The more that Donald Trump and his campaign try to distance themselves from the authoritarian ambitions of Project 2025, the more revelations emerge about how tightly linked they are. Videos of the Project’s Presidential Administration Academy, recently obtained by the investigative reporting outlet ProPublica, provide even more damning evidence of how former Trump administration officials plan to carry out their agenda in a possible second term — and how abortion is one of their key targets.
Two of these videos in particular show that despite Trump’s gaslighting of the public that he has “moderated” on abortion, his Project 2025 allies are plotting multiple ways to attack it.
ProPublica published 14 previously secret videos produced by the Heritage Foundation to train future administration appointees. Two of these videos in particular show that despite Trump’s gaslighting of the public that he has “moderated” on abortion, his Project 2025 allies are plotting multiple ways to attack it.
Project 2025 lays out multiple anti-abortion plans, including revoking Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion medication mifepristone and using the Comstock Act as a means of instituting a national abortion ban by criminally prosecuting the sale of abortion pills through the mail. These videos show how Trump’s allies also plan to radically reshape the federal government to elevate anti-abortion activists and even equate abortion with murder.
In the section “Coalition Building,” Paul Teller, a former special assistant to the president and a senior aide in the Office of the Vice President, and Sarah Makin, a former deputy assistant to the president and former director of outreach in the Office of the Vice President, discuss the importance of building relationships with outside advocacy groups to advance the administration’s agenda, particularly on “pro-life” issues. Makin highlighted her role in planning a Rose Garden event during which Trump addressed the annual March for Life remotely. For optimal “optics,” she reached out to “an umbrella organization for pregnancy centers” to arrange a group of people to stand behind Trump. She lauded that “we had moms and their babies, babies who’d been rescued from abortion by these pregnancy centers come and stand behind the president.” (The comments start around the 11:15 mark.)
Pregnancy centers, sometimes called crisis pregnancy centers, are “facilities that represent themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics providing care for pregnant people but actually aim to dissuade people from accessing certain types of reproductive health care, including abortion care and even contraceptive options,” according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. They often use “false and misleading information, emotional manipulation, and delays.”
In the segment titled “Left-Wing Code Words and Language,” Katie Sullivan, former acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, and Bethany Kozma, deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, devoted more than 45 minutes to vilifying Democratic programs to combat climate change, promote equity and advance LGBTQ and reproductive rights as a diabolical leftist plot to control peoples’ lives, akin to rule under Stalin or Hitler. The pair discussed their experiences as “part of a coordinated effort in the Trump administration focused on trying to take back hijacked language and definitions across the United States government.”
The left, Kozma claimed, “got very creative years ago and started using different words to make abortion sound a little less like murder,” using instead phrases like sexual and reproductive health or reproductive rights. Sullivan added, “it’s incredible how the left is able to make killing children and babies a ‘pro’ movement.” Sullivan promised the video would teach trainees “how to identify the left’s progressive language,” “how to scrutinize career staff compositions for dangerous language,” and “how to combat their manipulative efforts, ensuring clarity of definition and conservative intention.” Sullivan also said that “you can do this in any role at any level of seniority.” Although Trump pandered to the anti-abortion movement during his first term, and stacked the Supreme Court with the conservative majority that overturned Roe, it’s clear he is now terrified that the Dobbs decision is an albatross around his neck. Although Trump pandered to the anti-abortion movement during his first term, and stacked the Supreme Court with the conservative majority that overturned Roe, it’s clear he is now terrified that the Dobbs decision is an albatross around his neck — and that all the attention on Project 2025 is a perpetual reminder of his allies’ radical goals. Last month, Trump clumsily tried to claim in a Truth Social post, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it” and “I have nothing to do with them.” But Trump can’t beat the truth with misdirection. At least 140 Project 2025 contributors, including those featured in the training videos, previously worked in his administration. In 2022, Trump flew to a Heritage Foundation conference on the organization’s private plane, with the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, to deliver a speech. In the speech, Trump said, “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” Rolling Stone reported that just before publishing his bogus denial on Truth Social, “Trump had been privately — and very bitterly — complaining about the abortion policies laid out in the lengthy Project 2025 manifesto, and trashing the Project 2025-linked ‘lunatics’ who keep demanding unpopular abortion bans and restrictions.” Trump is keenly aware of polling data showing that, as public awareness of Project 2025 has skyrocketed, voters have recoiled from it. Trump can try to run, but he can’t hide from his closest allies’ plans to turn America into a dystopia where abortion is criminalized, and his loyalists wield power to police and censor even any discussion of it at the highest levels of government.
Sarah Posner
Sarah Posner is the author of "Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind." 
