Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign continue to hammer former President Donald Trump over Project 2025, the 922-page conservative agenda for the next Republican administration developed as a project of the Heritage Foundation.
The Harris camp launched a new ad blitz Wednesday seeking to tie Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, to the controversial right-wing policy plan. In a 60-second spot, the Harris campaign calls Project 2025 a “blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president ever, overhauling the Department of Justice, giving Trump the unchecked power to seek vengeance, eliminating the Department of Education and defunding K-12 schools, requiring the government to monitor women’s pregnancies and severe cuts to Medicare and Social Security.”
The ad includes video of Trump talking about revenge, before concluding with a final warning. “Donald Trump may try to deny it, but those are Donald Trump’s plans,” the narrator says. “He’ll take control. We’ll pay the price.”
Trump has repeatedly tried to deny any connection to the sweeping project, claiming that he knows nothing about it. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump said in a social media post early last month. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” Trump has also promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, including “no cuts” or changes to the retirement age.
But the former president has struggled to distance himself from Project 2025, in part because many of his advisers were involved in the effort and would be expected to join his administration for a second term — and in part because Democrats have latched onto the plan like a dog with a meaty bone.
The Harris team has made its focus on Project 2025 a core part of a $370 million paid media campaign it has reserved for the last couple of months of the election. The Project 2025 ad blitz is reportedly set to start this week on television and digital platforms across seven battleground states — and in the Palm Beach, Florida, market, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is located.
A new analysis of Project 2025 tax plans: As Democrats look to use Project 2025 against Trump, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, warned Tuesday that the tax plans in that conservative playbook would hit the middle class while benefitting the wealthy.
Project 2025 calls for an “intermediate tax reform” that would create just two tax brackets of 15% and 30% and eliminate most deductions, credits and exclusions. Capital gains and qualified dividends should be taxed at 15%, the plan says, and the corporate tax rate should be lowered to 18%.
The Center for American Progress analysis by Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at the think tank, says that the proposed changes would immediately raise taxes by $3,000 for the median family of four, earning about $110,000 a year. A typical individual earning about $40,000 a year would have his or her tax bill climb $950. Meanwhile, some 45,000 households making more than $10 million a year would get tax cuts averaging $1.5 million or more, potentially up to $2.4 million a year. A corporate tax rate of 18% would translate to some $24 billion in tax cuts for the 100 largest U.S. companies.
Project 2025 also calls for an eventual shift to a consumption tax, which it says “would minimize government’s distortion of private economic decisions and thus be the least economically harmful way to raise federal tax revenues.”
The CAP analysis says such a change would result in an average tax increase of $5,900 for the middle 20% of households and an average tax cut of $2 million for the top 0.1%. And inflation would see a one-time spike. “Replacing all income taxes with a value-added tax—a form of consumption tax—would require at least a 45 percent tax on goods and services, sending prices soaring,” CAP said in a press release.
