Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation policy manual that has stoked intense debate, is stepping down.
Dans’s departure from his director role was immediately welcomed by President Trump's campaign, which has been putting distance between Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s policy tome.
“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone, or any group, trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you,” said Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two senior advisors to the Trump campaign.
Dans could not be reached for comment, but officials at the Heritage Foundation said his departure was expected according to long-standing plans for the project to enter a different phase following the major party conventions.
“Paul, who built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the past two years, will be departing the team and moving up to the front where the fight remains,” said Heritage President Kevin D. Roberts.
Roberts said Project 2025 was “built for any future [Republican] administration to use,” not specifically for Trump, and it was “not shutting down,” he said. "Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local—will continue,” Roberts said.
In addition to welcoming Project 2025's demise, LaCivita and Wiles again stressed there is no connection between it and Trump. “President Trump's campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” they said.
Trump has previously said he knew “nothing about” the plan, and also that he found some of its ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
The nearly 900-page policy manual included a provision for amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to require employers to pay overtime to employees working on their Sabbath, whether their Sabbath was Sunday or from sundown Friday to sundown on Saturday (the Jewish and Adventist Sabbath).
Sadly, some Adventists treated this rather inoffensive policy suggestion as a harbinger of imminent Sabbath persecution, despite the fact that it recognized the Jewish and Adventist Sabbath (the Bible Sabbath) as a legitimate alternative Sabbath.
Donald Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025, and both President Trump and his campaign staff have repeatedly distanced Trump from assemblage of policy proposals known as project 2025.
Trump will run on the Republican Party platform, the preparation of which he personally supervised, and which reflects his priorities, and often even his language. The platform is summarized in 20 points:
1. Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion.
2. Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.
3. End inflation and make America affordable again.
4. Make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!
5. Stop outsourcing, and turn the U.S. into a manufacturing superpower.
6. Large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!
7. Defend our constitution, our bill of rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.
8. Prevent World War III, restore peace in Europe, and in the Middle East, and build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country—all made in America.
9. End the weaponization of government against the American people
10. Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush grang violence, and lock up violent offenders.
11. Rebuild our cities, including Washington DC, making them safe, clean, and beautiful again.
12. Strengthen and modernize our military, making it without question the strongest and most powerful in the world.
13. Keep the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
14. Fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare, with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age.
15. Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly burdensome regulations.
16. Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.
17. Keep men out of women’s sports.
18. Deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.
19. Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proff of citizenship.
20. United our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success.
These are Trump’s priorities, and it is this list of 20 items that Trump will try to accomplish in the extraordinarily unlikely event he takes office on January 20, 2025.
Further in the document we see this paragraph on religious liberty:
3. Republicans Will Defend Religious Liberty We are the defenders of the First Amendment Right to Religious Liberty. It protects the Right not only to Worship according to the dictates of Conscience, but also to act in accordance with those Beliefs, not just in places of Worship, but in everyday life. Our ranks include men and women from every Faith and Tradition, and we respect the Right of every American to follow his or her deeply held Beliefs. To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.
Trump strongly supports religious freedom, but the gay-friendly Trump does not support a Christian “culture war.” Trump removed platform language dating back to 1984 that proposed nationwide statutory or constitutional protection for the unborn. Trump opposes a nationwide ban on abortion and favors the pre-Roe/post-Dobbs legal posture in which each state decides its own abortion policy through its own elected legislatures and governors. Language opposing same-sex marriage was also removed from the 2024 platform.
Social conservatives pushed to retain the old platform language promoting a federal abortion ban and opposing same-sex marriage, but they lost, because Trump wrote this platform to reflect his own priorities. He believes abortion should remain a state issue, and his White House said during his first administration that he supported same-sex marriage.
Trump’s decision to jettison the more conservative Christian language on abortion and same-sex marriage from the 2024 platform has disappointed many pastors and social conservatives. “It is fair to say that over 1,000 pastors have emailed, texted, and called me about their disappointment over where they saw the platform going,” said Chad Connelly, a former chair of the South Carolina GOP who said he was blocked from the platform committee over being labeled “too pro-life.”
“The words I am hearing are ‘shocked, betrayed, trampled, depressed, deflated',” said Connelly. “Most pastors I know don’t want Biden and will still probably vote for Trump, but this hurts the energy needed for those folks to do the things it takes to help elect a president.”
Clearly, there is no theocracy lurking in a second Trump term. The idea that “Trump’s gonna bring in the Sunday law” is the worst sort of ignorance and fanaticism, but sadly all too typical in some Adventist quarters.
“Godliness makes a nation great, but sin is a disgrace to any people.” Proverbs 14:34