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Project 2025's Shocking Liberal Donors - The Nation
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Summary
This Nation article investigates how some wealthy donors who identify as progressive or liberal have contributed funding to Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation-led initiative to staff and guide a potential second Trump administration with a hard-right policy agenda. The piece highlights contradictions in donor ideology, particularly around labor and Israel policy, and contextualizes Project 2025's authoritarian governance blueprint.
Key Points
- •Project 2025's 920-page 'Mandate for Leadership' was designed to give a second Trump administration ready-made policy and personnel to pursue a radical right-wing transformation of government.
- •Some self-described progressive or liberal donors, including Pierre Omidyar's foundation, inadvertently or knowingly helped fund portions of Project 2025.
- •Project 2025 has been criticized for anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, plans to use DOJ against critics, and potentially deploying U.S. troops against domestic protesters.
- •Unlike Trump's first term, right-wing institutions have now become sufficiently 'Trumpized' to provide staffing and policy infrastructure for a more authoritarian second term.
- •The article argues donor behavior reveals that purported progressive values often give way to reactionary positions on labor rights and geopolitical issues like Israel.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| William and Flora Hewlett Foundation | Organization | 55.0 |
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[Politics](https://www.thenation.com/subject/politics/) / November 24, 2023
# Why “Liberal” Donors Love Giving Money to the Extreme Right
Many purportedly progressive plutocrats turn reactionary on Israel and labor.
[Jeet Heer](https://www.thenation.com/authors/jeet-heer/)
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**Eyes right**: EBay founder Pierre Omidayar, whose Omidyar Network Foundation helped to pay for the labor section of Project 2025—designed to help a second Trump administration hit the ground running by providing personnel and policy options.(Ramin Talaie / Corbis via Getty Images)
If Donald Trump wins back the presidency in 2024, his second term in office will be much more authoritarian than anything he was able to achieve in his first go-round. Yet some very wealthy donors who style themselves as progressives are helping to fund Trumpian schemes to remake the government along autocratic lines.
When Trump was first elected, he faced a challenging staffing problem that has now been solved. In 2016, the existing conservative think tanks, which provide both the ready-to-go policy agenda and the employee lists used to staff incoming GOP administrations, were still organized around the pre-Trumpian Republican Party. So in his first term Trump was hard-pressed to find staffers who would execute his policy agenda, aside from anti-immigration fanatics like Stephen Miller (who came Trump’s way thanks to his far-right strategist Steve Bannon).
But over the last seven years, right-wing institutions have become steadily Trumpized, so that the MAGA vision of Trump as the head of a radical right-wing transformation of American politics has been fleshed out in terms of both policy and personnel. For a road map to the future, all one needs to do is read the 920-page [_Mandate for Leadership_](https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf) crafted by a group called Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a consortium of right-wing organizations including the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Family Research Council. As Roger Sollenberger of _The Daily Beast_ [notes](https://www.thedailybeast.com/conservative-group-accidentally-reveals-its-secret-donors-some-of-them-ar
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