Former Project 2025 Leader Accuses Trump Campaign Advisers of ‘Malpractice

Sept. 9, 20241/2

The remarks from Paul Dans, the former director of the policy initiative, revealed discontent on the right about what some see as a pivot to the center.

The former director of Project 2025, a right-wing plan for what Donald J. Trump could do in a second term as president, is sharply criticizing Mr. Trump’s campaign, accusing its two top advisers of a series of missteps, lack of preparation and overconfidence that he says have jeopardized Mr. Trump’s chances in November.

The critique is the first public statement from Paul Dans, a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump, since he announced his departure from Project 2025 in late July. Mr. Dans oversaw the project for more than two years until Democrats publicized its proposals and turned it into a political liability for Mr. Trump. The former president ultimately disavowed the venture.

In an interview, Mr. Dans, a lawyer who served several roles in the final two years of the Trump administration, blamed Mr. Trump’s senior advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, for the episode and for the close race. He urged Mr. Trump to replace the two consultants.

“Trump should be running like Secretariat at the Belmont, but instead it’s a race to the wire,” Mr. Dans said.

His complaints reflect a discontent that has been simmering for weeks among a faction of Mr. Trump’s supporters on the right. Several media figures, activists and former Trump administration officials say they are worried by what they see as strategic mistakes this summer, followed by the campaign’s overtures to the center as it seeks to win over swing voters.

As is typical in Mr. Trump’s orbit, the complaints are rarely, if ever, aimed at the former president himself, but instead at his top aides. They recently grew so loud that the hashtag #FireLaCivita briefly trended on the social media network X.

A wave of summertime dissent was also a feature of Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. In those races, Mr. Trump responded by shaking up his campaign leadership. This year, Mr. Trump has given no indication that he intends to sideline his top advisers in the final weeks of the race.

“Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita have done a great job, I could not be more happy with them,” Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times in response to Mr. Dans’s remarks.

Mr. Trump, however, has brought in additional advisers. Last month, he added Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager Mr. Trump fired in 2016, to the team. He has also recently sought guidance from Ben Carson, Mr. Trump’s former housing secretary, as well as the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Representative Tulsi Gabbardand the billionaire Elon Musk.

Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles, both longtime Republican insiders, have forged close ties to important figures on the right, including Russell T. Vought, who directed the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, and Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA.

In an interview, Mr. Kirk pushed back on Mr. Dans’s critique: “Chris and Susie are very competent, sophisticated and loyal to the president. I think they have their head on right. We’re in a good spot and they deserve a lot of credit for that.”

Raheem Kassam, editor in chief of The National Pulse, a right-wing news site, and a frequent guess host on “War Room,” the popular podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, is among those who have been agitating for a leadership change for months.

In an interview, Mr. Kassam called himself the “ombudsman” and “chief public whip” for the loosely knit group of people — most of whom declined to speak publicly for fear of retribution — who remain concerned about the state of the campaign.He cast Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles as most concerned with their opportunity for personal gain from the campaign. “I really don’t think Chris and Susie care if they win. I’ve never gotten that vibe,” he said.

Both Mr. Dans and Mr. Kassam said they viewed Mr. LaCivita as insufficiently committed to Mr. Trump’s movementand to his false claims about a stolen election in 2020. They complained that the advisers were unprepared for President Biden to drop out of the race, and that Mr. Trump’s stances on policy matters including abortion and trade have alienated significant portions of the party base, depressing enthusiasm.

https://archive.is/X53jR

(I agree with him.)

>>21571088

2/2

But no topic has been more contentious for the dissenting loyalists than the handling of Project 2025.

The heart of the Heritage Foundation-funded project, ==Mr. Dans said, was a database of roughly 20,000 party loyalists who were vetted and ready to fill positions in a Republican administration. “The focus was on draining the swamp=,” he said.

But most public attention has been drawn to the effort’s 900-plus-page policy book, called the “Mandate for Leadership.”

Although Democrats first seized on the document a year ago, it didn’t gain traction as an attack line until early July, when the Heritage Foundation’s president,Kevin Roberts, said in a podcast interview that the country was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The remark went viral, and three days later Mr. Trump used Truth Social to disown Project 2025, claiming that he had “no idea who is behind it” and that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Mr. Dans said he was blindsided by the post, which he called an inadvertent signal to Democrats to push even harder to tie Mr. Trump to Project 2025.

“They took the bait,” Mr. Dans said of the campaign leadership. He pointed to comments by Mr. LaCivita at the Republican National Convention, where he called Project 2025 a “pain in the ass” and said that the people behind it “do not speak for the campaign.”

The strategy agitated loyalists who interpreted it to mean the campaign was cutting everyone involved in Project 2025 out of a possible transition. Those fears were underscored when the campaign installed Linda McMahon, chair of the America First Policy Institute, on its transition team. That group, a conservative think tank, has been working on a transition blueprint completely separate from the one made by Project 2025.

Tim Chapman, the president of the conservative policy group Advancing American Freedom,called the handling of Project 2025 a “rude awakening about the reality of politics.”

He said he was even more concerned about some of its recent policy positions, including what he sees as a more moderate stance on abortion and proposals for 20 percent tariffs on imported goods.Both ideas, he said, reflected a shift to the center in a bid for independent voters, but risked alienating the party’s base.

“The campaign is made up of political animals who don’t care about the ideological wing of the conservative movement,” Mr. Chapman said.

Another point of contention has been the Trump campaign’s debate strategy. In April, Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles pushed to hold the first debate between Mr. Trump and President Biden earlier than the planned September matchup. The campaign ultimately settled on a first debate in late June.

Mr. Dans and others said that timing was a mistake. Mr. Biden’s disastrous performance led him to quit the race, but with plenty of time for Democrats to select a new candidateand build momentum behind Vice President Kamala Harris.

Neither adviser appeared to believe it was possible that the president would actually drop out.In July, just 11 days before Mr. Biden’s departure, Mr. LaCivita was quoted in The Atlantic as saying Mr. Biden “doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere.”

Mr. Dans called that a sign of arrogance. “They pushed Biden off the stage and they had no plans for Harris,” Mr. Dans said.“That is on par with historic campaign malpractice.”

Despite the campaign shake-up and Democrats’ burst of enthusiasm, recent polling has shown Mr. Trump in a solid position — essentially neck and neck with Ms. Harris. Tuesday night’s debate is an opportunity to pick up more ground.

“I understand the election is tight but I don’t think that has anything to do with Chris and Susie,” said Mr. Vought, who is president of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank that contributed to Project 2025. “They have run an amazing campaign.”

Since leaving Project 2025 in mid-August,Mr. Dans said he had been working on “election integrity” issues to support Mr. Trump, but declined to give details. He said he was still hopeful that Mr. Trump would win in November and finish off the projects he started during his first term.

One of those, he said, was reinstating Schedule F, a new federal job classification Mr. Dans was instrumental in pushing through in late 2020. The change made thousands of government employees easier to fire on ideological grounds but was rescinded by President Biden.

But Mr. Dans said he feared Mr. Trump was losing too much support from grass-roots conservatives.

“Who is going to work the polls? Who is going to fight for you?” Mr. Dans said. “There’s no transition without winning and there’s no winning without those loyalists putting their boots on the ground.”

https://archive.is/X53jR

>>21571111

I wonder if this whole thing is a psyop to make it appear that Trump's camp is a mess? Why talk to NYTs otherwise? Is it possible? Yes

China | Not for the religious or lazy

How to get kicked out of China’s Communist Party

Officials are trying to expel slackers and the superstitious

china’s communist party has over 99m members. So it is no surprise that some are not up to scratch. The corrupt, criminal or disloyal are handled by the party’s fearsome internal-investigation arm, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. It has punished thousands of officials in recent years.But that still leaves another kind of troublesome member: those who have not broken any laws, but just aren’t very good communists.

In late August officials published regulations for dealing with them, too.The aim is to reform or expel people who show a “lack of revolutionary spirit”. Some of the rules were already on the books, but enforcement had been lax. It will get tighter so the party can further its “self-revolution”, an official explained to state media, using a buzzword for the purging of weaker members.

Those who do not pay their party fees are a target. Every month members are supposed to give up a small portion of their wages. The party does not need the money; it is simply an act of loyalty. Cadres are urged to take inspiration from Zhu De, a revolutionary hero who, on his deathbed, gave his life savings to the party rather than his daughter. Few members are so devout. Some fail to pay any fees at all. The regulations say that not doing so for six consecutive months is grounds for expulsion.

Religious members are seen as another problem. Newbies must swear that they are atheist. But many still harbour beliefs in the supernatural. In one notorious case, from 2018, a member in the province of Gansu hired a Taoist priest to bring luck to the construction of a nuclear power plant. According to the regulations, religious folk should be given a chance to renounce their beliefs—and kicked out if they do not.

The main goal of the regulations seems to be to root out slackers. “Passive and lazy” members should be shown the door, say the rules. Some members appear to be skipping the fun activities organised by local party cells, such as study sessions focused on Xi Jinping’s speeches. Others are not completing tasks assigned to them by officials.

This is of great concern toMr Xi. The party chief often complains about his subordinates’ poor work ethic. But the root of the problem is not laziness, says Alfred Wu of the National University of Singapore. It is that under Mr Xi, members who mess up are punished harshly. Many therefore believe that it is better to keep their heads down than to show any initiative. Stricter enforcement of the rules is unlikely to encourage them. ■

https://archive.is/9AtEu

The Economist