Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about the Project 2025 policy blueprint or the people behind it. “Have no idea who is in charge of it,” he wrote in a social media post in July.
But in April 2022, Trump shared a 45-minute private flight with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, according to people familiar with the trip, plane-tracking data and a photograph from on board the plane, which has not been previously reported. They flew together to a Heritage conference where Trump delivered a keynote address that gestured to Heritage’s forthcoming policy proposals.
“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in the speech.
Separately, Roberts told The Washington Post in an interview in April of this year that he had previously discussed Project 2025 with Trump as part of offering briefings to all presidential candidates. “I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025,” he said in the interview, “because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Roberts never briefed Trump. A Heritage spokeswoman declined to elaborate on private meetings.
The flight, Trump’s speech and Roberts’s interview cut against the former president’s recent efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 once Democrats turned some of its most controversial proposals into a frequent campaign attack. The proposals came from alumni of Trump’s first term and often overlap with his own official campaign pronouncements, such as eliminating the Education Department, weakening protections for career civil servants, ending affirmative action and reversing restrictions on greenhouse gases. One of the proposals calls for federal restrictions on access to abortion medication, a position at odds with the Trump campaign stance.
“Project 2025 has never and will never be an accurate reflection of President Trump’s policies,” Leavitt said. “As President Trump himself and our campaign leadership have repeatedly stated, President Trump’s 20 promises to the forgotten men and women and the RNC platform are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term.”
Trump and Roberts flew together in April 2022 from the former president’s home in Palm Beach, Fla., to the foundation’s annual conference in Amelia Island. Heritage chartered the plane since Trump’s jet was being refurbished at the time, according to two people familiar with the trip who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interactions.
At that time, Heritage was in the early stages of organizing Project 2025. Roberts brought it up with Trump on the flight, but Trump seemed uninterested and moved on to another subject, according to a Heritage official. A Trump campaign official said Trump and Roberts didn’t discuss Project 2025 on the plane ride.
Trump briefly described meeting Heritage staff during his keynote at the conference. “With Kevin and the staff, and I met so many of them now, I took pictures with among the most handsome, beautiful people I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Roberts took over day-to-day management of Project 2025 last week with the departure of Director Paul Dans. The project is winding down its policy work in anticipation of handing off its recommendations to the official presidential transition. The project will continue to operate a database of 20,000 applicants for Republican political appointments.
Participants are still drafting executive orders and conducting training classes for potential future administration officials, a person involved in the project said. In private, the person said, Roberts has told people Trump isn’t really that mad, instead attributing the backlash to top Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.
“Some chapter writers see this as a disaster, a catastrophe, that it’s really bad for them. Others think it’s going to blow over,” the person involved in the project said. “The wishful thinking school is that this will all blow over.”
The Heritage Foundation has since 1980 published a book of policy recommendations for the next Republican administration. For this cycle, the foundation set out to convene a coalition of more than 100 right-wing groups, presenting the proposals as a movement consensus under the banner of Project 2025. The coalition involved at least 140 Trump administration alumni, according to a CNN tally, including Dans, former White House speechwriter Stephen Miller, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and former White House budget director Russ Vought.
Heritage published the 900-page agency-by-agency policy book in 2023, and it was not until recent months that Democratic attention on its proposals exploded. They have particularly focused on the Project 2025 proposal to ban shipments of abortion medication and through the mail — which departs from Trump’s stated plans.
Trump and his advisers chafed at the critical media coverage that Project 2025 generated, especially when leaders including Roberts brushed off repeated warnings to keep their heads down. Roberts himself drew backlash for a July interview on the right-wing “War Room” podcast (which was hosted by former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon until he reported to prison), in which he said, “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Miller has started forcefully denying any role in the project. His America First Legal group was part of the coalition, and his deputy, Gene Hamilton, wrote the playbook’s chapter on the Justice Department. Others, such as Vought, who wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president and served as policy director for the Republican National Convention’s platform committee, has kept a lower profile since the Trump campaign started admonishing the project.
Others who Trump specifically said he would consider bringing back into a second administration contributed chapters to the project, including former adviser Peter Navarro on trade; former acting defense secretary Christopher Miller on the Pentagon; and former HUD secretary Ben Carson on housing. Navarro served four months in prison over his refusal to testify before Congress about efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Roberts also has a relationship with Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who wrote the foreword to Roberts’s book, “Dawn’s Early Light.” In the foreword, Vance called Heritage “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” On Tuesday, Roberts announced that he would delay publication until after the election.
Roberts previously raised suspicion among Trump advisers who viewed him as favoring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during the presidential Republican primary. Advisers also said Trump resents other groups such as Heritage raising money that he believes should go to his campaign.
At other times, though, Trump has praised Roberts. He singled him out in February during a speech in Nashville to the National Religious Broadcasters. “Heritage Foundation president, somebody else doing an unbelievable job,” Trump said. “He’s bringing it back to levels it’s never seen, Dr. Kevin Roberts. Kevin, thank you.”
On Tuesday, congressional Democrats called on Roberts to release Project 2025’s plans for the first 180 days of a new administration. This “fourth pillar” was not published, unlike the overall policy recommendations.
“It is time to stop hiding the ball on what we are concerned could very well be the most radical, extreme, and dangerous parts of Project 2025,” Democratic lawmakers led by Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said in a letter to Roberts. “If we are wrong about that — if your secret ‘Fourth Pillar’ of Project 2025 is actually a defensible, responsible, and constitutional action plan for the first days of a second Trump presidency — then we hope you will publish it, without edits or redaction.”