Secret Video Shows Project 2025 Author Bragging About Ties to Trump

A key author of Project 2025 was caught in a secret recording bragging about how close he is to Donald Trump and admitting his love of “Christian nation-ism.”

Russell Vought, who is reportedly in line for chief of staff in a second Trump administration, said that his group, the Center for Renewing America, is leading the charge drafting executive orders and policy memos to help Trump immediately take action upon entering the Oval Office. He was caught on camera by two undercover British journalists from the nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting, which published the secret recording on Thursday.

Vought revealed his group plans to create “shadow” agencies to implement its draconian vision to solidify the “Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”

“We’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” said Vought.

“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” he said. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”

The investigative reporters secretly recorded their nearly two-hour conversation with Vought, who served as the policy director of the Republican National Convention committee and recently helped to rewrite the official GOP platform. Vought, former Office of Management and Budget director under Trump, said he has personally been in talks with the former president over recent months and even received a personal “assignment.”

“He’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it,” Vought continued, saying that Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”

Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, is one of the many right-wing groups that are a part of Project 2025; Vought authored the chapter discussing the executive office of the president in the 900-page master plan. Trump has been trying to deny the influence of Project 2025 on his campaign.

“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,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the campaign, told CNN in response to the latest report.

But Vought wasn’t bothered. “I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious, distancing himself from a brand,” he said in the secretly recorded interview. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

Donald Trump is looking for one more get-out-of-jail free card, but the last-ditch effort is unlikely to work this time.

The convicted felon asked New York Justice Juan Merchan one more time on Wednesday to delay his New York hush-money criminal sentencing until after the November election. The historic event—which marks the first criminal sentencing of a former U.S. president—is currently scheduled for September 18.

In a pre-motion letter to the judge, Trump’s legal team suggested that delaying the sentencing would mitigate the “appearances of impropriety.” The letter pointed to Merchan’s daughter’s prior work for Democratic candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, and her business partner’s contributions to the Harris-Walz campaign, notably those made by Michael Nellis, the founder of Authentic Campaigns.

“Sentencing is currently scheduled to occur after the commencement of early voting in the Presidential election,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote. “By adjourning the sentencing until after that election—which is of paramount importance to the entire Nation, including tens of millions of people who do not share the views of Authentic, its executives, and its clients—the Court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings.”

“There is no basis for continuing to rush,” he added.

Merchan seems the least likely of Trump’s trial judges to offer him any favors, especially after enduring Trump’s endless mud-slinging throughout the grueling, seven-week trial. Trump’s attacks were primarily aimed at a gag order on the former president, which prevented him from targeting witnesses, jurors, courtroom staff, and their family in his venomous statements to the press—but did not prevent him from hurling vitriol at Merchan.

Trump repeatedly falsely claimed Merchan was violating his First Amendment right to free speech, but despite the constant heat, Merchan never broke. Appellate lawyers described Merchan’s behavior throughout the trial as “flawless” and have predicted that the attacks wouldn’t play well for Trump’s numerous appeals.

But if their background weren’t enough of an indication of how Wednesday’s request will proceed, another recent filing by Merchan might shed some light. The day before Trump filed his latest plea, Merchan plainly rejected an even bolder petition calling for his recusal from the wrapped New York case.

“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” Merchan wrote in his ruling posted Wednesday, noting that Trump’s arguments were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims.”

Donald Trump seems incapable of staying on message, and it’s seriously beginning to worry Republican lawmakers, according to a report NOTUS published Thursday. 

Trump’s campaign attempted to debut a smaller messaging event on Wednesday, as part of a new strategy to get the president to stay on topic. Trump predictably detoured into his typical racist fearmongering and personal attacks against his opponent, Kamala Harris. 

Despite the Trump team’s efforts to curb its loquacious candidate and its insistence on running a  “disciplined” campaign, it seems that nothing the team does can prevent Trump from, well, being Trump. And Republican lawmakers aren’t impressed. 

“Let’s be real: He lost in ’20. He has a solid base but has done nothing, or worse, alienated anyone from coming back to him,” one Republican lawmaker told NOTUS. “It’s like the sixth or seventh season of a show that was once funny but now panders to his base.

“If he continues down this road and Harris stays her course and the economy starts to show signs of improvement, he will be a two-time loser,” the Republican added.

Another Republican congressperson who spoke anonymously to NOTUS warned that Trump “needs to get back on message and start talking about policy differences.

“If he doesn’t do this I think he will lose and probably cost Republicans the House and Senate,” the GOP lawmaker said. 

A third House GOP member told NOTUS that Trump was “rattled” and needed to “get on message.”

Trump has reportedly been struggling to manage his frustration following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race. What was once a sleepy, one-event-a-week campaign has turned into an actual race, against a younger candidate with considerable energy and enthusiasm behind her. This anger seems to be coming out in different ways, and undermining Trump’s ability to effectively campaign without alienating his supporters and backers. 

Last month, just days after Harris announced her campaign, one of Trump’s aides fired off some extremely angry texts to wealthy GOP backer Miriam Adelson on behalf of the former president, according to The New York Times. Adelson, who is worth roughly $30 billion, is one of the Republican party’s wealthiest backers. 

The texts accused Adelson of having allowed RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) to run her Preserve America PAC. Trump and Adelson were scheduled to meet and make up this week, and it’s not clear that the comments will affect Adelson’s giving. 

Last week, Trump repeatedly attacked Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, much to the dismay of his allies and supporters, who believe it will hurt his chances in Georgia. One House Republican told NOTUS it was “extremely foolish” for Trump to go after Kemp. 

“If he displayed self-discipline and impulse control, he’d win,” the lawmaker explained to NOTUS. “The issues favor us. He’s been unable to focus on the issues and is behind. This is his race to lose, and he’s shooting himself in the foot. There’s some Trump fatigue too, and if he’d focus on issues and get off the personality attacks, he’d connect more with voters.”

But Trump hasn’t proven that he’s able to do that. The former president was meant to speak solely about the U.S. economy on Wednesday, but the Republican nominee couldn’t help but play into what his audience was most responding to, and they seemed excited by his jokes and jabs at Harris. But, ultimately, Trump’s audience of supporters isn’t representative of the electorate.

Typically, an election cycle has two or three presidential debates and just one showdown between the vice presidential candidates. But J.D. Vance wants to mix that formula up.

On Thursday, the Ohio senator announced that he would commit himself to more debates against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, believing that the “American people deserve as many debates as possible.”

“Not only do I accept the CBS debate on October 1st, I accept the CNN debate on September 18th as well. I look forward to seeing you at both!” Vance wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday morning.

But there may be more than meets the eye to the unprecedented second debate invitation, as September 18 holds a different kind of significance for the Republican campaign: It also marks Donald Trump’s sentencing date after a New York court found the former real estate mogul guilty of felony business fraud charges.

It’s not yet clear if Walz has agreed to the second debate—but doing so could divert attention from the first criminal sentencing of a former president in U.S. history.

“CNN invited both Senator Vance and Governor Walz to a Vice Presidential debate this fall, and Senator Vance has accepted,” a CNN spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.

“We are always in communication with the campaigns around opportunities for the American public to hear from leading candidates for President and Vice President of the United States, and we look forward to this programming in the fall,” the spokesperson said.

Tim Walz and J.D. Vance will be debating on CBS News on October 1.

CBS News invited Walz and Vance for a debate in New York City on Wednesday, offering them a choice of September 17, September 24, October 1, and October 8. Walz quickly confirmed his willingness, posting on X that afternoon, “See you on October 1, JD.”

And on Thursday morning, Vance finally agreed. He even tried to pressure Walz into a second debate hosted by CNN in September, a clear sign that things are not going well for him.

Typically, the vice presidential candidates don’t debate more than once leading up to an election, and many see the proposition as desperation from Vance and the Trump campaign.

When Vance was initially asked by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Wednesday evening if he would show up to the October 1 debate, he waffled.

“I strongly suspect we’re going to be there on October 1, but we’re not going to do one of these fake debates where they don’t actually have an audience there, where they don’t actually set the parameters in a right way where you can have a good exchange of ideas,” Vance told Ingraham.

“In other words, we’re not going to walk into a fake news media garbage debate. We’re going to do a real debate, and if CBS agrees to it, then certainly we’ll do it,” Vance added.

But things clearly changed in the Trump team’s calculus. Vance’s debate follows Donald Trump’s decision last week to debate Kamala Harris, after weeks of hesitating and complaining about Harris replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. He attempted to schedule a new debate on GOP-friendly Fox News, only to face criticism from his own supporters. It seems that now Trump and Vance are getting desperate in the face of Harris and Walz’s surge in the polls.

Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, just got a little bit weirder.

On top of the wannabe authoritarian’s other archaic views of women, the Ohio senator revealed to Fox News Wednesday that he doesn’t believe it’s “normal” for suburban women to care about their reproductive rights.

“What do you say to suburban women out there who are marinating in this propaganda?” prompted Fox News host Laura Ingraham, claiming that some women have fallen into the belief that abortion is banned nationally.

“Well, first of all, I don’t buy that, Laura,” Vance said. “I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about.”

But Vance’s assumption that suburban women don’t care about abortion is plainly wrong—and Trump’s campaign might be doing better in the polls if they paid attention to the data. An April Wall Street Journal poll found that abortion ranked head and shoulders above other issues in seven battleground states, with 39 percent of surveyed suburban women describing it as a “make or break” issue in the 2024 election.

An August report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in seven U.S. women have had an abortion at some point in their lives and that three out of four U.S. women believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Roughly 74 percent of the polled women also opposed leaving it up to the states to decide the legality of the lifesaving procedure.

“JD Vance thinks he gets to tell women how to live our lives,” Harris-Walz 2024 spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “Women are sick of Trump, Vance, and their Project 2025 obsession with controlling our most private decisions. We’ll shut the door on them this November.”

Donald Trump’s obsession with convincing his supporters to surveil the upcoming presidential election may ultimately be hurting his campaign.

The Republican nominee has repeatedly claimed that Republican Party officials only need to focus on ensuring election integrity in November, and has centered his campaign’s efforts on recruiting thousands of poll watchers and poll workers. As a result, the campaign is relying on a constellation of outside groups to rustle up the traditional networks of volunteer door-knockers and canvassers.

These groups include Elon Musk’s incredibly shady America PAC as well as Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of white-nationalist Charlie Kirk’s organization. A recent FEC rule change from March now allows for canvassing super PACs to coordinate directly with campaigns on messaging and campaign data. As a result, Trump’s scrappier in-house volunteer program can be boosted by funds from megadonors.

However, outsourcing this aspect of the campaign could prove problematic if strong personnel and structural dynamics don’t fall into place. The America PAC recently underwent a change in leadership, which caused it to clean house with its vendors supplying the workers.

The Trump campaign said it has rounded up more than 150,000 poll watchers and poll workers, reviving concerns about voter intimidation that first cropped up in 2020. The number of employed campaign staff and campaign volunteers is far smaller.

James Blair, the campaign’s political director, posted about the campaign’s operations on X Thursday, following a report from Axios that relied on numbers he’d shared last week.

In his update, Blair wrote that the campaign was bolstered by 14,500 community volunteers called “Trump Force 47 captains.” He said 2,500 of them had been trained in the last week alone, and has previously estimated that another two thousand would join every week until election day.

Last week, Blair had said that outside groups had employed more than 1,000 canvassers in battleground states, which would rise to 2,500 by election day. He said that the campaign employed hundreds of staff across the battleground states.

The Republican National Committee had plans in place for a more expansive canvassing effort, those plans were discarded once Trump’s team took over in March, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

While Trump’s focus on election integrity may not have been a detractor when he was running against President Joe Biden, it certainly looks that way now. Since announcing her candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has worked with 330,000 volunteers and has a staff of 15,000 people.

“What’s happened in the last couple of weeks is we actually have a real race. This is a real presidential campaign. The Biden-Trump version of this was one event a week by each candidate, very rarely on the campaign trail and no real engagement,” Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, told the Post. “Now this is going to be one of those campaigns where strategies matter, resources matter, time matters, and there is not much room for error.”

Several people close to the Trump campaign told the Post that there was an ongoing effort to get the easily distractible candidate to focus more on attacking Harris and other Democrats.

Trump has falsely claimed that Democrats are actually encouraging illegal immigration for the purpose of bolstering their voter base. Meanwhile, he was the one who killed a bipartisan border deal earlier this year that would have helped curb the entry of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Trump has repeatedly said the priority of the Republican Party is to tighten election restrictions, but his fearmongering is fed by his own baseless claims of election fraud and conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting. Trump’s election martyrdom from 2020 may be the nail in the coffin of his 2024 campaign.

This story has been updated.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to meet with Kamala Harris to discuss a Cabinet position in exchange for ending his independent campaign for president, but was rejected, and it might be because she benefits from him staying in the race.

The Washington Post reports that Kennedy tried to meet with Harris last week, but neither she nor her campaign responded. Kennedy met with Donald Trump in Milwaukee last month about the same issue and also had a similar phone conversation with Trump that was later leaked online.

“I think it is a strategic mistake for them. That’s my perspective,” Kennedy told the Post regarding his rejection by the Harris campaign. “I think they ought to be looking at every opportunity. I think it is going to be a very close race.”

Aside from Kennedy’s outlandish political views, Harris has a big practical reason for not giving Kennedy what he wants. Kennedy draws more right-leaning voters to his campaign than left-leaning ones, hurting Trump much more than Harris. It helps her if Kennedy stays in the race.

Kennedy’s campaign is well funded thanks to early support from right-wing donors hoping he would peel away support from the Democratic ticket, as well as from his running mate, Silicon Valley philanthropist Nicole Shanahan. But his prospects, which were never that high as a third-party candidate, have taken a nosedive as Harris has seized the Democratic nomination and as damaging revelations about him have come out.

Those revelations include that he dumped a baby bear carcass in New York’s Central Park more than a decade ago, has multiple sexual assault allegations against him, is lying about his voting residence, and once had a worm in his brain. With these strikes against him, it’s not surprising that neither the Trump nor the Harris campaign has taken him up on his offer.

Donald Trump was scheduled to give remarks on economic policy at a small messaging event in Asheville, North Carolina, on Wednesday—but the former president couldn’t help but venture way, way off topic as his speech devolved into angry ad hominem attacks against Kamala Harris, mixed into his own typical word salad.

The pared-down speaking event is part of the Trump campaign’s new strategy to keep its candidate on topic, by having him speak to smaller crowds about only one thing at a time. Trump didn’t seem committed to this idea for even one event.

“This isn’t a rally, but this is a different kind of a thing. Today we’re going to talk about one subject,” Trump said. “They say it’s the most important subject, I’m not sure it is. But they say it’s the most important—inflation is the most important, but that’s part of economy.”

When trying to speak about the vice president’s not-yet-released economic plan and her influence on the U.S. economy, Trump veered off-script to complain about her laughing. “For nearly four years Kamala has crackled as the American economy has burned,” Trump said.

“What happened to her laugh? I haven’t heard that laugh in about a week. That’s why they keep her off the stage. That’s why she’s disappeared. That’s the laugh of a crazy person, I will tell you if you haven’t noticed—it’s crazy,” Trump said. The crowd seemed to respond to Trump’s detour into bashing Harris, and so he happily repeated the line. “She’s crazy!”

“Her laugh is career-threatening,” Trump said.

The Republican nominee readily abandoned his talking points, instead opting to play to his audience of roughly 2,500 fans, fantasizing about firing his opponent.

“Kamala! You’re fired!” he screamed, pointing forcefully as the crowd cheered. “Get outta here! Go! Get outta here!”

“Right?” he asked someone in the front row. He pantomimed again as the room whistled and cheered. “Get her out,” Trump growled. “Boom.”

Overall, Trump couldn’t manage to stay on focus, even though his spokespeople have lauded the so-called “discipline” of his campaign. He patted himself on the back for his train-wreck interview with Elon Musk, proudly admitted he didn’t understand what a “net zero” carbon emissions policy meant or how wind energy works, and accused Europe of tending to be a “little bit woke.” He grinned as he remarked that was now “changing,” portraying a grotesque attitude amid deadly anti-immigrant riots that have spread across the U.K.

Trump made his regular detours into racist fearmongering about immigrants, pretending to recount—without so many details—a violent crime done by “a gentleman from a certain country, I won’t mention—happened to be in South America.”

The former president tried to list other violent crimes perpetrated by people he called “the Kamala migrants,” but couldn’t remember a single detail. It’s almost as if that wasn’t what he was meant to be speaking about in the first place.

“There were four or five other situations over the last couple of days. Rape and murder. Rape and beating. Rape and something else. And sometimes just immediate killing. These people are brutal,” Trump cried.

Trump then attempted to tie migrants back into the main subject of his speech, blaming them for basically every economic problem.

Overall, Trump delivered all the classics, despite the fact that his campaign was pretty much begging him not to.

While enthusiasm for Kamala Harris soared, Donald Trump’s pick for vice president was making zero sense before a small crowd in Byron Center, Michigan.

In one portion of J.D. Vance’s speech Wednesday, he seemed to forget what the average American spends on an economy vehicle, claiming that thanks to Harris’s spending policies, the “average new car costs nearly $50,000 a year”—a figure that would hardly translate to anything other than luxury vehicles.

Vance also flubbed a spur-of-the-moment interaction with a supporter, who shouted out that the potential administration should “fire Granholm,” referring to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. But Vance seemingly forgot who that was, instead responding that they would “fire the Agriculture Secretary.”

“She’s not doing a very good job,” Vance said, forgetting the gender of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

The Ohio senator also tried and failed to brush off comments that Trump made during a one-on-one interview with Elon Musk on Monday, in which the Republican nominee praised Musk for firing striking workers. The comment earned the ire of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose president described the behavior as “economic terrorism.”

“Well look, I like Teamsters’ president, I think he’s a good guy,” Vance said of Sean O’Brien. “But I think he’s wrong about this.”

“Donald Trump was not talking about firing Michigan autoworkers,” he continued. “He was talking about firing the employees of Twitter who use their power to censor American citizens. Those people ought to be fired.”

Vance, who famously authored The New York Times-bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has seen a significant decrease in the association of positive labels by voters since he was announced to the Republican ticket. Descriptive options such as “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” have all gone down among survey participants, according to a poll by centrist Democratic pollster Blueprint.

Most participants were aware of Vance’s strange and off-putting remarks, including an instance in which Vance claimed that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, deriding Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.” Approximately 50 percent of respondents said they were aware of Vance’s comments, while 55 percent said they were bothered by it.

Potential voters were also disturbed by a 2021 interview in which Vance defended a Texas abortion law’s lack of exceptions for instances of rape and incest by claiming that the resulting pregnancies were simply “inconvenient.” Roughly 62 percent of survey participants said they were “bothered” by that description, while 50 percent noted that it “bothers me a lot.”