Maurice Cunningham, writing for The Progressive, explains what Project 2025 means for education, and why Donald Trump can’t distance himself from it.
Former President Donald Trump claimed in early July he knows “nothing about Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page manifesto for his second administration. By the end of the month, the project was reportedly shuttered due to Trump’s “sustained criticism.” Creating that distance may be strategic on his part. But the plan’s architects are so embedded in Trump’s political networks—and in the networks of J.D. Vance, his running mate—that it’s hard to believe Trump pulling away from Heritage’s demon spawn is anything more substantial than a “rebrand.”
In fact, many of the policy ideas from Project 2025 are already in place or are rolling out in red states such as Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Florida. One policy area from Project 2025 that is particularly pernicious is its plan for schools, which includes criminally prosecuting teachers and librarians and replacing public education with for-profit schools, homeschooling, and Christian nationalist indoctrination.
Consider the book ban campaign led by Heritage ally group Moms for Liberty. It takes aim at books with LGBTQ+ themes or that teach accurate American history. Project 2025 is taking things further with a plan to criminalize teachers and librarians.
In the document’s forward, Heritage president Kevin Roberts wrote: “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
What does the Heritage Foundation mean by “pornography?”
While it may not be clear to most of us, writer Andra Watkins immediately understood what Roberts meant due to her Christian nationalist upbringing and her fluency in “Evangelicalese.” In her analysis of Roberts’s language, Watkins describes how U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson regards homosexuality as pornography; how an Oklahoma Republican politician views transgenderism as pornography; and how a Florida school banned images of Michaelangelo’s David because some parents saw it as pornographic. Another Florida school board recently banned Alan Gratz’s Ban This Book—not because there is any pornography in it, but because it is about other books banned by narrow-minded censors.
An analysis of book challenges by The Washington Post in the 2021-2022 school year found that nearly half “targeted titles with LGBTQ+ characters or themes.” PEN America reports that the book banning movement grew rapidly during the 2022-2023 school year with a focus on claims that books are “pornographic” or “indecent” even though they do not actually meet legal standards for pornography.
