What will Donald Trump do if he is reelected to a second term as president in November?
So far, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 has drawn the most attention. But while Heritage has endorsed Trump, he hasn’t endorsed Heritage’s 900-plus page magnum opus.
Trump isn’t known as a policy guy. He was nominated in 2020 by a Republican Party that offered no party platform that year. But there are two additional places you can look to find policies that have earned Trump’s approval:
- His own campaign website may be the best place to look for “Agenda 47,” even though it was created for the GOP primaries, not the November showdown with Joe Biden.
- The website of the Center for Renewing America, which was founded by Russell Vought, a self-confessed Christian nationalist and graduate of evangelical Wheaton College who served on Trump’s White House cabinet.
Project 2025, which calls for replacing tens of thousands of veteran civil servants with Trump loyalists, has generated the greatest attention and criticism, most recently from Democrats in Congress who announced a new Stop Project 2025 Task Force.
Russ Vought,, 2019 (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
The task force was praised by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which called Project 2025 “an existential threat to American democracy,” citing plans for “banning abortion and restricting birth control access, rolling back LGBTQ rights and erasing marriage equality, eliminating the Department of Education and diverting public funds to private religious schools, and redefining religious freedom as a license to discriminate.”
Vought’s Center for Renewing America says it works “For God. For Country. For Community.” Its mission is “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions and history, where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities.”
The center’s 2023 annual report highlights key accomplishments, saying, “In just three short years since our founding, the center has become the tip of the America First spear in some of the biggest fights in Washington.” Among victories it cited:
- Replacing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy with evangelical Christian and Trump loyalist Mike Johnson
- “Combatting and exposing weaponization of America’s national security apparatus, with an emphasis on the Federal Bureau of Investigation”
- Changing “the narrative around how conservatives think about our involvement in Ukraine and how Congress approaches aid requests from President Biden”
- “Fighting the porn epidemic”
- And “Standing by Jeffrey Clark,” who served in the Trump administration and now works for Vought’s Center. Clark, who has been indicted for seeking to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss, famously attempted to use the Department of Justice to keep Trump in office.
Vought, who recently was profiled by the Washington Post, believes Democrats have weaponized government against Trump-loving conservatives and plans to weaponize against them if Trump returns to office.
“We are living in a post-constitutional time,” he said. Trump has asked Vought to prepare a GOP party platform for this year’s national convention in Milwaukee.
Vought’s plans worry Marc Short, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff. Short told the Post Vought has embraced the “tactics of growing government and using the levers of power in the federal bureaucracy to fight our political opponents.”
The Trump campaign’s “Agenda 47” probably hews closest to Trump’s priorities, even though nobody, including Trump, gives it much attention, according to Post national columnist Philip Bump, whose article provides a helpful search tool allowing anyone to search for specific words within Agenda 47.
“Many parts of Agenda 47 cater to evangelicals.”
Many parts of Agenda 47 cater to evangelicals, who helped Trump win in 2016 and are essential again in 2024. Among the issues are opposition to all things “woke,” support for home-schooling families, and “the left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children.”
“President Trump’s Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity” says Trump “will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”
Trump also has his sights on dismantling higher education: “We will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments… and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy,” the Post reported of the conservative plan.
Agenda 47’s take on public education mirrors that of Religious Right activists who seek to dismantle public education: “The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways, it is resembling an established new religion. Can’t let that happen.”
“We will teach students to love their country, not to hate their country like they’re taught right now,” and “we will support bringing back prayer to our schools.”
Agenda 47 also has a policy on “Preventing World War III”: “It’s the collapse of the nuclear family and fertility rates, like nobody can believe is happening. It’s the Marxists who would have us become a godless nation worshipping at the altar of race, and gender, and environment. And it’s the globalist class that has made us totally dependent on China and other foreign countries that basically hate us.”
But Agenda 47 is silent on abortion and IVF.
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