Trump has publicly rejected Project 2025 as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has sought to tie him to some of the plan’s most extreme proposals. But in private, Vought said that those disavowals were merely “graduate-level politics.”
Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”
Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”
