Ex-Project 2025 Leader Brags Trump’s Policy Mirrors Theirs

The former leader of Project 2025 once claimed that many of Donald Trump’s policies for his second term would be ripped right from the pages of their authoritarian playbook.

In a recently unearthed video, Paul Dans, the former director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, spoke about the similarities between his policy plan and Trump’s on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

Dans said that his organization, which includes 140 former Trump staffers, wasn’t technically affiliated with their former boss’s campaign—but that it didn’t particularly matter because their product was 100 percent Trump.

“We’re not, to be sure, connected to President Trump’s campaign. But many of our ideas, you’ll see one-to-one mirroring,” Dans admitted.

“We sat down and wrote this book before President Trump had even announced,” Dans added.

It seems that Trump’s staffers knew him best while crafting their project’s agenda, which includes everything from the dissolution of essential government agencies, such as the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, to the implementation of federal abortion bans and contraception restrictions.

Dans previously appeared on War Room in June and called Project 2025 an “instruction manual” for a second Trump administration.

Dans resigned as director of the project in July, when Trump repeatedly tried to disavow the conservative manifesto after it started to be covered more widely in the press. But Dans’s resignation failed to quell the concerns of Democrats, and none of Trump’s attempts to distance himself, like pretending not to know what Project 2025 even was, have been particularly convincing.

Representative Nancy Pelosi scolded CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview Tuesday for giving airtime to Donald Trump’s attack on Kamala Harris’s mental fitness.

Tapper brought up the subject by mentioning criticism of how the media has covered Trump’s apparent cognitive decline.

“I’m sure that you hear from progressive voters, Democratic voters who say—as I hear from them on social media—[that] the media made such a big deal out of Joe Biden’s alleged cognitive problems; why don’t they talk about Donald Trump’s cognitive problems?” Tapper said to Pelosi. “Well, Donald Trump talked about that just a second ago, and I want to get your reaction.”

Tapper played a clip of Trump at a rally claiming that Kamala Harris has “got bigger cognitive problems than [Biden] has, in my opinion.”

“Why would you even cover that?” replied Pelosi, clearly annoyed. “This is a person who is not on the level. He is their nominee for president. He is incompetent. Let’s not even talk about the silliness of it all, and the weirdness of it all, and the assault on women that it is.”

Tapper was criticized earlier this week for echoing a false claim that Representative Rashida Tlaib made antisemitic comments against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. In reality, Tlaib was questioning why the attorney general’s office was filing criminal charges against pro-Palestine protesters but hadn’t done so in other protest cases. Tapper’s response fell short of a full apology in that case.

During the first presidential debate between Trump and President Biden in June, Tapper was criticized along with debate co-moderator Dana Bash for failing to challenge any of Trump’s false statements. Trump, who had attacked the network in the days leading up to the debate, was singing Tapper and Bash’s praises afterward. All of this adds to a long list of criticism of how Tapper and CNN handle political coverage.

Donald Trump’s campaign said the former president was briefed by top U.S. intelligence officials about more attempted assassination attempts against him, this time coordinated by one of the largest powers in the Middle East: Iran.

The Republican presidential nominee took to X overnight Tuesday to put the alleged intelligence on blast, claiming that the entire U.S. military is in on the mission to protect him.

“Big threats on my life by Iran,” Trump posted. “The entire U.S. Military is watching and waiting. Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again. Not a good situation for anyone. I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before.

“Thank you to Congress for unanimously approving far more money to Secret Service—Zero ‘NO’ Votes, strictly bipartisan,” he continued. “Nice to see Republicans and Democrats get together on something. An attack on a former President is a Death Wish for the attacker!”

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that they had briefed Trump’s campaign, but declined to offer additional details, reported NBC News.

Trump has survived two assassination attempts in recent months, both of which were conducted by U.S. citizens on domestic soil. Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot at Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, was a registered Republican. Ryan Wesley Routh, who attempted to shoot Trump at one of his golf courses on Sunday, voted for Trump in 2016 and supported a Nikki Haley–Vivek Ramaswamy Republican ticket.

“President Trump was briefed earlier today by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence regarding real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months, and law enforcement officials across all agencies are working to ensure President Trump is protected and the election is free from interference.”

Donald Trump’s pledge to be women’s “protector” is not sitting so well with, well, women. That includes his own former White House employees.

During an appearance Tuesday night on CNN, former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farrah Griffin was asked if she thought there was anything odd about Trump’s rant about women from his campaign event in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the night before.

“I started laughing and thinking it was creepy, but then thinking more about it, it’s very infantilizing,” Griffin said.

“Talking about women as though we’re weak, we’re meek, we need a protector, we need a defender, and we just sit around thinking about abortions all day,” Griffin continued. “It just underscores a fundamental lack of understanding for why a demographic that represents half of the country is one that he is struggling so profoundly with.

“I think Donald Trump, if he loses this election, is going to look back and think that one of the worst decisions he made was not having a female on the ticket, who actually knows how to speak to living, breathing, normal women about issues that matter to them,” Griffin said.

Griffin added that in addition to reproductive rights, economics and national security were also womens’ issues. “The way he is talking about them is not the way to sway voters in the middle,” Griffin said.

A recent NBC News poll found that Kamala Harris was leading Trump among women voters by 21 points.

Trump’s not the only one struggling to connect with women voters. Last week, Bernie Moreno, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate from Ohio, told the audience at a town hall that he thought it was “crazy” that women only cared about abortion.

Donald Trump is angry at late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert after watching a PBS interview with him Tuesday night.

Trump took to Truth Social late at night to vent about Colbert, who seems to have gotten under the former president’s skin after saying that Trump would not be returning to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert as a guest.

“I briefly watched an interview of Stephen Colbert on highly government subsidized PBS, and found it fascinating for only one reason—Why would they be wasting time and the public’s money on this complete and total loser?” Trump posted Tuesday. “He is not funny, which he gets paid far too much to be, he is not wise, he is VERY BORING, and his show is dying from a complete lack of viewers—Gutfeld, on cable, is killing him

“CBS should terminate his contract and pick almost anyone, right off the street, who would do better, and for FAR LESS MONEY—Or I could recommend someone, much more talented, and smarter, who would do it for FREE! The good news for Stephen is that the two DOPES on NBC & ABC are not much better than him!” Trump added.

Trump’s post was very over-the-top compared to what Colbert actually said about Trump in a Monday interview with PBS Newshour’s Amna Nawaz.

“I have had him before, and he was kind of boring. So, no,” Colbert said in response to a question about if Trump would appear again on the CBS show. Colbert was on PBS with his wife, Evie, to talk about their new cookbook, Does This Taste Funny?

This isn’t the first time that Trump has attacked a media network or journalist over their less than flattering coverage of him. It’s also the second night in a row that Trump has complained about late-night TV hosts. On Monday, he ranted against Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, and called for the return of Johnny Carson to The Tonight Show. It’s unclear whether Trump was just reminiscing about the legendary TV host, who passed away in 2005, or if he thought Carson was still alive and could actually return.

After all, Trump has been showing signs of cognitive decline for quite a while and has mistakenly referred to famous dead people as alive, most famously abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Of course, the former president and convicted felon has also been known to lash out at celebrities who slight him, like Taylor Swift, bothering even his ardent supporters.

After another rambling speech in Georgia on Tuesday, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to pat himself on the back.

Except, he appeared to forget where he just had been.

“A great day in Louisiana!” Trump posted around midnight, following his rally in Savannah, Georgia.

He then tried to correct his mistake, tweeting about “internal polling in Louisiana” that showed him “winning the state by the largest margin.” (Sure, let’s see those polls!)

Later in the night—or morning—he finally sent out a shoutout to the correct state, Georgia, covering his tracks.

This wasn’t Trump’s only geography blunder in the past 24 hours.

During his speech on Tuesday, Trump’s brain also short-circuited when he tried to talk about the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“She didn’t say anything except lies, like bloodbath, like Charlottestown,” Trump said, only a minute after trying to conjure a thought about manufacturing in Georgia.

Trump didn’t bother to correct his mistake, and the crowd clapped anyway.

Ohio’s Republican Senate nominee Bernie Moreno thinks it’s “crazy” that female voters only care about abortion.

Moreno was caught speaking candidly about some of his female constituents during a town hall in Warren County Friday, in footage obtained by NBC4 WMCH.

“You know the left has a lot of single-issue voters,” Moreno said. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion’s it! If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else!’

“It’s a little crazy, by the way, but, especially for women that are past 50. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you,’” Moreno continued.

Moreno remarked that this kind of statement might “get him in trouble”—and it has.

Former Republican presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley didn’t mince words about Moreno in a post on X Tuesday morning. “Are you trying to lose the election? Asking for a friend,” she wrote.

Ohio’s current Senator Sherrod Brown also posted about Moreno’s off-color comment. “Bernie Moreno thinks he knows better than the 57% of Ohioans who made themselves clear on this issue,” Brown wrote.

In another post, Brown wrote, “Bernie Moreno thinks it’s ‘crazy’ that women want to make their own healthcare decisions.” Sometimes the campaign ads just write themselves.

A spokesperson for Moreno clarified that the Republican wasn’t making a misogynistic claim but, rather, a misogynistic joke.

“Bernie was clearly making a tongue-in-cheek joke about how Sherrod Brown and members of the left-wing media like to pretend that the only issue that matters to women voters is abortion,” Reagan McCarthy wrote in a statement to WMCH.

“Bernie’s view is that women voters care just as much about the economy, rising prices, crime and our open southern border as male voters do, and it’s disgusting that Democrats and their friends in the left-wing media constantly treat all women as if they’re automatically single issue voters on abortion who don’t have other concerns that they vote on,” McCarthy added.

By his own spokesperson’s definition, Moreno is pretty disgusting.

A former aide in Donald Trump’s presidential administration and a senior adviser to Project 2025 is in trouble for sending creepy internet messages to teenagers.

John McEntee, who also co-founded the conservative dating app The Right Stuff, sent messages to multiple young women offering in some cases to give them free trips to Los Angeles and making sexual advances, Wired reports. The app’s sole investor is right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, and it has been criticized for its mostly male user base.

One of the women, Grace Carter, said McEntee reached out to her through Instagram in October last year when she was an 18-year-old freshman at North Carolina State University. McEntee used the business account of The Right Stuff to message Carter, asking if she wanted free merchandise.

Initially, Carter was interested in a free hoodie but didn’t know much about the app, and didn’t know she was corresponding with McEntee. He introduced himself as John and gave Carter a southern California phone number to message him at, which a Wired reporter recognized as one that McEntee has used in the past. Carter doesn’t know how or why McEntee decided to reach out.

“I actually have no idea how he found me,” Carter told Wired. “Based on the other accounts I follow and things I post, it’s very leftist. So I was surprised when he found me.”

Carter didn’t use McEntee’s number, although she accepted his offer of a free hoodie. Despite the fact that she rarely answered his messages, he offered to fly her and one of her friends to Los Angeles. She responded in a sort of “trolling” way to see if he’d actually follow through on the free trip, but the conversation fizzled out when Carter decided not to visit him.

Later, McEntee’s views on reproductive rights would provoke Carter’s ire. After the September 10 presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, McEntee posted a video on TikTok asking, “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath.”

Carter was incensed, and posted her own video to TikTok sharing her interactions with McEntee. Soon she began receiving messages from other women who said they had similar experiences with the conservative operative.

The publication spoke to one of those women, who asked to remain anonymous. Also aged 18, she said that McEntee reached out to her on The Right Stuff’s app before moving to text messages, using the same southern California phone number he sent to Carter. Over text, he sent her clearly identifiable selfies and began mentioning explicit sexual acts that made her uncomfortable, and encouraged her to come to California.

“It was very sexual from day one,” she said. “He kept making comments about my age and how hot it would be to sleep with someone who was my age.”

McEntee had a reputation while working in the White House for hiring young, attractive women, and could very well have been trying to pursue women through the dating app. He joined the Project 2025 team as a senior adviser in May 2023, raising the question of whether his apparent liberalism on sex coexists with the manifesto’s puritanical recommendations. But conservatives have historically been willing to let that slide.

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have both had to answer for spreading misinformation about Representative Rashida Tlaib.

During an interview with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Sunday, Tapper asked if she had any response to Tlaib’s “suggestion” that state Attorney General Dana Nessel was seeking strong charges against pro-Palestinian student protesters “because she’s Jewish.”

The only problem is, Tlaib never said anything of the sort.

Steve Neavling of the Detroit Metro Times, who wrote the article that Tapper was citing, published a fact-check on Monday. “Tlaib never once mentioned Nessel’s religion or Judaism. But Metro Times pointed out in the story that Nessel is Jewish, and that appears to be the spark that led to the false claims,” Neavling wrote.

In an interview with the Detroit Metro Times, Tlaib did not mention or even refer to Nessel’s Jewishness. Instead, she spoke about systemic anti-Palestinian bigotry. Some, like Nessel, have interpreted Tlaib’s words about widespread discrimination against her own community as coded antisemitic language.

Despite Neavling’s clarification, the false claim continued to spread. Jewish Insider picked up the story Sunday and wrote, “Tlaib has also claimed that Nessel is only charging the protesters because she’s Jewish,” without including any actual quote. The language in the article has since been changed from “claimed” to “suggested,” but its divorce from reality remains the same.

CNN’s Bash used footage of Tapper speaking to Whitmer about Tlaib as part of a segment Monday about antisemitism “from both ends of the political spectrum.” Bash claimed that Whitmer had “sidestepped calling it out” because Tlaib was a member of her same party—not because it had never actually happened.

Both Tapper and Bash posted clips of their stories on social media, further boosting the claim. Whitmer did eventually make a statement about the nonincident, without referring to Tlaib specifically, which Tapper also shared, further adding fuel to the fire.

Finally, Tapper spoke with Nessel later Monday and claimed that he simply “misspoke” on Sunday.

“I should note that I misspoke yesterday when asking a follow-up of Governor Whitmer who I asked about this. I was trying to characterize your views of Tlaib’s comments,” Tapper said to Nessel. It appeared, however, that Tapper had plainly presented his own characterization of Tlaib’s statement. Tapper then allowed Nessel to repeat her interpretation of Tlaib’s statement.

“What do you make of those today noting that Congresswoman Tlaib never explicitly said your bias was because of your religion and so it’s unfair for you to make that allegation?” he asked.

Nessel replied saying that Tlaib was “well-known for making inflammatory and incendiary remarks that are antisemitic in nature.”

“I think it’s very clear to everybody exactly what she’s saying,” Nessel said.

Bash also offered “clarification” during her show Tuesday. “Tlaib accused Nessel of ‘biases,’” Bash said, now including Tlaib’s full quote: “But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.

“Now, Tlaib did not reference Nessel’s Jewish identity. Her office has not responded to our request for clarity,” Bash said, attempting to place the onus on Tlaib for the confusion she and her colleague had wrought.

“Her allies insist that’s not what she meant,” Bash said, but offered no further explanation into Tlaib’s comment. “But Nessel still says she believes it’s antisemitic.” Bash then referred to Nessel’s comments on the show the night before.

Judge Tanya Chutkan is blowing past Donald Trump’s efforts to waylay his January 6 trial schedule, deciding on Tuesday that special counsel Jack Smith will be allowed to move forward with a proposal to submit a 180-page brief of evidence related to the case.

Trump’s legal team, which includes Todd Blanche and John Lauro, have continually argued in recent weeks that such a brief would be “incredibly unfair” to Trump so close to the election. But Chutkan’s latest ruling plainly rejects that line of thinking, determining that the matter of the election is irrelevant to the case’s timeline, and that Trump’s legal team had failed to follow the proper procedures in order to legitimately reconsider the schedule.

“For the second time in a week, Defendant urges reconsideration of the current pretrial schedule in a brief intended to respond to a separate issue, and without actually filing a motion to that effect,” Chutkan wrote. “The court has already addressed the scheduling objections Defendant raised when he was given an opportunity to do so.”

According to the judge, Smith’s brief would also resolve issues pertaining to the lingering issues of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling expanding presidential immunity “at the earliest possible stages” of the trial. “That is reason enough to grant the present motion,” Chutkan wrote.

Smith filed a superseding indictment against Trump in August. The pared-down indictment largely focuses on Trump’s private and non-official actions, since the Supreme Court granted the former president broad immunity for official acts, thereby nixing them as evidence.

The case hinges on the allegation that Trump knew he had lost the election but still tried to subvert the results, as proven by conversations he had with then-Vice President Mike Pence and his lawyers. Admissions by Trump from earlier this month—including that he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden “by a whisker”—could further damn his chances at trial.

“Allowing a brief from the Government is not ‘contrary to law procedure, and custom,’ as Defendant claims,” Chutkan continued. “It is simply how litigation works.”

Trump’s attorneys had attempted to preempt the brief by describing it as a “180-page false hit piece” and mocked the idea that the document would be of “great assistance” to the court, reported The Hill.

“The requested 180-page brief would be tantamount to a premature and improper Special Counsel report,” Trump’s legal team said.