Tonight, we're going to talk about the rarest of birds in the Washington ecosystem, a policy report that someone actually read.

The Heritage Foundation, formerly a think tank, now something closer akin to the MAGA movement's waiting room, has a fairly revolutionary vision for America, and Donald Trump, Heritage found someone who would readily take through its views.

Trump made a lot of noise about the irrelevance of Project 2025 when he was campaigning, but the proof of the pudding is in the implementation.

His administration has taken many of Project 2025's ideas and is poised to take even more.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Leigh Ann Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent for Puck, Laura Barron-Lopez is a White House correspondent for MSNOW, and David Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America.

Thank you all for joining me.

I hope you've had good holidays so far.

David, you wrote this book, very nice looking book.

We've exerpted it.

I want to start, let's start at the near the beginning of Project 2025.

Give us the overview.

What did its authors -- and you could talk about the authors a little bit, if you want.

What do the ex authors want executive branch to do?

DAVID GRAHAM, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So, a lot of these authors came from the first Trump administration and they had this real frustration that Trump hadn't gotten nearly as much done as they wanted, but I think he kind of fired their imaginations.

So, their idea was to put together this vision for sort of maximalist executive power.

They would take power from Congress, sort of undermine the administrative state and use all this to establish a very socially conservative vision of America.

They talk about a biblically based vision of the family.

So, it's a plan to overhaul the way government works, and then from there to overhaul what American society looks like writ large.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

So, talk a little bit about some of the main areas of focus then I'm going to ask our panel to go into some of those areas in a little bit more depth.

DAVID GRAHAM: Yes.

I think a couple key things.

One of them is immigration, which, of course, has been a priority for Trump for a long time.

And you see them pushing beyond, you know, it's not just closing the border.

It's not just reducing illegal immigration.

It's also cracking down on visas.

It's denaturalizing people, really sort of closing off the U.S.

in many ways.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Reversing immigrate - - reversing the effect of immigration, not simply slowing immigration.

DAVID GRAHAM: Exactly, right.

You see them, you know, putting a lot of power to the president.

So, trying to take over independent agencies, taking power from Congress about a lot of these things, creating this, you know, president without checks and balances.

Connected to that, you see sidelining Congress, you know, taking these powers, impoundment, for example.

So, the president can kind of do whatever he wants.

And then, finally, you have this very traditionalist vision of how society should work.

So, you know, men as breadwinners, women at home, taking care of children, abortion banned, this kind of, you know, pro-natalist vision that we've heard from people like J.D.

Vance as well.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Who are the most important people in the making of Project 2025?

DAVID GRAHAM: I think the most important one really is Russell Vought.

He's kind of the intellectual architect of this, had the plan for how government could do the things that they wanted to do, head of Office of the Office of Management budget in Trump's first term, and again now, JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

And why did Trump - - any one of you could answer this question actually.

Why did Trump disavow 2025 and then immediately hire its author or main author to run one of the most important functions of his government, how it's managed and budgeted?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, White House Correspondent, MSNOW: I mean, because it was incredibly unpopular during the campaign trail.

And there was polling that showed that, and that voters weren't necessarily aligned with this.

And so even Susie Wiles at the time, and Chris LaCivita -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The chief of staff.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: -- the chief of -- now the chief of staff, one of his campaign managers, said the demise of Project 2025 could not come soon enough, and people associated with it should not claim to be associated with the campaign.

Of course, that was false at the time, that was not true, and more than just Russell Vought, a number of other authors of Project 2025 work inside of the government, including at various departments.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

What I'm getting at is was it conscious gaslighting of the public, or did they actually not want anything to do with Project 2025?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: It was conscious gaslighting.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Definitely conscious gaslighting.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Definitely conscious gaslighting.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I took a vote around the panel, as Congress does.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: I mean, Project 2025 also created an entire list of some 10,000 people that were going to be Trump loyalists that could then staff the government and be across the government and do exactly what the president wants.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The reason I ask about the gaslighting is that I'm impressed that they had the discipline to keep to that one message for several months that we don't know what 2025 is and we've never heard of it and we don't like it, if we had heard of it, PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: I mean, look, you know, if you were to fact check what you just played with Donald Trump, that's one where he might actually pass muster.

He probably didn't read it, right.

This is a lot of people who are imputing their own agendas onto Trump's presidency that he's okay with, right?

He actually goes along with all of these things.

Most of these things, a lot of these things, they suit his ideas.

But this is a remarkable thing in history, Jeff, if you think about it.

This is the only time really, if you don't count Grover Cleveland, in which a president had a four-year break after having been president, experienced what it was like, to try to figure out, okay, if I have a chance to do it again, what would I do differently?

Or the people around him are figuring that out, right?

And they came up with this plan that really has been a blueprint.

Every other second term president had to go immediately from their reelect into the second term, never a chance to pause, think through what the plan might be.

That's why they've been more effective at accomplishing a lot of these goals.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I'll give you $10,000 if you tell me what Grover Cleveland did in his interregnum.

PETER BAKER: Well, I think he got married actually, didn't he?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's not going to get you $10,000.

PETER BAKER: He did not have a Project 18 -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I count Grover Cleveland, by the way.

You say don't discount Grover Cleveland, but we all take Grover Cleveland very seriously.

PETER BAKER: This Project 1892 was very, very -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Project 1892.

So, Laura, let me go to the immigration questions.

Discuss its -- discuss this plan's immigration vision, how much it aligns with what we're seeing right now, and how far down the road it is in implementation.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: It aligns very closely with what was laid out in project 2025, including kind of this meshing of the -- and melding and bringing together of the Customs and Border Protection agents and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE agents.

And so bringing Border Patrol into the interior and having them more involved in rounding up immigrants was one of the visions of Project 2025.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Just so people understand, the Border Patrol literally stays within how many -- it's meant to stay within -- previously meant to stay within how many miles of the actual border.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Operating within a hundred miles or so at the border.

And, yes, oftentimes, they are just right there along the border, in those border towns.

They operate very differently than ICE agents.

They are used to dealing much more with cartels and violent criminals and operating, you know, along the border and outside of the border and that so forth, like that.

But ICE agents actually operate very differently.

They tend to take their time to figure out if there is a criminal or to figure out what kind of targets they want to go and arrest inside the interior of the United States, in U.S.

cities.

And we've seen that all go by the wayside where there are mass roundups.

There are people who have no criminal convictions and no history of criminal convictions being rounded up.

But I recently spoke to Paul Dans, who was the director of Project 2025 at the time, and he was pushed to the side and kind of took -- was the fall and scapegoat during the campaign cycle when they wanted to distance himself from it.

And he told me that immigration was the one reason that Trump got elected and it was one of the main - - if not the main directives of Project 2025.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And it's one of the reasons that Joe Biden came in for so much criticism right from middle of the road Americans.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: But he also said that he -- one of the other visions that to me is key here and we're starting to see heading more into the New Year is the attack and the targeting of legal immigration.

And he said that they want to see that go down to a very, quote, light drip, where that means almost no legal immigration is allowed into the U.S.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A light drip.

Leigh Ann, on Congress, the Republicans in Congress seem to -- whether or not they meant to go along with this vision, they do go along with this vision.

They have stopped providing oversight of the executive branch.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL, Chief Washington Correspondent, Puck: Yes.

I mean, they're trying to get a little bit back now but, yes.

I mean, Congress is complicit in give -- handing over their power to the executive branch.

And to be, you know, fair to Project 2025, they wrote a line about Congress that given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most members of Congress have chosen the latter, so being vulnerable and famous.

So, this is -- I mean, they understood the weakness of Congress and how Congress -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's almost like they understood the psychological weakness of Congress people.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: And how it operates now, how getting on, you know, with influencers or on cable news or fundraising or most members of Congress' priorities now.

And Congress has been handing over a lot of their power over the decades.

Every president wants to abolish Congress essentially.

But they saw this weakness and they -- so their plan was because Congress isn't doing their job anyway, the president needs to step in through executive orders, through impoundment, as far as appropriations are concerned, and take back some control of the, quote, administrative state, the federal government.

And Congress has even now, when this president is more effective at it than many other presidents previously, are letting them do this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, David, on this question about Congress, is this an evolutionary change or a revolutionary change?

It seems from what Leigh Ann is saying that like they were moving in this -- I mean, we all make the joke about everybody in Congress is just trying out to be a podcaster at this point.

But how revolutionary is this in historical terms?

DAVID GRAHAM: Yes.

I mean, I think that it's exactly right.

They have been -- you know, this is a -- from an understanding of Congress, Russell Vought spent time in both the Senate and the House.

He knew where of he spoke and -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: As a staff.

DAVID GRAHAM: Right, as a staff member.

And, you know, I think this is an evolution that has been happening of Congress giving it up.

But I think the result is going to be more revolutionary.

If we look at, for example, control of the administrative state, if we look at the way the Supreme Court seems poised to hand over control of, you know, independent regulatory agencies to the White House, we're looking at a really huge shift in the way the government relates to individual citizens and in Congress giving up that power.

And I think that's more than just a kind of, you know, gradual de-empowerment of Congress.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Peter, talk about -- first, talk about the Grover Cleveland administration even more.

But when you finish with that, talk about the way the Republicans act now in Congress versus the way they acted or led in the Nixon administration, in the latter days of the Nixon administration.

PETER BAKER: Yes.

Well, I would say, by the way, that Grover Cleveland's second term was hobbled by an economic repression.

And that's exactly what this administration is worried about.

So, there is some possible parallel there.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Just don't encourage it.

He's just going to start on the Benjamin Harrison presidency -- PETER BAKER: Fine, moving forward to the 70s, how are Republicans -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, the 1970s, please.

PETER BAKER: To David's point, look, this is obviously an evolution, but it's sort of like what Hemingway say.

It's gradual than sudden, right?

We've been moving this direction and then suddenly this last year, you might say, we kind of fell off the cliff of Congressional influence in Washington.

And it's fascinating to see a president, first time I've seen it in his first year in office, basically try to do nothing legislatively.

He did his big tax bill, obviously.

That was necessary to keep the tax cuts that he had passed in his first term going and he threw other policy into it.

But broadly speaking, he didn't go to Congress say, this is my one chance to really do something big and permanently, like Obamacare, like no child left behind, like other things -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A signature legislative -- PETER BAKER: A signature legislative thing.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: -- as we would say.

PETER BAKER: And he doesn't seem to have much of a plan for any further, plans that way, because he does want to use executive power.

But the danger in that is that the second the next president comes in, if it's a Democrat, for instance, they can simply say, I now hereby overturn all the executive orders last guy did.

Now, that doesn't mean it would change overnight because a lot of things he's done have real lasting impact, but it's not permanent the way legislation is.

And the Republicans in Congress, to your point, are willing to let that happen and willing to be quiescent at the very least until the primary filing deadlines when they see whether or not he takes aim at them.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, are tariffs in 2025 or is tariffs Trump's own preoccupation?

DAVID GRAHAM: Tariffs is one of these weird places where you can see the kind of cleavages in the conservative movement, so whereas in most of Project 2025, there is a clear view.

On tariffs, there's a debate within mandate for leadership, the 900-page document, between a sort of Peter Navarro, current White House aide and sort of Trump acolyte on tariffs, and Trump's Svengali on tariffs, and a more free market conservative vision.

And I think what you see is places like the Heritage Foundation that still retain that older school conservative, you know, free trade attitude, you know, accommodating themselves, knowing, look, if Trump is the president, we're going to have tariffs and we just need to sort of find a way to cope with that in order to get the other particularly socially conservative goals we have.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Put it this way, if the president they were serving didn't have strong feelings on tariffs, what would 2025 have said?

It would've been more traditional Republican?

DAVID GRAHAM: Yes, it would be closer to the old school.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Let's talk about Russell Vought, who I think maybe one -- along with Stephen Miller, maybe the most quietly or semi-quietly influential person in the administration.

And he had very, very -- he has very pronounced views about government itself.

I want you to listen to one famous quote that he was caught saying in a fit of candor.

RUSSELL VOUGHT, Director, Office of Management and Budget: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.

We want -- when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are so -- they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

We want to put them in trauma.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Talk about the vision there, the impetus behind that description of what he wants a federal bureaucracy to look like.

PETER BAKER: Yes.

Well, first of all, cruelty is the point, right?

I mean, you know, every president of the modern era has felt some frustration with the federal bureaucracy, Republican and Democrat.

They find themselves hamstrung by the rules and the red tape and the resistance and the inertia.

But this is the first one who comes in waging war on it.

And Russ Vought is his field marshal, right?

It is not just that the bureaucrats need to be reformed.

It's that they are the enemy, they are evil.

They need to be made into villains.

Because, if nothing else, it provides an excuse if things don't get done and it allows Trump to have an enemy.

Trump plays best politically when he has somebody to go after.

He likes the fight.

This is why COVID was a problem for him.

COVID wasn't an enemy he could go after.

The deep state -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Oh, that's why he called it a -- he -- a lot of time blaming the Chinese.

PETER BAKER: Eventually China, because he couldn't think of some other way to attack it, right?

And Russ Vought has given voice to this instinct of Trump's, which is to find an enemy.

And the enemy is the people who work for the federal government.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And also trying to get rid of all these thousands of federal workers is trying to get rid of any kind of check and balance that may have existed.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's another - - like Congress, it's another -- LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: It's another check, another potential check to the president, which is, you know, including career lawyers who work across these agencies who say, no, actually, if you attempt to do this policy change you want to do, that may be illegal.

And now there's no one doing that, including at the Justice Department, which is not independent anymore, and at other key agencies.

I mean, I have talked to federal government workers who are still inside who, yes, Russell Vought was effective.

They are not happy about going to work.

They are pretty miserable.

They're depressed.

The morale is low.

And many are afraid that they're going to be fired or forced into layoff in retirement come next year because they expect more will be happening across the federal.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: In addition to expanding the executive branch or part of that plan for Russ Vought is also making OMB the agency he oversees much more powerful, having much more heavy hand throughout the administration and weakening GAO, which is the kind of the oversight wing, the legislative part.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's the accountability office.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes, for Congress, and Congress relies on the GAO.

And they think that there's a huge, disproportionate like focus on GAO and they're trying to completely destroy that.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: All the inspector generals are gone, yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Well, David, one thing I don't understand, I understand why if you're a fast-moving executive, you want to be disinhibited.

You want the chains off you in terms of the bureaucracy.

You want to be able to do things you want to do.

And there are plenty of bureaucrats in the federal government, and some people do actually slow things down.

I don't understand -- and maybe you can explain it in the context of 2025, I don't understand why the government has fired so many line scientists, for instance, people who are not doing bureaucracy, they're actually looking for Ebola.

They're actually trying to cure cancer.

What do they have to do with this and how does that fit into the overall vision?

DAVID GRAHAM: Well, I think there's a couple things.

One of them is a kind of opposition to scientific research from the government, skepticism of climate change.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wait, stop.

Number one doesn't make much sense to my mind.

DAVID GRAHAM: Sure.

I mean, I think there's a sense that, they're often pursuing very liberal goals.

It's climate change, it's gender ideology, as they term it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

But the mass of the research is just done on diseases that kill large numbers of Americans.

Red, blue state doesn't matter.

DAVID GRAHAM: There's an entire -- I mean, this is an interesting dovetail with the MAHA agenda, which is skeptical of that research.

It sees it as in bed with big pharma pushing in the wrong direction.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: MAHA, for those of you who don't know, it's Make America Healthy Again.

That's the RFK, whatever, program.

DAVID GRAHAM: Right.

And so they want some of these things to be private.

They want some of these things to be done outside of government.

Some of them, they just don't want them done at all.

And they want the government to be smaller.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Meanwhile, measles and whooping cough cases are up across the country.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

David, I want to read something that you've wrote about the cultural aspects of this.

Quote, with a little imagination, we can glimpse the America that Project 2025 proposes.

It is an invalidly Christian nation, but following a very specific narrow strain of Christianity.

In many ways, it resembles 1950s, while fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families.

At school, students are in old fashioned values and lessons, abortion is illegal, vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in healthcare.

The government is slow to police racial discrimination in all, but its most blatant expressions.

Trans and LGBTQ people exist.

They always have, but are encouraged to remain closeted.

How explicit is this in the framework of the 900 pages?

DAVID GRAHAM: Extremely.

I mean, basically, every one of those things I could point you to a page where that comes from.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

DAVID GRAHAM: This is the vision they want, and they're very clear about it.

They're not -- you know, I think what's interesting is there have been, you know, claims about hidden agendas for many years.

There's no hidden agenda here.

They're very clear about what they want.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: They actually published the agenda.

DAVID GRAHAM: They put it online, you know, in 2023 for everyone to read.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

One more question on that, because I'm interested in -- and this is -- I'm interested in where Trump's inclinations diverge from 2025's inclinations.

I mean, Trump seems to be historically fine with at least the Ls and the Gs and the Bs, maybe not the Ts.

We see that.

But it's -- this is not a person in Donald Trump who would overturn marriage equality, is it?

I mean, I get that the Heritage people might if they had their (INAUDIBLE).

DAVID GRAHAM: I think what they've found is common cause on this fear of wokeness, this idea that the cultural left is taking things over.

And so you start by knocking out DEI programs and wokeness.

But pretty quickly you're getting into things like civil rights enforcement, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

All of these things become very connected for the people of his heart.

And I think, you know, for Trump, he's getting what he wants and if they want to go further, it's not a huge problem for him.

He's having to let them have their run.