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Trump, Project 2025 and ‘Culture Wars’


The foreword of Project 2025 is titled “A Promise to America.” In it, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts listed four promises – the first being a promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

Trump signs an executive order on Feb. 5 directing federal agencies to deny funding to schools that allow transgender female athletes to participate in women’s sports. Official White House Photo / Flickr.

In presenting his “pro-family promises,” Roberts targeted reproductive rights, transgender protections, critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, while fondly recalling President Ronald Reagan’s “platform in the culture wars.” 

“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Roberts wrote. It begins, he said, with deleting “sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) … reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

In his second term, President Donald Trump has signed executive orders that ended protections for transgender individuals and eliminated DEI programs, policies and offices.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, for example, reduced the federal workforce by first placing “all employees in federal agencies who worked on diversity, equity, and inclusion … on administrative leave,” according to Government Executive, a website for government officials and contractors. And the Department of Defense got rid of transgender military service members.

On the issue of abortion, Trump has embraced many of Project 2025’s proposals – including an attempt (so far unsuccessful) to defund Planned Parenthood. But he has been slow to move on some of its more restrictive recommendations, such as reversing approval of or restricting access to abortion pills.

Shortly after winning the election, Trump said it was “very unlikely” that he would restrict access to pills used in medication abortion. And, more recently, anti-abortion advocates were angered when the Food and Drug Administration on Sept. 30 approved a new generic version of the abortion pill mifepristone.

However, abortion rights advocates are concerned that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said his department is conducting a review “relating to the safety and efficacy” of mifepristone.

In this story, which is the last in our five-part series on Project 2025, we look at how Trump implemented the document’s recommendations on divisive cultural issues.

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