Walz said it pretty well: you don't write a 900 page playbook without intending to use it.
The people who wrote it definitely hoped to use it. Political think tanks write up policy recommendations all the time. Trump hasn't written 900 pages in his entire life.
Again, I am NOT saying he has no connection to it. I don't know. My involvement in this was a reply to someone saying Project 2025 was Trump's tagline and I don't know any definition of tagline where your tagline can be something you never said and denied whenever asked.
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If you want my opinion, I do think Project 2025 was written independently of Trump's campaign and his knowledge of it is brief and his understanding of it is scant. It is a wishlist. They hope to get as much of it as possible enacted. But stuff like this is written all the time. It doesn't usually get so much public attention. Whether they'll be able to get Trump to work on a lot of it is very questionable, because he is very lazy. Whether they'll be able to get Congress to participate where necessary is even more questionable because they are mainly much more savvy politicians than Trump.
I actually don't know much about it. I have seen some of the things that people talked about, but I haven't read it and I haven't read a summary. The parts that depend on the Senate will not pass. The things that Trump can do through the Cabinet are possible, but I really feel like people don't understand the animal that Trump is. For some reason they think he is part Dick Cheney, but he is 0 parts Dick Cheney. The only thing he WANTS is to be vindicated as a winner, to be praised, and to stop the legal cases against himself. Trump has no political agenda whatsoever. He has no wishlist. No policy ambitions. He has very little idea how government could be improved. He wants credit for good things that happen and he wants no blame for bad things that happen. He has nothing he wants to accomplish, full stop. When a policy is suggested to him the only calculus in his head is whether or not it will win him praise. I think he has heard enough about Project 2025 on TV to be wary about it. He is deeply fearful of being called a bad President. So he'll have to check his gut on how much praise it gets him from how many people and how much blame it gets him from how many people. He is perfectly willing to sit there for 4 years and accomplish nothing at all. He's only going to make an effort for something that will help him personally. So wily people who get him working on it are probably going to have to break it in pieces and never call it what it is so he won't say, "Wait isn't that the thing that people said would make me bad?"