There were few false or misleading claims on the second night of the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday. Speakers generally made factual statements, told personal stories, expressed subjective opinions or offered uncheckable predictions.
Here is a fact check of one false claim, one misleading claim and one claim that left out some important context – plus some context about Project 2025, a conservative think tank initiative that has been repeatedly invoked by convention speakers.
Democrats on Trump and Project 2025
Various Democratic National Convention speakers have invoked Project 2025, saying or hinting that this project is former President Donald Trump’s own agenda. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont referred to “Trump’s Project 2025.” State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta of Pennsylvania used the same phrase. Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, talking about Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, referred to “their Project 2025 agenda.”
Here is some context about the project, Trump’s links to it, and what Trump has said about it.
What Project 2025 is: Project 2025 has been led by The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, working in collaboration with dozens of other conservative organizations. Their efforts, which began in 2022, resulted in a detailed 920-page document, called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” that lays out “hundreds of clear and concrete policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, commissions, and boards.”
The document proposes a variety of right-wing policy changes in a variety of policy areas, from immigration to health care to agriculture to education, plus a major overhaul of the executive branch that would significantly increase presidential power.
The document was published in April 2023, when Trump was a heavy favorite to win the party nomination but nearly a year before he had actually secured that nomination. The document bills itself as an attempt to help “the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be,” hit the ground running if and when they are inaugurated in 2025.
Trump’s links to the initiative: Project 2025 has emphasized that it is “not affiliated with former President Trump.” Trump claimed in July that “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”
CNN cannot definitively fact check what Trump might or might not know. But it’s clear that Trump has extensive connections to Project 2025.
A large number of people who served in Trump’s administration were involved in crafting Project 2025. CNN reported in July that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in the project, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to the policy document. For example, six of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries played a role in the project. So did Tom Homan, the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief early in the Trump administration, whom Trump has recently said he plans to make part of a second Trump administration.
Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance wrote the foreword for a forthcoming book by a leader of Project 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. A Vance spokesperson told Axios in July that “the foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025” and that Vance has “previously said that he has no involvement with” Project 2025 “and has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for.”
Trump’s stance on Project 2025 proposals: It’s not clear how much of the extensive Project 2025 policy document Trump supports and how much he rejects. Trump has said that some of the document is “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” but he has also said “many of the points are fine.” He has not specified which proposals he rejects and which he finds acceptable.
Russell Vought, the Trump-era Office of Management and Budget director who is one of the former Trump administration officials involved in Project 2025, said last month in a hidden-camera video secretly recorded by a British journalism organization: “I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand. It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”
CNN reported in July: “Project 2025 includes many policy priorities that are aligned with those of the former president, especially as they relate to cracking down on immigration and purging the federal bureaucracy by making it easier to dismiss civil servants and career officials. But Project 2025 has lately become a lightning rod for other ideas Trump hasn’t explicitly backed,” including a ban on pornography and the exclusion of the morning-after pill and men’s contraceptives from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act.
A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign told CNN in August: “President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term.”
