According to a new report, former President Donald Trump flew on a private jet with the president of the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025, to a conference the institute was scheduled to hold in 2022.
The Washington Post obtained flight tracking data and a photo of Trump traveling with Kevin Roberts in April 2022. The image appears to further undermine Trump’s claim that he had “no idea” who was responsible for the controversial conservative draft – even though more than a hundred people working in his administration were involved in its creation.
Roberts took over as president of the Heritage Foundation in 2021 and was one of the chief architects of Project 2025, a 920-page document with policy goals that include replacing federal employees with political appointees and abolishing the Department of Education.
“They will lay the groundwork and develop detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in a keynote speech at a Heritage Foundation conference after the 2022 flight.
Roberts told The Washington Post in an interview last April that he discussed Project 2025 with the former president as part of a briefing the Heritage Foundation offered to anyone hoping to run for the White House.
“I spoke personally with President Trump about Project 2025 because my role in the project was to ensure that all candidates who responded to our offer of a briefing on Project 2025 received one from me,” Roberts told the newspaper.
Trump, for his part, continued to deny knowledge of the blueprint, and his spokesman told The Washington Post that Roberts never informed him. A Heritage spokesman told The Washington Post that Trump seemed “uninterested” in what Roberts had to say during the flight.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, distanced himself from Project 2025 amid fierce criticism from Democrats, and the Heritage Foundation replaced the project’s director last month.
“Project 2025 was and will never be an accurate reflection of President Trump’s policies,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the publication. “As President Trump himself and our campaign leadership have repeatedly stated, President Trump’s 20 promises to the forgotten men and women and the (Republican Party’s) platform are the only policies that President Trump supports for a second term.”
Roberts also postponed the release of a new book, due out this week and including a foreword by Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, until after the November election.
The Democratic Party immediately pounced on the Washington Post report, calling Trump a “liar” and saying the photo confirmed that the former president and his running mate “are fully engaged in this dangerous plan to take away our freedoms, threaten our democracy and set our country back.”
“While Trump and Vance desperately try to distance themselves from their own ultra-MAGA agenda, voters are learning more every day about Project 2025’s deeply unpopular proposals – and are ready to reject this extreme, far-right blueprint at the ballot box in November,” Alex Floyd, the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response director, said in a statement.
