Project 2025 is here. How likely is it to succeed?

About the Trump executive orders and their precedent in Project 2025

(Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for DNC)

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Donald Jamboree Trump famously said, and repeated, on the campaign trail. Since he is famously a man of his word, everybody believed him, and the article ends right here. Good night!

Of course, that’s sadly not the reality we live in - as I’ve covered on this Substack before, Trump is such a profound liar that the Washington Post once found that, on average, he told nearly 147 lies per day - 30,573 over the course of four years, to be exact. Nobody believed him then, and when he almost immediately went against his own word on January 20, 2025, nobody was surprised, either.

Source: Joe Biden Instagram, on the 50 lies told during their debate

But how much of Project 2025 did Trump enact in week 1 of his presidency - and how much of it is likely to stick? Are we up to 50%? 60%? More? Less? How many of Project 2025’s authors are involved in the current Trump administration? And where does Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the dark web drug den Silk Road who was serving a life sentence, getting pardoned fall within Project 2025’s plans? (that last one wasn’t an executive order on Day 1, but it is a thing that’s happened, and I think I may save that for another piece)

the face of a man accused of hiring hitmen to kill his enemies, but that’s okay, because Daddy Jamboree said it was okay

The answers to all of these questions aren’t too clear just yet, but folks, I thought it might be helpful if we round up each of these executive orders, compare them to their Project 2025 text, and see how many alarms we truly need to sound. For the sake of your sanity (and mine, let’s be real here) I’ll be lumping a few different orders into different categories. There’s one key reason for this: