Suffering through Project 2025 training videos (Part 2)

Transcript Transcribed by Hannah E.

Courtney: Hello, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here, as always, with my spouse, Royce. Together, we are The Ace Couple. And we are continuing to suffer through the Heritage Foundation training videos… [laughs] at least as much as I find politically interesting or tolerable enough to discuss, because my goodness, is there so much here.

Courtney: I hope by this point — after talking specifically about JD Vance, after talking about the first video in this training — hopefully, now, you listeners who have been along with us for this ride have a pretty good understanding of why we think this is important: to know what these folks are saying, what they believe, what they are trying to do, their political motives — and even, furthermore, the more prolonged pattern we’ve established with our previous episodes and series on Christian nationalism.

Courtney: But before we get into the actual videos and some of the notes I took, I do want to point out a few things, because I have still heard some things here and there that say, you know, “The Heritage Foundation isn’t running for president.” People saying that listening to them or taking them seriously is actually just fearmongering. I vehemently disagree. Even people on the left have said that Trump has denounced Project 2025 and that we should look at what Trump himself is saying. So, just a couple of additional quick points of, do you really believe that? Can we actually trust that? These —

Royce: I find it baffling that anyone on the left is saying, “Listen to what Trump is saying” —

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: — as an actual indication of what he might do in the future.

Courtney: Right? Well, that’s just the thing. Because it’s like, I feel like I should just say, “Look at these scary things he’s — like, the people he’s surrounding himself with are saying.” But now I feel like I need to justify and prove with evidence, like, “Look, here’s proof that he probably knows something about this.” But, again, I’ve said time and time again, Trump as a guy in isolation is a buffoon, is wildly incompetent. I am significantly more concerned about the politically competent people surrounding him that are going to take advantage of that. Not to say the guy himself isn’t dangerous. Obviously, the platform he has given to hate is a nightmare, socially. So this is not giving him a pass on the wildly messed up things he says.

Courtney: But for anyone out there who’s still skeptical as to whether or not we should actually be digging into the Heritage Foundation, digging into Project 2025 so seriously, I have some notes here, and I will link a source for these from ProPublica in the show notes. In these training videos, there are a total of 36 speakers. 29 of them have already worked for Trump in some capacity. 29 out of 36 total speakers in this video series! And, well, some people say, you know, “Maybe they’re not coming back. Maybe they’re fired. Maybe it’s a totally new staff.” I have also seen that argument. The spokesperson for a Trump campaign named Karoline Leavitt has been quoted as saying, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.” Uh, Karoline Leavitt is also in the videos! She is in here. She is in the videos.

Courtney: And in 2022, in a speech at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump was quoted as saying, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” Why are we pretending that Trump saying he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025 holds any water?

Courtney: And, like, here’s also a story from The Washington Post that the flight to speak at that event with the Heritage Foundation where he was quoted as saying that, he literally shared with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. They know each other. They are friends. Trump hasn’t always been loyal to his friends. Maybe he’s lying to the Heritage Foundation. I don’t think it matters. It’s all a mess. It’s all dangerous. Even if it wasn’t Trump, they’d still be trying to implement these policies with somebody else.

Royce: Yeah, regardless of what Trump is saying right now, what this group is trying to do is to do all of Trump’s homework for him, so that he can come in and not need to decide on people, not need to do anything. And if there’s one thing that we can say about Trump’s character, it’s that he will choose to not do work if he can do so. And so if someone else comes in and is like, “Here, we did all the paperwork. Just sign your name 1000 times,” of course he’s going to do that.

Courtney: Well, exactly. And this group in particular, like, their stake is implementing Christian nationalist policies. So, let’s look at how they’re planning to do that with Video 3. I’m skipping Video 2 because it was infuriating. It was so dull, it was so reductive, it was like… It was lightly revisionist. Like, it was talking about the Constitution and the original founding doctrine and what conservatism actually means. And I almost thought there was interesting points as, like, “Let’s get into the mind of these conservatives and what they conceptualize conservatism to be.” [laughing] But it was so dull. And there were so many words said that were so utterly meaningless. So I resolved, “Let’s just skip that one.” You can watch it on your own if you want.

Courtney: But Video 3 picks up talking about working with Congress. And it’s hosted by two former political appointees, one of whom is currently the legislative director for Senator JD Vance — you know, [laughing] Vice President nominee JD Vance. This quote I wrote down verbatim because I think it is so damning. One of these fellows said, “Part of the difficulty, and core of being an effective legislator or a fair staffer, is understanding what you actually have to accomplish on a particular administration policy initiative. If you can do it solely through Executive action, that means you need to protect the Executive action. You don’t have to go out there and pass a law. What you do need to do is prevent an Executive action that could be politically unpopular in Congress by preventing the junction of Republicans and Democrats. Congress is the Article I branch. The Executive branch, in modern times, is more powerful, but Congress unified will beat you. So you need to prevent the effectuation of that junction. That’s really important.”

Courtney: So, cutting out all the jargon there, they’re like, “No unity. No reaching across the aisle. No compromise. You need to make sure that both parties in Congress don’t ever agree on anything.” Because they’re like, “Congress will beat you. We’re trying to get things done just with the President. We’re trying to get things done with just Executive action if we can, because that is a faster way than getting it all put through Congress.” But the fact that they literally say, “Congress unified will beat you, so you need to prevent the junction of Republicans and Democrats.” Are you kidding me?

Royce: So that is very apparent, because what they’re saying is that a deadlocked, do-nothing Congress basically takes that branch out of power.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: And that’s exactly what Republicans have been doing for a long time now.

Courtney: Hello, Mitch McConnell! Yeah, exactly. But here, they’re just saying it. They’re like, “Yeah, this is part of our strategy. We’re not trying to compromise with you. We’re not trying to work with you at all.” Oh, it’s so infuriating! So, the working with Congress is basically: don’t.

Courtney: Video 4 was working with the media. Now, this one was particularly interesting, just even visually watching it, because we have a fellow dressed in, like, Catholic priest garb, because he is a Catholic priest and former Trump staffer. And he’s sitting in front of two large flags behind him — like, the floor-mounted, really sturdy flags. One is the American flag. The other, which is exactly the same size as the American flag, is just a flag with the Heritage Foundation logo. And there was just something about that that made me so uneasy. Usually, flags in general make me uneasy. I have very little actual love for a flag as a symbol most of the time. But the fact that, the previous video, they’re like, “Sow discord between the Democrats and the Republicans. Don’t work with Congress,” and then they’re like, “Here’s our Heritage Foundation flag.” There’s something just very… dictatorship about it that I don’t like.

Courtney: So, this Catholic priest and former Trump staffer tells us that if you’re going into a conservative administration, to not expect a long career, because only the people in liberal administrations get big payouts, Fortune 500 jobs, spokesperson jobs, and become lobbyists. Laughable. Laughable! I want to know how much he’s getting paid to work with the Heritage Foundation and record this video and help author some of this. He’s sitting here with a job at a wildly politically influential organization being like, “Don’t go into this thinking you’re going to get any opportunities after, because only the liberals do that.” And to be very clear, people on both sides 1000% sell out our country. So I’m not saying liberals are scot-free on this, but what a laughable thing to say.

Courtney: But also, I got to thinking, like, is any of this even allowed for Catholic priests? I turned to Wikipedia to see the page for “Catholic priests in public office,” and under the section of the United States, there were apparently two priests who served in Congress. But then in 1980, Pope John Paul II decreed that priests not serve in elected office. So that kind of seems like you’re already giving a loophole, because political appointees are not elected. But I’m like, “Isn’t that… Is that kind of intentionally ignoring the point of that decree?” Like, if you are a Catholic priest and you believed in the church and you believed in the Pope’s decree, aren’t you kind of undermining the point of that? I found it very odd.

Courtney: And, yeah, like, looking in, he also has LinkedIn (which, there’s just something about a Catholic priest having a LinkedIn account that is hilarious to me. Maybe all the Catholic priests have LinkedIn and I’m just not privy to this, but there’s… that’s silly, right? [laughs] It sounds silly.) …where, for four years, he was the Senior Communications Manager at the Heritage Foundation. It shows three different positions he had within government since. But then, in 2021, he became Co-founder of Athos PR. And I found the website to the PR company, where they claim to have “deep relationships with eminent individuals in the realms of journalism, finance, tech, and government” and boasting their “strategic high-stakes communications experience in the private sector and at the highest level of the federal government.” And then I was like,

Courtney: “Are Catholic priests allowed to own capitalist businesses?” Even if they are, you literally own a public relations agency for, like, government officials and private sector businesses. And there’s something that’s just so discordant in this ideology to me, especially after going down this rabbit hole of figuring out who this guy is, after saying, “Don’t expect a long career after being a political appointee,” it’s like, my guy. You are, again, working for the Heritage Foundation, and also you own a PR company, where you’re using your experience from government as part of the pitch, part of the sell for why people should hire you.

Courtney: And one thing he keeps saying over and over — and, honestly, most everyone else in these videos also, they reiterate that your job as a political appointee is to implement the agenda of the President, which is also so wildly weird when, publicly, they’re saying, “This isn’t the President’s agenda, but hey, we have this whole handbook, and this is the point of our training.” Very, very weird.

Courtney: But he also alludes to the people who think that appointees are ruining a system that works better without them. And, having recapped the first episode, it’s like, “Oh, you’re talking about the Careers.” “The Careers,” that they kept saying with such disdain. But they insist, “No, the system works so much better with political appointees, because without political appointees, there’s just simply no way to implement the agenda of the President. Which would mean, if we’re not implementing the agenda of the President, then that means bureaucracy is ruling the nation rather than the President himself.” Which he then conflates as being “The direct will of the people” — because they elected the President, so this is the direct will of the people. So if we aren’t implementing the President’s agenda, then we’re ignoring the will of the people. Which, again, laughable, with the electoral college being a thing. And Trump didn’t even win the popular vote! And he then goes on to slam the Careers as being unelected, which is, again, laughable, coming from an unelected political appointee.

Courtney: And then he goes on to comment on things where I’m like, “There’s got to be a more specific story here that maybe people in the know know what you’re talking about.” But he alleges at one point that, “Oh, these Careers will tell the political appointees that you can’t talk about certain things because certain things are just too political.” I was just like, “My guy, it’s literally the government. Literally, it is all politics.” [laughs]

Courtney: But then he turns it around to his main point, which is, political appointees alone should have the power to determine what is and is not conveyed to the public. And that’s where working with the media comes in. And that’s basically, “Oh, don’t let the Careers talk to the media. We are the gatekeepers of information to the public. It is up to us alone.” And he goes on to say — and this is a direct quote — “The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times, they’re not reading The Washington Post. To the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets. For many of these people, if it’s not in these conservative outlets, it didn’t happen or it’s not true. And that’s simply the result of the past decades, where legacy media have attacked conservatives and then shown that they’re lying or reporting something as false.” So, wow, don’t work with Congress, don’t work with the media, unless it’s Fox News.

Courtney: It’s also — now that I’m thinking about it — just this feigned loathing of unelected positions. Not only is it an unelected person complaining about differently unelected people, but also, this is absolutely the party who has weaponized the hell out of our Supreme Court and put us in the very precarious situation we’re in now where our rights are being repealed. We have had Roe v. Wade overturned, as an example, which is something the Heritage Foundation and other organizations like them have been working on for decades. They finally got it done.

Courtney: And when you see what their actual game plan is, their actual strategies, you can see exactly how they did it. And they haven’t been subtle. They want to weaponize media. They want to weaponize the Executive branch and Executive orders. They want to turn Congress against one another. And they don’t actually want to pass laws. And yet, they want their ideology to be the law of the land. So instead of going through Congress to pass a bill in the traditional way, they’re like, “The fastest way is just get our guy in at the Executive branch and have him put Supreme Court justices, have him put political appointees, have him make Executive orders, circumvent as many of the systems of checks and balances as we possibly can.”

Courtney: And following along with that train of thought is really interesting going into Video 5, because Video 5 talks about the federal workforce. And they pose it this way: they say, “Think about it. There’s only between 3 and 4000 political appointees.” That seems like a lot, right? But they say — and again, like, any given President, name any of them, does not personally know 3 to 4000 highly specialized, competent people to implement in all of these roles. But they phrase it as, “These 3 to 4000 political appointees are sitting atop millions of career federal employees and bureaucrats.” And they say, “Is that really enough?” [laughing]

Courtney: So lovely, they actually want more political appointees — which was fascinating because, as they’re implying that they’d like to expand political appointees, they even mention some people in their own camp that don’t agree with that. They even talk about how some conservatives believe in a small government and think that if we believe in small government, then conservative Presidents shouldn’t even fill all of these positions. They should just leave wide swaths of them open and unoccupied. But they’re like, “No, think about it. We only have 3 to 4000 of our guys that are definitely our guys. We need more of our guys, and we need more of our guys who don’t need to be elected,” which is fascinating, especially when Project 2025 outlines, like, entire departments of government that they do want to eliminate, For one example, like, the Federal Department of Education — they’re like, “Don’t need that. Let’s just get rid of that.” So they still want to eliminate entire departments and still possibly expand more than just 3 to 4000 political appointees? I don’t know, unless their theory is just, like, “Let’s get rid of all the departments that have more career federal employees,” but they’ll still, at the end of the day, have a higher percentage of manpower on their side working towards their goals, and they really just want to want to go full dictatorship. I don’t know what to say.

Courtney: And this video, by the way, is hosted by two people who worked in the office that is responsible for hiring political appointees. So, as I said, like, any individual President isn’t like, “Oh, I know 4000 highly qualified people for these very specialized jobs. Let me just appoint them all here.” There is an office itself that hires political appointees. Now, both of these two people worked in that office already, and now they work for the Heritage Foundation, who is actively already starting to recruit future political appointees with this entire program. And here’s the way one of them thought about his job. He said, literally, “I spoke for the President when I hired people on his behalf.” Which, there’s just sort of an odd duality that’s so present here. They’re so like, “We have to be behind the President 100%. This is the President’s agenda. This is what the President wants,” while very clearly they also have their own individual agendas, or the organization they work for very clearly has its own agendas.

Courtney: But I think they’re really trying to tap into the specific type of voter who downright deifies their political candidate. I mean, there are instances of people who say, like, “Trump was sent from God. God wants Trump to be President. I would vote for him no matter what, because this is God’s will” — a very, like, “chosen one, all must bow down” mentality that I could never understand [laughs] personally, on a personal level. But I really think that that is an element of why they are so consistently doubling down on “the President’s will. The President’s will. We speak for the President. We implement the President’s agenda. We’re the only one standing between the bureaucracy and the President and the President’s agenda.” While I don’t think a lot of the people saying these words themselves actually believe that personally, I think a lot of the people they’re speaking to believe that.

Courtney: But then the really fun part comes because they’re like, “Hey, we hired these people. We know how this works.” And they’re like, “Fun fact, you don’t have to have any credentials or experience! No requirements, except you gotta agree to push our agenda. Only requirement.” Which, I think it pertinent to point out that most positions for career federal employees do actually require some level of experience, education, or credentials.

Royce: Well, yeah, that would make sense. They’re actually being hired to do a job instead of just following top-down orders.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: Or, I guess, in some instances, being hired specifically to understand what the job is and then intentionally not do it.

Courtney: [laughs] You’re not wrong! That’s not even a stretch! [laughs]

Royce: And this is the wing of our political system that likes to complain about government spending.

Courtney: Mmm. Mhm.

Royce: Like, you’re literally putting bodies in positions — often salaried positions — and then telling them to not only do as little as possible, but sometimes, be a sentient wrench in the gears or in the machine.

Courtney: “A sentient wrench.” That is exactly what they’re asking people to do and what they want people to be!

Courtney: So, once we know what your job is and you don’t need any credentials, you just need to be blindly obedient, then we get to Video 6, where they talk about background checks and security clearance. Because they’re like, “You don’t need to be good at your job. You don’t need to have credentials. You don’t need to know anything about this department of government at all.” But they’re like, “But there are background checks, and you do actually need to pass that. So here’s what you need in order to pass that.”

Courtney: And I’m just gonna read this quote: “If you have been convicted of a crime, you will not be serving in federal government. Crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, and tax evasion show a lack of moral character, just like similar white-collar offenses that are highly frowned upon and will bar you from service. To obtain employment in government, it is not favorable if you have accumulated debt and filed for bankruptcy that you’re not able to be responsible for. For the government, this means that you are unable to comply with financial obligations and are grounds for disqualification.”

Royce: Unless you are the puppet demagogue, cult leader person that they want to put at the top so that they can get their people in to transform the government.

Courtney: In which case, all of those things are a feature. [laughs]

Royce: Like, ideally, preferred candidate.

Courtney: [laughing] Preferred candidate. “We want all of these things, but there can be only one.”

Royce: All of the corruption has to go straight to the top.

Royce: [both laugh]

Courtney: So after that fun little nugget, the next video refers to Executive orders — which, I think we’ve already, from context clues of previous videos, gotten a decent understanding of how they feel about Executive orders, but they make it even more obvious here. Basically, they think Executive orders are very important tools, except when we don’t like them. [laughs] Because if Biden does an Executive order, it’s just PR. It’s just his hopes and views, but it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s not a law. It’s not doing anything tangible. And at this point, they mentioned diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, as, like, “Their Executive orders about DEI,” and it was very reminiscent of the very first video that we already talked about. So, you can see these very specific themes throughout multiple videos.

Courtney: So, we’re going to ignore Executive orders that we don’t like, but we’re sure as hell going to abuse them and put as many as we can. Because, they say, “Sometimes they are very important, because it creates structures that can sometimes later get ratified by Congress.” Good luck with that, if you’re intentionally sabotaging Congress [laughing] from working with one another, I guess. But there’s just, like — there’s no consistency or even an attempt at feigning integrity in the way they approach things. They’re like, “By any means necessary, implement our agenda, and ignore or actively sabotage anything that is standing in your way.”

Courtney: Video 8 was kind of interesting, because this one is literally about advancing the President’s agenda. But, rather than having a bunch of former Trump appointees, which a majority have been up to this point, this guy worked for Reagan. And I don’t know if it was just my computer screen or if it was something in their lighting or their cameras, but there was something so, like, accidentally trans about this, because they had the 2025 logo in the background of this video, which is usually red and blue, but for some reason, this one was just fully pink and blue as I was seeing it. And I was like, “Why? Why is it this way?” And at first I was actually like, “Are they doing this on purpose because they want to reinforce the gender roles, and they’re just accidentally being trans here?” And then I was like, “No, it’s, it’s gotta just be red and blue, but someone messed something up in the lighting.” It was very silly.

Courtney: And this guy, I mean, he says… First of all, “The President’s agenda” is said so often throughout this and all previous videos that I am now fully convinced that this is just inherently a dog whistle for Christian nationalism. I fully believe that. Because what else could it be, given all the context we’ve laid out and how often they drill down on that phrase, “the President’s agenda, the President’s agenda”? Because when this was all written, they didn’t even technically know who the next conservative candidate was going to be. They had a good idea of who they wanted, I’m sure, but if Trump loses this election — and I am hoping beyond hope that he does — they don’t even know who the next conservative president is going to be. They don’t know that answer, and yet they’re so confident in saying, “We will, without question, implement the President’s agenda, the President’s agenda,” and yet they have a whole book of their own agenda right here. So that’s going to be something to look out for: for other organizations doing this, future political appointees, other government officials saying “the President’s agenda” over and over again — that’s going to start setting up alarm bells for me. I’m going to keep an eye on how that phrase evolves.

Courtney: And, honestly, for having a guy who worked for Reagan, I was — as kind of… Is it weird to say I was hoping for more? I hoped he would give me more of his experience so that I could learn about this evolution over time. But there really wasn’t all that much to it that I found particularly notable. But he did keep saying, like, “You need to keep your agenda close, and be careful who you tell it to, or it will end up in the newspaper.” And just sort of like, “Don’t write things down. If you write anything down, before you do, just think about how that will look on the front page of The Washington Post.” Which, that’s also, you know, potentially another… obviously a means of undermining our democracy, but also, just going back to the previous notion of, like, “We are the gatekeepers of what the American public gets to know,” and it’s like, “Nobody who works with us and should be working with us and for us should even know anything. They shouldn’t even know what we want. You shouldn’t even tell them what your agenda is.” This is not only intentionally sabotaging Congress, but this is also sabotaging every single agency.

Royce: Yeah. This is a very intentional plan to create a propaganda machine.

Courtney: Yes! And the funny thing is — because then, they say in this video, like, “Don’t trust the Careers if they tell you something is illegal.” They say, “If you can, know the law yourself, and make sure that any lawyers on staff that you consult are themselves political appointees. Don’t trust any lawyers who work in or around the government if they aren’t political appointees.” So that’s, like, [laughing] so obviously, like, legal corruption that, I mean, again, to just parallel with the Supreme Court, these are not neutral justices. These are people who are given lifetime seats, basically lifetime political appointee seats, sometimes as a result of intentionally sabotaging and stealing an appointee from a previous President, just like we saw with Mitch McConnell, President Obama — blocked his right to appoint a Supreme Court justice, and now we have the most conservative court in history, and we’re going to be feeling the effects of this for decades at least. And this is the party that’s always complaining about “activist judges, activist judges.”

Courtney: But also, the major takeaway here, this large piece of advice, is, “First thing to do when you get in is make sure that nobody in your agency can do anything without going through you.” So they’re like, “Not only are we going to be the gatekeepers of information between the government and the American public,” they’re like, “We are going to be the gatekeepers for each of our own respective agencies. Nobody is doing anything without us, and nobody working in those agencies is going to know what we actually want or what we’re actually trying to do.” It’s evil.

Courtney: And then, I think the last video I want to talk about today, because I just have a couple of points on it, is Video 9, social media messaging. Most of it’s pretty unremarkable. Most of it’s PR and posting practices and how to make catchy posts that get attention — standard nonsense. But this one line really stuck out to me, where they say, “Career civil servants will try to tell you that you don’t have authority to do certain things, so what you have to do is have other political appointees who are higher up who will have your back and will basically tell them off for you.” And he even said, like, “It could be as simple as someone higher up writing someone an email.” So, yeah, about your point of, corruption goes right to the top.

Courtney: So I think that is about as much patience as I have for that right now. I hope that by going through these videos that I will have suffered so you do not have to. But of course, as always, if you do want to check these things out on your own, I encourage you to do so. Links in the show notes.

Courtney: But for today, that is going to bring us to our featured MarketplACE vendor. If this election cycle has you rather quite anxious, like it does a lot of us, perhaps you can get some comfort from these very adorable knitted goods created over at the shop Knitted by Sammy. Last year, I think, we got these three really precious little pumpkins from Sammy. We have, actually, a black one and a purple one, so that’s a little bit Ace, and then a standard orange one. They’re sitting right in our parlor, in our sitting area by our couch. They’re very cute. We love them. I kind of hoped that this time of year I’d be able to say, “If you want these precious pumpkins, go get some also,” but it seems as though we bought all of them. [laughs] And Sammy has not made more. So, apologies for that. But there are a few other really great things in here. Really cute hand-knitted stuffed elephant. Get a little plushie for yourself or the children in your life. But there are also these very cozy little crocheted book sleeves. I love a nice crocheted book sleeve. I think they’re very cute, very cozy, very stylish. Or you could even get a fancy knitted scrunchie to put your hair up for those of you who, like us, have rather long hair. All the links to find Knitted by Sammy, as usual, in the show notes.

Courtney: And once again, we’ll see if I have the patience to talk about this more. Maybe we’ll pick up right where we left off next week. Maybe we’ll talk about something else entirely. I guess we just have to find out which I have more of next time we sit down to record. Is it going to be political rage or patience? I can’t wait to find out. But we will see you then.