The one issue where Trump can’t escape Project 2025

Since it unexpectedly became a viral phenomenon earlier this year, Project 2025 has loomed extraordinarily large over the presidential campaign.

On the debate stage, Kamala Harris called it “a detailed and dangerous plan” that Donald Trump “intends on implementing if he were elected again.”

Trump, meanwhile, insists we should pay no attention to that 922-page policy plan behind the curtain, claiming that he has “nothing to do” with it and has “no idea who is behind” it.

In reality, Project 2025, an initiative put together last year by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to plan for the next GOP administration, was shaped by longtime close allies of Trump. Detailed planning for a second Trump term agenda along these lines is very real, and though the Project 2025 initiative itself has seemingly fizzled out, other groups have picked up the slack.

Furthermore, many of Project 2025’s key proposals — to centralize presidential power, crack down on unauthorized immigrants, deprioritize fighting climate change, and eliminate the Department of Education — are fully and openly supported by Trump.

Yet Trump’s intentions are less clear on a vitally important issue where Project 2025 made some particularly extreme proposals: abortion.

The project’s plan called for using presidential power to aggressively restrict abortions in several ways. Trump, wary of these proposals’ unpopularity, has said during the campaign that he won’t support some of them. He also evidently feels hesitant to outright disavow the social conservatives who have long been a key part of his base.

Harris, meanwhile, wants to associate Trump with the most extreme version of the conservative anti-abortion agenda. “Understand in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion ban,” she said at the debate. That isn’t strictly true, in that the project does not call for any explicit  ban, but it does include a proposal that some experts say could lead to a “backdoor abortion ban,” depending on how it is implemented. Furthermore, it is certainly true that anti-abortion activists got key appointments in Trump’s administration last time and expect to score such appointments again. 

At the moment, Trump is caught between his fear of electoral defeat if he backs social conservatives’ unpopular ideas and his desire to reward their loyalty to him and keep them by his side. That explains Trump’s delicate dance in which he says Project 2025 has some “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” ideas but never quite specifies what those bad ideas are, since doing so might make his supporters angry. 

If he wins, the question will be whether Trump feels freed up to reward his longtime allies with control over federal abortion policy, much as he did last time around when he appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.

Project 2025 has a sweeping set of proposals designed to restrict abortion in the United States

While Trump may not have been personally involved in Project 2025, much of it was clearly written in the hope of appealing to him. The group’s key policy document conspicuously avoids taking sides on key issues where Trump has broken with conservative dogma, like trade and the future of Social Security and Medicare. 

But the one issue where they really got out in front of Trump, it seems, is abortion. 

Project 2025’s policy plan was put together in the months after the Supreme Court achieved social conservatives’ long-held priority of overturning Roe v. Wade. The anti-abortion movement, though, does not want to stop with returning abortion policy to the states. It argues that abortion should be understood as the murder of unborn children, and it wants to use federal power to cut down further on abortions.

“Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, wrote in the foreword to Project 2025’s policy plan.

The plan recommends many anti-abortion policies, but three in particular stand out.

1) Enforcing the Comstock Act: Project 2025 calls for prosecuting “providers and distributors of abortion pills that use the mail,” via an old anti-obscenity law called the Comstock Act — a law that, my colleague Ian Millhiser writes, “has not been seriously enforced for nearly a century.”

Reproductive rights activists have warned, with alarm, that the Comstock Act could be used to enforce “a backdoor abortion ban” nationally. That’s because the very broad law says it’s illegal to send not only any pill, but any “thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion” through the mail or across state lines in interstate commerce. If it is seriously enforced, they argue, it would be effectively illegal to send abortion clinics basic supplies.

“If the Comstock Act were being enforced, it would preempt state laws that protect abortion rights, and states that have ballot initiatives, and states that have other protective legislation,” UC Davis law professor Mary Ziegler told Mother Jones in April.

Some anti-abortion activists have a similar interpretation. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan Mitchell, an influential conservative lawyer (who represented Trump in one legal proceeding), told the New York Times in February. But, he added, “the extent to which that’s done will depend on whether the president wants to take the political heat and whether the attorney general or the secretary of Health and Human Services are on board.”

2) Banning the abortion pill mifepristone: Asserting that “abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” Project 2025 calls for revoking FDA approval of the pill mifepristone, which is used in about half of US abortions. 

Because mifepristone has been under legal challenge, many abortion providers have prepared for such a ban and said they can switch to a different regimen requiring only the drug misoprostol. But they fear that drug would become the next target of anti-abortion activists, as NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin wrote earlier this year.

3) Demanding data from states on who is getting abortions: Complaining that liberal states are “sanctuaries for abortion tourism” (because red state residents can travel there for the procedure), Project 2025 says that HHS needs to ensure every state reports to the feds “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders,” including data such as “the mother’s state of residence.” The document recommends cutting federal funds to states if they refuse to provide this data.

Trump just can’t seem to quit anti-abortion activists

It’s those above proposals from Project 2025 that have proved so politically inconvenient for Trump during this campaign. He has sounded the refrain that he merely wants to let states decide on abortion policy, saying “the federal government should have nothing to do with this issue.” But he also constantly promises that new details on his intentions for federal policy are forthcoming — details that somehow never arrive.

Asked last month about enforcing the Comstock Act, Trump seemed to say he wouldn’t, but he did hedge a bit: “No, we will be discussing specifics of it, but generally speaking, no.” On banning mifepristone, the Trump campaign’s line is that the Supreme Court has settled the matter — which makes no sense because the court merely ruled on a procedural issue.

So Trump is claiming women will have nothing to fear from his abortion policies if he wins. But there are many reasons to wonder whether to believe him.

The reality is that some of Trump’s most important political allies are people deeply committed to restricting abortion in the United States. Take, for instance, his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance. In 2022, Vance called for enforcing the Comstock Act and said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”

Trump’s key appointees who’d be tasked with setting federal policy in his second term would also likely include many committed social conservatives. Notably, the chapters of Project 2025 that touch on abortion were written by two important Trump administration officials: Roger Severino, who served in the Department of Health and Human Services, and Gene Hamilton, who served in the Justice Department (and is a longtime close ally of Trump policy guru Stephen Miller).

Trump “had the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policies of any administration in history,” Severino told the New York Times in February. “That track record is the best evidence, I think, you could have of what a second term might look like if Trump wins.”

There’s a classic political saying, “Dance with the one that brung ya,” explaining why politicians feel compelled to stick with their loyal supporters. While Trump may be currently trying to strike a more moderate tone on abortion, he is a transactional person and he knows that social conservatives are among his most important and loyal supporters. 

That was demonstrated at the end of August: After several days in which Trump had taken heat from anti-abortion groups, he announced that, on a Florida abortion ballot measure, he’d stand with them.