As the Trump-Vance ticket campaigns to win the White House, conservatives have created an extensive plan called Project 2025 to outline what a second Trump presidency could look like. theSkimm spoke with Nicole Hemmer, political historian and director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency, at Vanderbilt University to ask… What is Project 2025? Project 2025 is a proposed agenda for the next Republican presidential administration. It was put together by the Heritage Foundation, which is a think tank that has been putting out roadmaps for what Republican governing should look like since Ronald Reagan was president … The foundation pulled together, with the advice of 100 different institutions and more than 400 people, what they think the best possible right-wing agenda for the country looks like. All of that advice went into this 900 page document. It’s worth noting that of the people consulted, many of them were high-powered advisers, Cabinet members, and ambassadors for the Trump administration … If Donald Trump becomes president again, conservatives want to make sure he hits the ground running. Are there certain aspects of Project 2025 that stand out to you the most? One of the things that often gets overlooked is how invested this piece of writing is in strengthening the control the president has over the executive branch. One big part of the agenda is that the president should be able to fire all of the civil servants in the government and replace them with loyalists. That the president should have more political appointees in the Department of Justice. If you combine that with recent Supreme Court decisions, you’re looking at a much stronger presidency … We’re also talking about a document that says that pornography should be banned, that mifepristone — which is the drug that’s used in more than 50% of abortions in the US — should be taken off the market … that things like sexual orientation and gender identity should be scrubbed from all federal law, and that trans people should be banned from the military. Former President Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025. Why do you think that is? Donald Trump is distancing himself from this agenda not because he disagrees with all of it, although I think there are parts of it that he disagrees with, but he knows that there are certain parts of it that would be damaging for him in the election, particularly things like banning mifepristone. There’s no popular support for that. Trump has taken a look at the political landscape and is trying to find the message that will alienate as few people as possible because he needs to expand his base just a little bit in order to win this election. If Trump were to be elected and follow the agenda outlined in Project 2025, could anything be done to stop it? Legal challenges will be very difficult because of the Supreme Court, which has given a lot of leeway in its recent rulings to the president and particularly presidential control over appointments and the federal government … The thing that would prevent some of this from happening is if you had enough Democrats in the House and Senate, and some governors can throw sand in the gears for implementing things in their states. It’s worth making clear that should Trump become the president and control the federal government apparatus, there is this plan that will be very difficult to stop the implementation. PS: This interview was edited for length and clarity. Read more: What is Agenda47? A Look at Trump’s Own Policy Proposals (USA Today) What Are Democrats Doing About Project 2025? (The Guardian) Note: This interview originally appeared in the Daily Skimm for July 19, 2024. Skimm'd by Marina Carver and Maria del Carmen Corpus