Trump’s Platform vs Project 2025—What’s the Deal?

In February of this year, my colleague Brian Lantz and I produced a video entitled, “Trump’s Second Term: The Heritage Foundation or the American System?,” which took up the issue of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Not a whole lot of people paid attention to it. After all, the Heritage Foundation has been a favored institution among conservatives and patriots for decades. 

Trump’s Second Term: The Heritage Foundation or the American System

The Heritage Foundation has come out with an economic program and personnel proposals for Donald Trump’s second term. In brief, they mostly suck. Trump has long favored the unique American System of Hamilton and Lincoln to create massive economic progress. Heritage favors the antagonistic British system which will trap him.

Promethean ActionSusan Kokinda

Fast forward to the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where an oversized prop version of Project 2025 was brandished by what seemed at least half of the speakers. Look at the Harris website which is devoid of any of her policy content (her webmaster probably can’t keep up with her changing positions anyway), but has a whole section devoted to beating up on Donald Trump and Project 2025. The theme of much of this is the hard-wired narrative about the “threat to Democracy.” 

In between our February discussion and the current Democratic Party obsession with Project 2025, Donald Trump came out and forcefully distanced himself from Project 2025. While commenting that there were a few good people and good ideas in it, he made the point that it included some “crazy” ideas and some extreme right-wing ideas. But most importantly, he made clear that HIS POLICY IS THE 2024 REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM. 

So, what’s the deal? 

The deal is that Donald Trump has reintroduced the forgotten and long-suppressed system of American economics. Listen to his September 5 speech to the Economic Club of New York. Pay attention to his use of the term “economic nationalism,” and his praise of President William McKinley and McKinley’s enormously successful tariff policies. Think about the implications of his proposals for R&D tax credits, support for expensing new manufacturing investments, and a national (ie, the federal government) crash program to develop energy production. These are all elements of the American System, by which the federal government actively creates the conditions for producers to produce. You haven’t heard a President talk like this since John F. Kennedy (or before that, Dwight Eisenhower with his Atoms for Peace or Franklin Roosevelt with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation or the Defense Production Board.)

Instead, since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, economic discussion in this country has been limited to a debate between two versions of British liberal economics: 

1. The left-wing version (John Maynard Keynes), which says the Federal government throws money at everything;
2. The right-wing version (the Austrian School), which says that private interests (including especially the privately owned Federal Reserve System) get to deploy money for the purpose of making more money for the favored few who control the flows of that money.

What is missing in this world of British monetarism is production, that is, the process which  creates new physical wealth by increasing the productive powers of labor. The new Republican Party Platform, written under the direct supervision of Donald Trump, pledges to return to its roots as the party of “industry, manufacturing, infrastructure and workers,” ie, producers.

From its inception, the Heritage Foundation was created to propagandize for the right-wing version of British monetarism. (There is an interesting backstory in the history of the Heritage Foundation—about one of its founder’s affinity for British Fabian socialism, but that is a tale for another time.)  This author recently heard the current Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on a local Detroit radio station, putting it in simple terms: his approach is libertarian. Adam Smith, In his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” summed up libertarianism this way: make your decisions from the standpoint of the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, i.e. profit and loss, and let the invisible hand sort out the consequences. 

That is not an American policy, nor is it moral, nor is it Donald Trump’s policy. Donald Trump recognizes that the federal government must intervene on behalf of producers. The simplest example of this is tariffs, which protect domestic industries. His September 5, 2024, is filled with other proposals for the government to foster production, not leave it to the mercy of some magical marketplace.

What Trump has done, first with Agenda 47, and now, much more forcefully with the platform and his recent economic speech, is to completely outflank the elites. The 2024 fight was supposed to be between the Democratic Party and the old Republican Party of free traders, Wall Street, and war hawks, with Project 2025 as the script.  If you pick through that 900 page script, you will find some proposals that Donald Trump agrees with, like using Schedule F to reign in the politicized federal bureaucracy, or eliminating idiotic regulations (because they are idiotic). You will also see that a couple of his anti-free-trade advisors managed to get a few of their proposals included. 

But Project 2025 is primarily a product of an old Republican Party which is going the way of the Whigs and other now-forgotten parties of the 1850s. The leaders of those parties failed in their understanding of what this nation was up against, and of the solutions. Those parties disappeared, as would have our nation, if Abraham Lincoln had not emerged with a singular dedication to return to the American System and the principles of our Founding Fathers. 

Like Lincoln, Donald Trump is leaving the failed policies of both wings of the Uniparty behind, and like Lincoln, he is reviving the American System. That is what the Democrats cannot fight against. 

Let them have their tantrums about Project 2025. Let them throw it on the floor as Saturday Night Live comedian Keenan Thompson did at the Convention. A better use for the 900 pages is to use it to prop open a door or a window and let some fresh air in, while you take the time to learn about the American economics of Hamilton, Lincoln, McKinley and now Donald Trump.