The Centre for Climate Reporting posted an undercover-sting video exposing two key operatives inside Heritage Foundation‘s Project 2025 war machine. Russ Vought and Micah Meadowcroft are seen on tape speaking freely and openly about how their anti-democratic plans will be incorporated on Day One of (what they believe will be) Donald Trump’s second regime.
An undercover Centre for Climate Reporting journalist first encountered Meadowcroft, functionally serving as Vought’s consigliere and appointment minder, who promised the reporter he could arrange a meeting with Vought.
“We make the acquaintance of Micah Meadowcroft, an author of Project 2025 and a close aide to Vought,” the video narrator says. “He tells us Vought is running the secretive, second phase of Project 2025.” Meadowcroft proceeds to explain how that second phase is a “concrete transition plan” to bend every federal agency toward their fascist goals—all without transparency and out of the reach of FOIA requests.
“If the press knows what you’re doing,” Meadowcroft states, “they will say ‘I request all your emails from Heritage.”
Later in the video, Vought is heard echoing Meadowcroft, making bold assertions about destroying independence of federal agencies like The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), making them subservient to the executive branch.
“We wanted to meet the man writing the game plan for Trump’s second administration” the narrator says. “Vought believes that Trump’s first-term agenda was frustrated by what he calls the ‘deep state.'”
The video then cuts to Vought, who makes some shocking claims about racial-justice protests of 2020.
“Eighty percent of my time is working on plans on what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies—and we’re working doggedly on that… George Floyd was not about race, obviously. it was about destabilizing the Trump administration.”
Vought goes on to describe a dystopia that basically takes Donald Trump’s violent fantasies and mainlines them as public policy, allowing the military to put down any protest it wants.
Actually, Russ Vought was busy in Donald Trump’s administration trial-ballooning some of his fringe theories: as OMB director he reclassified 88% of federal workforce as Schedule F employees, “stripping them of job protection and making it easier for Trump or any president to order mass firings of federal employees.”
Trump’s claims that he “knows nothing” about Vought and Project 2025, except his former staffers created it and tried to implement pieces of it before his administration ended in 2021.
