After years of describing Republicans as “dangerous,” Democrats seem to have hit a groove with “weird.” “These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said recently. “We’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”
Democrats aren’t the only ones who think conservative ideologues are weird. Trump thinks they are too—if weird means extreme and unpopular. In fact, he’s been trying to escape them. The problem is he can’t, at least not fully, because they’re his people.
On Tuesday, media outlets reported that the former Trump staffer Paul Dans had stepped down as the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which created a conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration. Dans left his role following Trump’s condemnation of Project 2025, and attempts by the former president to distance himself from its plans—“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said. According to Rolling Stone, Trump has “been privately—and very bitterly—complaining about the abortion policies laid out in the lengthy Project 2025 manifesto, and trashing the Project 2025-linked ‘lunatics’ who keep demanding unpopular abortion bans and restrictions.”
Trump is right to worry that Project 2025 is a political loser. The project’s 900-page presidential-transition document, “Mandate for Leadership,” includes a lot of unpopular conservative ideas, such as using the archaic Comstock Act to restrict access to the abortion drug mifepristone, preventing Medicaid from covering abortion, gathering data on women who get abortions, and allowing hospitals to refuse medical care to women ill from abortion complications. It also outlines plans to reorganize the federal bureaucracy into an organization that is loyal to Trump personally rather than concerned with public service, and to outlaw “pornography,” broadly defined as anything LGBTQ-related. Project 2025 also calls for an immigration crackdown so expansive that it would target undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children who have been living lawfully here for decades, as well as their U.S.-citizen relatives.
Lesser-known, yet equally extreme, ideas include dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service for the thought crime of acknowledging the reality of climate change as part of their work, repealing certain child-labor protections, undermining public- and private-sector unions, and allowing states to ignore federal labor laws regarding overtime pay and the minimum wage.
Democrats’ use of “weird” is not a stroke of political genius. It is novel language for doing something very typical in politics, which is highlighting your opponents’ unpopular positions. It has caught on because social media incentivizes engaging in ideological extremism to stand out. And in a GOP where loyalty to Trump is the paramount value, ideologues can rise by pledging fealty to him, even if their beliefs and public conduct are very strange.
Many of these ideas are likely repellent to many of Trump’s supporters, who are energized by his anti-establishment rhetoric but who have more moderate views on economic matters and even abortion. (Trump similarly pretends to diverge from the conservative orthodoxy on economics and abortion, but his actual record tells a different story.) Trump often comes off as much less “weird” despite being just as extreme, because he doesn’t speak as often in the ideological lexicon of right-wing activists, academics, and think tankers. Being associated with the ideologues who ran his administration last time and who would run it next time gives up the game, and lets the public know who would really be in charge during a second Trump administration, while the president live-tweets Fox News every day just like he did four years ago.
But whatever Trump says about Project 2025, his ties to it are undeniable. A CNN review in mid-July found that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” and “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House—from day-to-day foot soldiers in Washington to the highest levels of his government.”
Condemning Project 2025 because it is a political loser does not mean that Trump won’t pursue many or most of its recommendations. As the Ronald Reagan staffer Scott Faulkner once famously put it, “Personnel is policy.” And whatever Trump says about policy in public, the people who put together Project 2025 are his personnel.
“Trump can try to distance himself from this, but 70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote the book are going to be in his second administration—the cabinet, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, the senior advisers,” one anonymous Project 2025 contributor told Rolling Stone. “They’re all going to be the foot soldiers in a second Trump administration!”
As CBS News reported, Project 2025 was advised by more than “100 conservative groups,” and its “Mandate for Leadership” lists as co-authors many former Trump officials, including Russ Vought, the policy director for the 2024 Republican National Committee’s platform committee. That means that all of the extreme positions documented in Project 2025 remain conservative goals, whether Trump embraces Project 2025 by name or not. No political movement gets everything it wants, but Project 2025 remains the conservative movement’s ideal vision for America.
Another problem for Trump is that he chose an ideologue, J. D. Vance, as his running mate. Surveys suggest that Vance—who wrote an introduction to a new book by Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025—is one of the most unpopular vice-presidential picks in the modern history of polling, in part because of what is a frankly very weird obsession with childless people, women in particular. Vance, a proponent of making abortion illegal nationwide and preventing women from crossing state lines to get the procedure, has attacked Trump’s likely rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “childless cat lady,” even though she is a married stepmother of two. He’s separately described people without children as “more sociopathic.” Freedom includes the right to judge; it does not include taking people’s fundamental rights away because they choose to live differently from you in ways that do not affect you at all.
Trump’s response to a question about Vance’s remarks illustrates the distance between his own political instincts and those of professional conservatives like Vance.
“I think a lot of people like family, and sometimes it doesn’t work out. And, you know, you don’t meet the right person,” Trump told Fox News. “You’re in many cases a lot better than a person that’s in a family situation.”
Well, yeah. Being obsessed with strangers’ personal lives, especially to the point where you’re trying to use the power of the state to force everyone else to live according to your values rather than their own, comes across as pretty weird. Even Trump understands that. He also understands that, weird or no, this is the agenda the movement behind him wants to pursue. If he can obscure that agenda long enough to get elected, that movement might actually succeed.
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