Donald Trump two years ago reportedly shared a private flight from his Palm Beach home with the architect of Project 2025, the controversial extemist plan for the next conservative administration which the former president has repeatedly claimed to know "nothing" about.
The Washington Post published a photo from the flight of Trump with Kevin Roberts, the head of the right-wing Heritage Foundation which produced the conservative manifesto.
The two were on their way to the annual Heritage Foundation conference, where Trump would tell the organization's members that they would "lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."
Trump has furiously tried to backpedal from the foundation's hugely controversial Project 2025 as details about the plan have emerged in the media.
The 900-page plan, which organizers aim to begin launching the first day of a Trump presidency, includes shutting down the federal Department of Education, ending all abortion rights, slashing Medicaid, and firing tens of thousands of federal employees to replace them with loyalists.
It would also officially support only "intact" heterosexual families because all other relationships are "unstable" and create "bad behavior," the plan states, and would quickly execute — or "obtain finality for" — all prisoners on death row.
Organizers know the plan will trigger dissent, and are "anticipating large protests" if Trump is elected, the New Yorker reported late last month, citing an inside source and life-long Republican who is frightened by the scheme.
Trump allies are already working on plans to impose a "version" of the Insurrection Act that would allow Trump to "dispatch troops to serve as a national police force" to quell dissent, according to the magazine.
When Trump was in the White House he asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley about shooting Black Lives Matter protesters during a 2020 meeting, his Defense Secretary Mark Esper told NPR in an interview.
"Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?" an "enraged" Trump asked, recounted Esper, who said the question took everyone in the room "aback."
Many of the plans for the envisioned Trump administration would be launched within "hours" of the moment the former president retakes office, according to the New Yorker - which is why Trump told Sean Hannity late last year that he wouldn't be a dictator "except for Day One,"
In an awkward development for the Republican ticket, it turned out Trump's running mate J.D. Cance had already written a forward to an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts on Project 2025. The publication of the book has now been delayed — until after the election, reports the Associated Press.
