The Daily Fuckup

Trump tried to draw a hard line from Project 2025 on July 5, 2024, when he posted that he knew nothing about it. By July 28, that denial was not facing a fresh revelation so much as the same public record it had already run into: Heritage’s own announcements tied the project to several former Trump officials.

Heritage said in November 2022 that Rick Dearborn, who served as Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff, was returning as a visiting fellow for Project 2025 and would sit on its steering committee. In May 2023, Heritage said John McEntee, the former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, was joining Project 2025 as a senior adviser. In September 2023, Heritage said Troup Hemenway, another former Trump personnel official, had joined Project 2025 as a senior adviser and associate director of personnel placement. Heritage also said Hemenway had worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and transition team.

That overlap does not prove Trump wrote Project 2025 or directed it. It does show why the denial was always going to be politically fragile. The project was not built by strangers to Trump-world; Heritage itself presented it as a transition operation stocked with people who had worked in Trump’s orbit.

So the story on July 28 was not a new twist. It was a reminder that Trump’s July 5 claim was always going to be measured against names, dates, and Heritage’s own words. The campaign could say he had not endorsed every policy in the blueprint. It could not make the personnel links disappear.