campaign told NOTUS. “You know Trump. Nobody’s ever in the doghouse completely.”

(Jose Luis Magana/AP)

The sheer amount of appointments — roughly 4,000 — needed to fill out an administration makes a Heritage-free transition practically impossible. Trump’s chief lieutenants are, of course, first in line for jobs. Then there are the folks from the America First Policy Institute. But after that, sources think Heritage will get its turn.

The rapid reconciliation is due in part to Trump’s rapid timeline. In 2016, a beleaguered transition and an unprepared Congress limited Trump’s ability to enact policy. Once Democrats won the House in 2018, he faced a legislative roadblock.

This time, Trump wants to avoid that by working quickly in his first two years — and, more specifically, his first 100 days.

“They want the people in place that can make their agenda happen as fast as possible,” the strategist close to the campaign said. “If they happen to work at Heritage and they’re connected to Project 2025 and they can do the job and they’re loyal, they’re gonna get the job.”

Multiple sources said Trump will need Heritage people because his plans mirror many of the think tank’s policy guidelines. The crossover between Project 2025 and Agenda 47, the Trump campaign’s official policy plan, is well-documented.

“Project 2025, is like, you know, boilerplate conservative stuff and a lot of that stuff, Trump’s gonna do,” said yet another former Heritage employee. “And that’s why the joke is sort of funny.”

Trump’s blood-and-guts plan for a second administration would cause sweeping changes to the executive branch specifically and government programs more generally. On Day One, he plans executive action on mass deportations of undocumented citizens, a ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports, a reversal of regulations for auto manufacturing and an oil production push.

As Trump has said of his energy plans, “Drill, baby, drill!”

With Trump unconcerned about reelection, the strategist close to the campaign thought there were a lot of hard-line policy ideas Trump would embrace that he avoided during his first stint in the White House.

“Frankly, he doesn’t have to worry about winning a second term, so he’s gonna go fucking balls to the wall,” the strategist said. “He wants to make shit happen.”

And seeming to summon the tone of much of the group chats with Heritage staffers — which NOTUS saw a portion of but was not authorized to share — the strategist said Trump must feel like Grover Cleveland right now, the only other president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

“He’s like, ‘Fuck yeah, I know what I’m doing. Eat shit and die, all of ya,’” the strategist said of Trump.

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Ben T.N. Mause and Helen Huiskes are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.