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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Arjun Singh 0:00
Arjun from the levers, reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh, the election is finally here, and one way or another, the United States will have a new president come next January. Donald Trump has run on the explicit theme of revenge, revenge against the media his political opponents and federal government workers. Then there's project 2025 a 900 plus page policy manifesto from the right wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. If enacted, Project 2025 could transform this country, empowering religious nationalists and a radical group of millionaires and billionaires. But project 2025 isn't new, at least its ideas aren't. If anything, it's the final formation of a decades long effort to unite Christian nationalists with oligarchs. And if he wins, Trump might be the last piece of the puzzle. So today, on lever time, we're going to take a deep dive into the people behind project 2025 we'll hear what motivates them, and about one of its most radical plans, one that could permanently change the government and thus the direction of the country.
Alec Magillis 1:13
The core of project 2025 really is personnel. I think the Democrats did a very good job in recent months making it sound as if project 2025 is all about policy. It is, is all about these radical light proposals that are in this in that big book that they put out. But that book the mandate for leadership, it's only one of the four parts of project 2025 and the other three parts are really the more relevant ones, because they're much more about personnel and how they're going to make sure that they can get enough true Maga people in the federal government come next January.
Arjun Singh 1:47
Alec mcgillis is a reporter for the investigative news outlet ProPublica. A couple weeks ago, I called him up because I wanted to learn more about Project 2025 project 2025 is a policy manifesto released by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, and it's over 900 pages long. There's heavy speculation that should Donald Trump win the presidency. Project 2025 will serve as a blueprint for his second term. Inside of it are plans for mass deportation, dismantling the Department of Education, even privatizing the National Weather Service. But when I sat down with Alec, he told me that one of project 2025, most radical plans is one that's little discussed, Schedule F. The idea
Alec Magillis 2:26
with Schedule F is that you take 10s of 1000s of slots in the government that are now held by career employees. Federal Government is like 4 million career employees total we take, say, 50,000 of the most important career slots, the ones that are what they call policy shaping, policy making, slots that actually have an effect over policy and you switch them to a new category called Schedule F, where, quite simply, they are much easier to fire. Right now it's not easy to fire a career employee. They can appeal. There's a lot of hoops to jump through, but if you create this new Schedule F, it'll be much easier to fire those people and replace them with other people. And so the idea is that they will immediately reinstate Schedule F. If Trump wins, there will be some core challenges to it. But everything I've you know, I've been told, is that that in due course, Schedule F would be able to stand and the way that the Trump folks talk about it, and they're very candid about this, is that they don't really think they would need to fire 50,000 people. They would just need to fire a few 1000 people and thereby put the fear of God into everyone else across the federal government to send a signal that if you do resist us, this is what's going to happen to you. So just put the heads on pikes, and that'll send the message. As President
Arjun Singh 3:49
Trump would usually rail against something he called the deep state, the federal bureaucracy that he claims tried to thwart him. In 2016 Trump ran on the idea of quote, draining the swamp. But this time around, he's looking for revenge. We
Donald Trump 4:02
will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians or the left's political enemies, which they're doing now at a level that nobody can believe
Arjun Singh 4:28
what Trump characterized as resistance, though may have actually just been in competence on the part of his administration. The federal government is a complicated system, and one of the reasons it leans on career civil servants is to be able to implement a President's vision in his first term, some within the administration realized that, so they began to conceptualize a means to install civil servants who would be loyal to Trump above anything else. It's
Alec Magillis 4:51
their recognition that to really get stuff done, to really implement the agenda, you need to change who's in these jobs. You need to bring in a whole new cohort of. People. And so to that extent, it really is the most radical part of the agenda of project 2025. Is, in a way, the most boring seeming part of it, which is, which is the personnel, which is, it's this database that they build of all these people that are ready to go. But that really is, in a sense, more important and more radical than a lot of the wild seeming proposals in the book, because it's something that they were actually going to do, and that will allow them to do more things.
Arjun Singh 5:26
And once news about Project 2025 broke out, Trump tried to distance himself from it.
Donald Trump 5:31
Number one, I have nothing to do, as you know and as she knows better than anyone, I have nothing to do with Project 2025 that's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it. Purposely. I'm not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together. They came up with some ideas, I guess, some good, some bad.
Arjun Singh 5:47
But a lot of the authors, including project 2025 director, worked in the Trump administration. And this isn't just something born out of the Maga movement. In one way, it's a culmination of the longtime goals of the Heritage Foundation to promote religious fundamentalism with a heaping dose of unrestrained free market capitalism. And if Trump can successfully pull this off, it could put the country on a completely new trajectory and make the federal government unrecognizable.
Nancy Maclean 6:14
The Heritage Foundation is the peak organization on the political right that has been working to move the Republican Party and American politics to the right since its creation in 1973 it has an enormous budget, funded by many donors whose names will be familiar to your readers, melon scaif, Coors, Coke donors, trust now all the dark money ATM groups, as one journalist called them and its vibe is a combination of plutocrat serving and Christian nationalists.
Arjun Singh 6:49
Nancy MacLean is a historian and a professor of history and Public Policy at Duke University in 2017 she wrote a book called democracy in chains, the deep history of the radical right stealth plan for America, the Trump administration had an incredibly close relationship with the Heritage Foundation, so much so that in 2018 heritage put out a statement proudly saying that 70 of their staffers worked on Trump's transition team, and that Trump had taken up more than 60% of their policy recommendations, and in return, Trump heaped praise on them. Here he is in 2022 for example, for
Donald Trump 7:22
nearly a half a century, you have been titans in the fight to defend, promote and preserve our great American heritage. For
Arjun Singh 7:33
the last three years, heritage has been led by a guy named Kevin Roberts. How many
Kevin Roberts 7:37
of you are ready to very steadily, calmly, peacefully,
Arjun Singh 7:41
take our country back. One thing that makes heritage unique is its mission to define the United States as a Christian nation and bring it into the government, also known as Christian nationalism. And a model for how Roberts wants to do it is the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, whose weakened democratic institutions in the name of, quote, defending Christianity, unquote,
Nancy Maclean 8:03
Kevin Roberts at Heritage, brought or bond to heritage, and, you know, convened a bunch of allies this past March and met with him for a few hours and came out saying, Victor Orban is not just a model for Conservative governance. He is the model, right? And so what they're trying to do with Project 2025 is basically undermine the capacity of civil society to reject their agenda in the same way that Orban did. And what did Orban do? He rode Christian nationalism, you know, and the backing of malevolent corporations to power. Then when he got in, he completely purged the civil service to make it loyal to him, and unbending, purged the media, changed the laws, changed the Constitution, and this is exactly what heritage wants to do.
Arjun Singh 8:55
Nancy touched on another important thing that makes heritage unique, the fact that it blends Christian nationalism with corporate hegemony. Today, it's usually taken for granted that the GOP is comfortably home to conservative Christians who also believe in free market capitalism. But that wasn't always the case. It's actually a fairly recent phenomenon.
Kevin Roberts 9:13
I suppose the more important thing that I did was to try to bring together the what is now known as the Religious Right. Those people were not active in politics, and I served as sort of a coach to get them active in the political process. And today, as you know, they're an important element in electing even the President of the United States.
Arjun Singh 9:50
This is the voice of Paul Weyrich, the co founder of the Heritage Foundation. Though he may not sound imposing, he's a colossal figure in American history.
Nancy Maclean 9:59
Paul. Way, Rick is really, in many ways, the key architect of what was called for a long time, the religious right, but now is really Christian nationalism that seeks to transform the entire federal government and to implant its own dogma as the law of the land. He was extremely shrewd about using particularly evangelical fundamentalist churches to build political power, not least because he understood that many of their ministerial leaders were entrepreneurs themselves, kind of religious entrepreneurs, and they also had vast power, because those kinds of congregations would pretty much do what their pastors tell them to do. So if you recruited the ministers to the, you know, religious right now, Christian nationalist cause, you would get a huge section of voters, and we saw the power of that when 81% of Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, Wyrick,
Arjun Singh 11:03
first and foremost, wanted to advance the Christian cause in the United States, but in 1973 you could say he made something of a devil's bargain. When Wyrick wanted to build a think tank that could rival liberal ones like the Brookings Institution, he needed funding, and that's why he partnered with Joe Coors, the grandson of the founder of the Coors Brewing Company, and a very wealthy man. Coors was a prominent member of conservative circles, and around the time he co founded heritage, he had made a big bet on a rising star in Republican politics. I
Ronald Reagan 11:37
think there is a different philosophy or belief in the Republican party today at the grassroots level and on up through the pros, I think you will find the republican party today is far more willing to see good in in other Republicans in the interest of unity and in the interest of winning. That
Arjun Singh 11:57
guy was Ronald Reagan and with Coors money and weirichs grassroots organizing heritage embarked on a quest to remake the Republican coalition by marrying conservative Christian nationalism with free market capitalism. And in Reagan, they had a perfect messenger. We
Ronald Reagan 12:13
will never compromise our principles and standards. We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in God
Arjun Singh 12:24
with Reagan in the White House. Throughout the 1980s the Heritage Foundation became a dominant force in Republican politics, and it would grow into a comfortable setting for rich tycoons to control the GOP. By 1994 heritage had become so influential, its ideas formed the basis of something called the Contract with America, a legislative platform and strategy that was a grocery list of right wing goals like cutting taxes, social security and welfare, though the idea had sprung out of the Heritage Foundation. Its spokesman was a Georgia Republican named Newt Gingrich. We've already told
Newt Gingrich 12:55
the incumbents and the candidates that if we have a majority, if the American people accept this contract that they can expect to work five days a week in January, six days a week in February and March, and 24 hours a day around the clock towards the end, if necessary. But we are going to get to the final recorded votes in the first 100 days on every item
Arjun Singh 13:20
introduced six weeks before the 1994 midterms, Gingrich used it as a rallying call for conservative revolution, and all but two Republican House members running for Congress that year signed onto it, unified around Heritage's ideas. The Republicans gained 54 seats in the house and eight seats in the Senate, a landslide victory that flipped both chambers of Congress and put Gingrich in the Speaker's seat
Dick Gephardt 13:42
with faith and with friendship and the deepest respect. You are now my speaker, and let the Great Debate begin. I now have the high honor and distinct privilege to present to the House of Representatives, our new speaker, the gentleman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich.
Arjun Singh 14:05
By 1996 these religious voters were a massive force in Republican politics, and they began to organize one of the most prominent groups that came out of this was the Christian coalition, led by a conservative Christian entrepreneur named Pat Robertson. And
Pat Robertson 14:19
now they accuse us of being a Power Man, and they accuse us of using stealth tactics, because we go out and knock on doors of people and ask them to vote for candidates. We go out and send voter guides informing people of what the issues are an election. We actually use phone banks, and that is supposed to be a secret weapon known only to a few.
Arjun Singh 14:48
This was heritage in action, and why? Rick's goal of folding evangelical and other Christian voters into the Republican Party became a reality, but the Heritage Coalition didn't always click in. The 1990s the two major Republican candidates for President, George Herbert, Walker, Bush and Bob Dole, were seen as too business minded for a lot of these Christian voters, and ultimately, in their elections, a lot of them rejected them, and for some of the wealthy donors to heritage, like Charles Koch, these Christian voters were simply seen as tools to enact their radical economic agenda. Here's Nancy Maclean again. It's
Nancy Maclean 15:21
a very cynical pairing. I mean, certainly donors like you know Charles Koch that I know best, and many of the libertarians have never shown any sign of religious faith. You know, they don't go to church, they don't have a religious affiliation, but they do need foot soldiers to go to the polls, to vote for the candidates that will get them the policies they want. And those policies Arjun are really extreme, like extreme, you know, Liberty to the point of anarchy for property holders, corporations, of course, fossil fuel corporations, like Koch Industries, and then a kind of totalitarianism for the rest of us, where their freedom means our domination. But again, they know, and this, I believe, this is my key finding in democracy, chain, in chains, they knew that the vast majority of the American people would never be persuaded to those views. Would never come around to thinking that that was a good agenda for them. You know, a country with no public education, no social security, no Medicare, no workers rights, no environmental protections, no women's rights, et cetera. So they had to find, again, a source of votes to move this agenda. So again, it's an extremely cynical, almost, I think, diabolical at this point, turning to these Christian nationalist voters
Arjun Singh 16:38
in the process of reporting this piece. Right here is where I plan to return to project 2025 but then something interesting happened. I had a conversation with a journalist named Gareth gore. Gareth lives in London, and he just published a book called Opus the cult of dark money, human trafficking and right wing conspiracy inside the Catholic Church, which is about a Catholic group called Opus Dei. Now I'll be completely honest, I didn't really know what that group was, if anything, I remembered it being a plot point in that book, The Da Vinci Code. But then Gareth told me something that I was not expecting to hear. Opus
Gareth Gore 17:11
Dei has so successfully infiltrated, I guess, the conservative Catholic community in Washington, DC right now that to get ahead, I think in the Republican Party right now, it's certainly a benefit to be either part of this group or at least allied to this group.
Arjun Singh 17:33
Did he really just say that a secret Catholic organization might have a major role to play in Republican politics right now,
Speaker 1 17:40
one very clear connection between JD Vance and the opera's day network is Kevin Roberts. So Kevin Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation. Kevin Roberts is a good friend of JD Vance. In fact, Kevin Roberts was supposed to have a book out in September, and the guy that he asked to write the forward to the book was Mr. JD Mance, but Kevin Roberts is absolutely part of this Opus Dei network. So Kevin Roberts has gone on record talking about how he's a regular visitor to the CIC, the Catholic Information Center, Opus days hub in Central Washington. He goes there to receive spiritual formation from the Opus Dei priests there. And you know, Project 2025, a project which Roberts has pushed through, and which is being financed by Leonard Leo, who again sits on the board at the CIC in Washington. You know, this is the next step to this infiltration of every element of society. I mean, Project 2025, will basically see 1000s of federal employees fired and replaced with like minded radical conservatives that are appointed by people like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo. That second
Arjun Singh 19:01
name Gareth mentioned is important to remember. Leonard Leo Leo is a conservative activist who's funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into a network of organizations that have pushed and helped install right wing judges throughout the court system. As the president of the Federalist Society, Leo is arguably one of the people most responsible for the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and he's also closely aligned with this Catholic group, Opus Dei. But right now, you're probably wondering, like I was, what is Opus Dei?
Speaker 1 19:30
Opus Dei is a is an organization that was set up in 1928 by a Spanish priest called Jose Maria escriba. So this was a guy who told everybody that he had received a vision from God for an organization that would help ordinary Catholics to basically live out their faith more seriously, I guess, without the need to become priests or nuns. But very quickly, it took on a very political dimension. Basically. What happened was, you know, this was Spain in the early 1930s a society that was deeply divided on the brink of civil war. Workers were rising up, demanding new rights for themselves. They overthrew the monarchy. They turned their backs on the church, and escriba saw what was happening around him, and he was horrified. And so what he did was he took this original idea that he'd supposedly received from God, and he basically ripped it up and started again, and what he recreated was a deeply militant, reactionary and political group. He envisioned his followers as part as a kind of hidden guerrilla army that would infiltrate every element of society and use their positions to one, collect information about what he called the enemies of Christ, but then two use or abuse their positions in society to follow what he called the orders of Christ, which would of course, come from himself. I
Arjun Singh 21:05
One way Opus Dei hopes to accomplish this infiltration is by embedding itself amongst the elites in a society. They arrived in the United States in the 1940s originally in Boston, but soon moved to Washington, DC, and they would become intimately connected with the conservative movement in the 1980s the same time, heritage was building their coalition of Christian voters and hardcore free market radicals. In
Speaker 1 21:27
the late 80s, it became close to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. So he was a regular attendee at Opus Dei retreats that it was holding outside of Washington. He would also, you know, I guess, use the cache of Scalia to invite other prominent Washington figures as well. But the real transformation happened when it took over a chapel and bookshop in Central Washington called the Catholic Information Center. Basically this little chapel became the center for the recruitment of many high flying political figures. So you get people like Newt Gingrich, Bill Barr, you know, start to frequent this place. And there's this really charismatic and extremely successful recruiter, this priest called Father C John McCluskey, who made a name for himself as what they called the Convert maker. He managed to convert a number of really high flying Washington politicians, not just to Catholicism, but to Opus
Arjun Singh 22:30
Dei. I feel like I just threw a monkey wrench into what was a fairly standard political history. But if you think about it, this kind of makes sense. Remember earlier what Nancy Maclean had said about Kevin Roberts idealizing Hungary's leader, Viktor Orban, because of orban's belligerent push to elevate Christian nationalism in Hungary. And is it really that absurd when you consider that there are hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars in cash circulating through various networks like Leonard Leo's network or think tanks like heritage that have been on the forefront of getting Supreme Court justices who would crack down on things like abortion rights in
Speaker 1 23:05
the late 2000s early 2010s one of Opus Dei main operatives. This guy who runs a bunch of foundations out of Princeton called Louis tellers, he basically allied with the Mormon church to fund a huge campaign to lobby against same sex marriage. And they ran up a number of successes. I mean, they, they managed to get a referendum on same sex marriage onto the ballot in California, and they won. It was, you know, it was later overturned, but they almost were managed to kind of outlaw same sex marriage in California. People are extremely familiar with the efforts that, especially evangelicals, have gone to in the past. I guess 4040, years to really, I guess, shape policy around topics like abortion and same sex marriage. What people are much less familiar with is just how much radical Catholic movements such as Opus Dei have been involved in all of this kind of behind the scenes, certainly in the last 20 years. But there's
Arjun Singh 24:17
an even darker element to Opus Dei, and keep in mind that this group has documented links to people like Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Bill Barr, Trump's former Attorney General, and Leonard Leo, the activist who effectively chose all of Trump's Supreme Court picks. Opus Dei is also involved in human trafficking. In their case, they prey on young teenage girls and essentially turn them into indentured servants, forcing them to work in Opus day run schools and residences all around the world. These girls
Speaker 1 24:50
were basically coerced into a life of servitude. They were expected to work 14 hour days, seven days a week, 365, days a year. One. For no pay, and they were trafficked around the world to wherever they were needed by the organization, including to the United States to here in the UK. And now these women are rising up. I've spoken to many, many other women who've lived through the same experience of being coerced into joining Opus Dei and basically working as slaves, as free labor for the organization to serve Opus Dei elite members.
Arjun Singh 25:32
These are the groups and people that are swirling around project 2025, and in the heritage Foundation's case, actually designing it. So after the break, we're going to return to what's actually in Project 2025 and learn About the architect of it. We'll be right back you.
Arjun Singh 26:03
So far, we've talked about how the heritage Foundation's mission has been to build an alliance between the religious and corporate right in the more than 900 pages of project 2025 this is a common pattern in their plans surrounding everything from fossil fuels to immigration. But if it's enacted, it'll also be the next step in the Maga movement, and that's embodied in the person who spearheaded the entire thing, a former Trump administration staffer named Paul dance. Here's Alec mcgillis again.
Alec Magillis 26:30
Paul lived this very kind of quiet, obscure life as a lawyer in New York for many, many years, and then over his years in New York, he shifted way to the right despite having grown up in this very liberal family and and became really kind of like an original Maga guy, like an OG Maga guy, to the point where he was rooting for Trump to run for president way back in 2012 and when he finally ran and won in 2016 and 17, Paul dans was desperate to go work for the new administration. Dans
Arjun Singh 27:05
had no government experience before going to work for the Trump administration, but he was able to finagle a job working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development due to a personal connection so like Trump, he was an outsider, and also someone who had no institutional knowledge of how the government actually worked. You've
Alec Magillis 27:22
got all these people at the agency, both career people and also Trump appointees, more sort of conventional Trump appointees, who did not know what to make of him because he comes in there really, you know, kind of like a bull in a china shop, just wanting to overhaul everything, change the ways that everything is done, as far as hiring and other personnel things, and again and again, is just freaking people out with his with these outbursts that he's that he's having, he he's just constantly feels like he's being resisted by everyone else who's already been there. And he wants to change the way that everything's done, including this bizarre moment where, early in the pandemic, when they're trying to figure out how they're going to keep the agency running, and they're, you know, shifting things over to more remote meetings and whatnot. He objects loudly at one meeting to their using zoom, declaring that this is going to allow the Chinese to spy on on the Office of Personal Management, which is amusing in a lot of levels, because it's probably the last thing that the Chinese would really care about if they if they did actually want to spy on the remote work of the government during the pandemic. But the technology officer tried to calmly explain to him that, you know, it's it was going to be okay, that it's on the approved list of vendors, and a lot of other agencies were using it as well. And he just got was very, very worked up about it. And it was just another moment where you sort of saw Paul Dan's just coming in as this, someone just from a completely other realm, who who'd had, again, no government experience, and feeling that he needed to represent the true Trump, the Maga vision.
Arjun Singh 28:52
That was a pretty funny story, but Dan's is anything but funny as a maga loyalist, Dan's experience in the Trump administration heavily shaped his view that the government needed to be purged, and eventually he would make his way to the Heritage Foundation, where he'd become the director of Project 2025 if Heritage's broader mission is to steer the country towards Christian nationalism and radical capitalism, Dan's mission represents another radical goal of Project 2025 to remake the government in Donald Trump's image, he
Alec Magillis 29:21
represents essentially what he believes the government needs more of. That was the core of his work at Project 2025. Was finding people out there around the country who have not been in the government, who are both sufficiently Trumpy, sufficiently Maga, and really sort of feel that the Trump vision, if you want to call it, or Trump culture, to the core in their bones, but are also sufficiently learned and skilled enough to do the work of government, because he was in the government long enough to see how complex a lot of it is, and that one of the reasons. That it's hard to sort of stop the progressive agenda is that you have to actually know how things work to be able to stop them. So you need people actually know how things work. But it's very hard to find people who both know how things work and are highly educated and highly skilled in the work of government and are also hardcore Maga, and he fits that bill. The challenge is finding other people who are like him to fill all the other jobs. That was his project at Friday 2025 was setting up this core of 1000s of people who would be sufficiently like him to be able to take over come next January.
Arjun Singh 30:39
Today is election day, and if you're burnt out and exhausted or you just want to tune out, I can't blame you at all. For the past few weeks, I think a lot of people have felt the same way. We're now in our ninth year of Donald Trump being at the center of our political process, and he's undeniably gone mainstream. But this plan, Schedule F it feels different, and Trump hasn't minced his words this time around about what his goals are, getting revenge on his political opponents, using the government to target journalists and making the government resemble one of his companies more than a public institution. What he wants to do isn't like any other Republican before him, and this election is a fork in the road, and it's clear what direction Donald Trump wants to take us.
Arjun Singh 31:32
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me Arjun Singh, with editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music is composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back later this week with another episode of lever. Time you