CAMPAIGN
If it’s not Heritage, who is planning Trump’s transition
The former President need to clarify who’s in charge
Former President Donald Trump’s claim this week that he knows nothing about the work underway by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative groups to prepare for a second term in office strains belief, but it also makes complete sense.
Project 2025, after all, has been operated for over a year by a handful of former Trump associates, including his former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, and his former director of personnel, Johnny McEntee. These are his people, suggesting Trump’s memory is slipping quickly or he’s badly out of the loop. He could, of course, just be lying.
Despite his baffling assertion, the comment fits into a decades-long cat-and-mouse game of pre-election transition planning.
As I’ve noted before, Ronald Reagan’s adviser Edwin Meese famously met with Pendleton James before the 1980 election in a Bob’s Big Boy in northern Virginia to discuss staffing plans, so worried were they that word would get out. Once elected, it was Meese who passed out copies of the plan Heritage had prepared to direct Reagan’s agenda (if you haven’t read EJ Fagan’s new book on think tanks, like Heritage, I recommend it).
In 2020, pre-election planning for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris played out in a conventionally cloak-and-dagger fashion. People I interviewed for my recent book, Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the Presidency, told of mysterious messages they received on social media only to find out later it was members of the Biden-Harris transition team trying to discreetly enlist them in the planning process.
Forty-five years later, Heritage is up to it again, but this time it’s not keeping quiet about it. Since Heritage unveiled its lengthy battle plans for a conservative overhaul of the federal government last year, it’s taken every opportunity to talk about it. People in Washington used to talk about the political sin of “measuring the drapes of the White House” too early. Heritage long ago disregarded this in favor of a bull-in-a-china shop approach that disregards convention in favor of bombast and air-time.
This strategy got them a scold from the Trump campaign last fall and the rebuke from Trump himself this week.
That Heritage has been busy preparing to replace over 50,000 civil servants with conservative devotees and usher in hundreds of unprecedented changes in national policy is not surprising, nor is Trump’s denial.
What is surprising is that nobody has called on Trump to clarify what he is doing to prepare for a second term. At this point four years ago, Biden had the leadership of his pre-election transition team in place. Ted Kaufman, Yohannes Abraham, and Jeff Zients were busy planning as of April of that year.
Who has Trump chosen to run his transition team this time? I speculated three months ago, but still no name has emerged.
This matters because the transition process has already commenced at the White House. In May, two councils were set up by the GSA to begin the transition out of office for President Biden, should he lose the election this fall. A seat on one of those councils has been reserved for someone from the Trump team, yet it’s far from clear who has filled it, if anyone at all.
It’s tradition, of course, to keep campaign work and transition work far apart, yet it’s also imperative for the safety and security of the country to know major candidates are preparing for all possible outcomes. Trump’s first transition proved the risks of a disorderly and chaotic planning process. That’s, in part, why Congress requires candidates to do this well.
President Biden and his White House have been doing exactly this since last November. Right now, former President Trump needs to clarify his post of Truth Social. If he doesn’t know about Project 2025, what is he actually doing to get ready? If Kevin Roberts isn’t going to run his transition team, who is?
