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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. David Graham, Atlantic magazine national politics staff writer, is with us as we approach the 100th day of the Trump administration next Tuesday. David has a new book called The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. One thing David can boast, he read the whole thing, which not many people can say about the 900-page blueprint for this second Trump term that they hoped for that came out last year. Spoiler alert, David broke out a piece of the book for an article in The Atlantic that says the top goal of Project 2025 is still to come. Let's see what that is and how much he thinks they're already reshaping America as the book's subtitle says. David, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

David Graham: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: As you note, Project 2025 identifies four goals that their specific policies flow from. Would you like to recite the list?

David Graham: Yes, the first one is to restore the family as the heart of American life. I'm paraphrasing a little bit here. The second one is to dismantle the deep state and return power to the people. The third one is to secure the borders and the bounty for America. The fourth one is to restore the blessings of liberty for all Americans.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to that number one goal that you said may come next for Trump and affect all American lives, what was it like reading Project 2025 cover to cover? Some of our listeners may be wondering. You write that it was both more radical and more interesting than you expected. What was that experience like?

David Graham: I'd read bits and pieces during the campaign when I was looking for specific policy questions on things, but I hadn't read it all the way through. It's just so systematic. It's not the kind of wish list of policies that we see from think tanks and other political organizations. It is both a wish list of policies and a plan for achieving it. I think that plan is really radical. There's also just an interesting variety of facts. There are things in here that don't necessarily code as far-right or far-left or anything else. They're just agreements within the text. I think there's a lot of rich information to learn about the ideology driving the Republican Party and the administration right now.

Brian Lehrer: Did you avoid reading it before bed so you could get sleep or how did you read Project 2025 cover to cover?

David Graham: Mostly, just in a rush, trying to think about it all and put the parts together that weren't together. It occupied a lot of my mind for a few weeks.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Of those four goals, the top goal as you label it that is still to come is? Drumroll.

David Graham: Restoring the family.

Brian Lehrer: Why?

David Graham: This is, I think, the thing that is really deeply held for so many of these people. They are very religious and very conservative. Russell Vought, who's the architect and now leads the Office of Management and Budget, has said he doesn't view Christian nationalist as a pejorative. That is exactly how he would describe himself. They want to take over the government. They want to take over the executive branch. They want to accrue power for the President and they want to do a bunch of things.

All of those things, I think, are generally aimed around implementing this conservative vision of society where you have fathers who are breadwinners, mothers who are in the home taking care of children. You have many children in the home. They fit strict boy and girl-- It's blue and pink. The gender roles are strict. Abortion is illegal. Schools are certainly not conveying "wokeness." Ideally, they're pushing religious messaging. Trans people are literally written out of the language of government. That's the vision of society they want to implement.

Brian Lehrer: On Russell Vought acknowledging that he's a Christian nationalist, one of the quotes you pull from Project 2025, which he was an architect of, is an argument that the government should bolster organizations that "maintain a biblically-based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family." Why do they bring the Bible into it? Are they looking to impose one set of religious beliefs on everyone else as federal law?

David Graham: It's a little bit slippery. On the one hand, they say the US was founded as a Christian nation and that's what we need to return to. They also often talk about leading social services, for example, through religious groups that tends to be churches. They do make some allowances. For example, one idea that I think I could imagine having widespread support is that all workers should have a Sabbath. They should have time off. If they're not going to get that time off, employers should pay them time and a half because it's important for folks to be with their family and get that rest period. They phrase in this very religious way. They say, "The default would be Sunday, but we could allow other possibilities such as a Friday evening to Saturday evening Sabbath."

Brian Lehrer: The quotes you pull indicate they have a very specific idea of what a man's role should be and what a woman's role should be. We'll touch on each. For men, they write that the Health and Human Services Department should enlist churches and other faith-based organizations to "provide marriage and parenting guidance for low-income fathers that would 'affirm and teach' a biological and sociological understanding of what it means to be a father, not a gender-neutral parent." Take us there. What does that Project 2025 author think it means to be a father as opposed to a more generically good parent?

David Graham: I think they're very concerned about the idea that there is this gender-neutral vision in the world and that people think you can have two fathers or two mothers. They're skeptical of same-sex marriage. Although they don't talk about abolishing it necessarily, they say falsely, I believe, that it has a higher divorce rate. They're very concerned about what they say is gender ideology.

Anything that suggests anything other than a strict binary between male and female. They're also concerned about poverty. They're concerned about poverty and broken families. They think that when you have a single-parent situation, you're more likely-- and there's evidence for this that outcomes for children are not as good in many aspects. They put all these things together. They want to return to something more like maybe the traditional family that we imagined from the 1950s.

Brian Lehrer: It's not just about being heterosexual. You write, "In this vision, men are the breadwinners and women are mothers." This line from the book made me laugh, "Without women, there are no children and society cannot continue." David, there are no children without men either, or at least without sperm. Why did they even publish that line?

David Graham: [chuckles] It's interesting. The context of that line, they're concerned about the US government's efforts overseas pushing what they see as a gender-neutral ideology. They're worried that this has not only infected people in the US but that the US is now exporting this to foreign countries. They want to lift up this very traditional vision of motherhood. People talk about tradwife culture on TikTok, for example, or on Instagram. I think they're very in line with the idea of the tradwife who is at home, who wears a long dress and has lots of children while the father goes off to work and earn the money.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and one way their policy prescriptions in Project 2025 differ from more liberal policies for supporting families with kids, because everybody would say they want to support families with kids, is that the conservatives oppose universal daycare, which you say that many on the right see as encouraging women to work rather than stay home with the kids. That description, it goes all the way there, right? They want to literally get women out of the workforce and mostly limit their role to stay-at-home parent, correct?

David Graham: Yes. Yes, we saw JD Vance, who was not involved in this but is closely aligned with a lot of these people during the presidential campaign, saying that he opposed universal healthcare for exactly that reason. To be fair, there's a range of views within here. There are, for example, people who believe we should have childcare available at employers to allow people to have a closer bond with their children. There's also this prevailing idea, for example, of paying family members to provide health care in the home. Of course, that is likely to mean mothers or grandmothers more likely than anything else.

Brian Lehrer: Doesn't Usha Vance have a high-powered career?

David Graham: There are a lot of interesting tensions here between what the vision that Project 2025's authors lay out and their allies and what they actually live. Usha Vance is a great example. Roger Severino, who writes the chapter on Health and Human services, is married to a woman named Carrie Severino, who's a prominent lawyer in the conservative movement. Obviously, the White House. The chief of staff at the White House is Susie Wiles. Karoline Leavitt is the press secretary. There's a bunch of high-powered women in the administration. There does seem to be a double standard there.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite your questions and comments and personal stories about what David Graham from The Atlantic calls the top goal of Project 2025, which he writes that the Trump administration hasn't even gotten to yet, promoting these traditional families through federal policy. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Who supports any of this or opposes it or has a story about yourself that relates? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. We'll get to more as we go from his book. This is really just one thing in it, but this is what he broke out as an excerpt for The Atlantic magazine that's very provocative. The book is called The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.

We've been talking so far about how it may yet reshape America. We will get definitely to ways in which it already does. One of the policies that might flow from this promotion of traditional families is something that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said that they might give more transportation funding to different parts of the country based on marriage and birth rates. For people who haven't heard that before, you didn't mishear it. Transportation funding to different parts of the country based on marriage and birth rates. Now, as it happens, I asked for a reaction to that idea on yesterday's show from Janno Lieber, chair of the New York mass transit system, the MTA. Here's what he said. Spoiler alert, this ends with a joke.

Janno Lieber: Honestly, to me, that's a head scratcher. What we're trying to do is to provide service to the areas that are most dependent on mass transit, and that's New York, where transit is what makes New York possible. I always say, for New Yorkers, transit's like air and water. We need it to survive. I don't know why you give the money to Salt Lake City because they have bigger families even though they don't use transit. Although a member of my staff coined a funny phrase, calling what Duffy's proposing, "conception pricing." I kind of dug that and thought I'd share it.

Brian Lehrer: MTA Chair Janno Lieber here yesterday. David, are they serious about conception pricing?

David Graham: I was really shocked when I heard this idea from Sean Duffy and then immediately thought, "Well, I shouldn't be because it's so closely in line with so much of what's in Project 2025." I think there's two things I would point out about that. One is it comes from this very totalizing view of the federal government where they want to use every department of the government in a coercive way to make these things happen.

We don't think of the Transportation Department as a marriage-focused agency, but they do. They want everything to focus around that. The other is that approaching policy from that point of view is likely to-- You're going to make the rich richer and you're going to make the poor poorer. You're not assigning funding based on any sort of imperative. It's simply reward system. I don't think that leads to good policy.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer in Middlesex County in Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Hi there. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, and you?

Jennifer: Fine. Thank you. I just want to throw out there that while it sounds lovely, the idea of a mother stays home, sure. For some women, that'd be great. Who can afford this? It's magical thinking. The idea that all women should stay home and all men should go to work. Where is the salary that a man could go to work and support a family and live comfortably? It just doesn't happen. Hasn't happened since 1976.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer, thank you. Yes, so even without the gender roles debate, David, there's the idea of the single-earner household, which would take a lot of policy to bring back, no?

David Graham: That's right. They gesture at this. They say that they would like to have a situation where people can, in fact, support a family on one salary. They hope to bring back these great middle-class jobs where a father could do that. They don't really offer much specificity on how to make that happen. Although there's a desire to bring back manufacturing economics, I think there's a general hole in Project 2025. They would like to cut taxes. They have a debate over protectionism. I don't doubt that they would love to have a situation where fathers can't support a whole family, but I don't think they really explain how to get there.

Brian Lehrer: Did you see this proposal recently for a $5,000 baby bonus, I think they're calling it? $5,000 isn't going to go very far toward raising a kid.

David Graham: That's right. I did see that and that fits very much with the mindset, but you're right. I don't know a lot of people who would turn their nose up at $5,000, but the cost of raising a child is obviously a lot higher than that. That will cover a month or two of childcare in a lot of places.

Brian Lehrer: You do say along those lines that there are points of common ground between what you call the natalist right like Project 2025 and the crunchy left. Points of common ground like what?

David Graham: Well, the one that really jumps out at me is that they say that every expectant mother should have a doula, a birth coach, available to them. The idea of having childcare available at workplaces, I think, fits along a lot of liberal priorities. Although they phrase these things in ways that make people uncomfortable, I do think there is some common ground and room for agreement.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an ABC News article, "Trump administration looking at $5,000 baby bonus to incentivize public to have more children." CBS News, "Could a $5,000 baby bonus convince Americans to have more kids? Here's what the data show." CNN, "What would it take to actually spark a baby boom? Way more than a $5,000 baby bonus." That's the lead one that's out there right now as an actual proposal that's making all those network headlines. Not very much else, right?

David Graham: No, it's all very fluffy. They talk about the need to do this. Some people have discussed a motherhood medal, which is, again, maybe very nice but is not the thing that moves policy. If you want people to have more children, one thing you need to do is you need to have economic growth. That is not what the Trump administration's policies currently are providing.

Brian Lehrer: We have more calls on this to take. We have other aspects of Project 2025 to get to that are already being implemented in American policy. Obviously, we have a big one that has the initials D-O-G-E that David Graham from The Atlantic writes, actually works against some of these traditional family-oriented goals. David, I want to bring up the contradiction when we come back between policies like you've been describing and the notion of freedom that they seem to hang them all on. We'll get to that as well and more of your calls and texts. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with David Graham, Atlantic magazine national politics staff writer. As we approach the 100th day of the Trump administration next Tuesday, David has a new book called The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. He read the whole 900-plus-page book that they put out and wrote his own book based on it. We've been talking so far about what Project 2025 identifies as its number one goal, which is basically restoring a traditional notion of the American family.

As you describe in the book, Project 2025 grounds its prescriptions for America in the notion of freedom, but it seems so hypocritical. Conservatives claim to be the camp that's for freedom of the individual, right? That's why they oppose COVID lockdown despite the public health concerns. They oppose gun laws, all kinds of things. In this most fundamental area of human life, it looks like they want to restrict freedom.

They want government to make it harder for women especially to choose the work-life balance that they think works for them and their kids. They want to end people's freedom to identify on the gender spectrum based on how they experience themselves. They deride women who have made certain lifestyle choices as childless cat ladies and all that. How is this whole area of policy prescription consistent with the bedrock notion of freedom that they claim Project 2025 is grounded in?

David Graham: Well, I think they have a very different vision of that than what most people consider to be freedom. Kevin Roberts, who's the head of The Heritage Foundation, which convened this, writes in the report, "Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want but what we ought." I don't think that's the way most people think about what freedom or liberty is. They're really willing to use the coercive power of the state to achieve what they want.

I think that's one way that this is a break with traditional conservatism, a break with Reaganite conservatism is this belief in the coercive power of the state even when the goals are not that different from what we've seen from past Republicans. It's that belief in state power. I think that itself is rooted in this idea that we're at a crisis moment and saving America requires unusual measures that they haven't tried before.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text that also uses the word "contradict." "What about universal childcare, paid parental leave, comprehensive health care? All of their infrastructure policy stances ultimately contradict this." We talked about why they're opposed to universal childcare because that would incentivize women to work, but what about comprehensive health care? What about paid parental leave?

David Graham: You cited earlier where they talk about a biblically-based and social science-reinforced vision. I think when there's a conflict between what is biblically-based and what is social science-reinforced, the biblical basis is what wins out. There are places where it simply doesn't afford with their worldview. There is also traditional conservative opposition to universal healthcare. In Project 2025, they look at cutting back on Medicaid. They want to move Medicare more towards a privatization plan. Same for VA health care. Despite the willingness to use the state to push their agenda in some places, they also want to shrink what the government does for people and other ones.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener writes, "If the man is the sole earner, the woman is home working for free. No Social Security if they divorce before 10 years. If they divorce after 10 years, he only gets half of what he would. That's how Republicans honor motherhood." How would a Project 2025 author respond to that text?

David Graham: They don't believe that divorce should happen, I think, is a lot of it. Their vision is that families will stay together. They hope that the restructuring society they want will solve that problem. Social Security is an interesting mention there just to take that tangent because some authors pointed out that Social Security is a massive expenditure. If you want to balance the federal budget, you might want to cut entitlements. They don't actually go there, though. There are these places where I feel like they're a little bit wary of pushing into areas that might be too politically toxic.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with David Graham from The Atlantic. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. How's it going? I just wanted to say that this agenda is just boiling my blood. It is so radical that I hope that all the women wake up and vote all the men out. I'm sorry, guys. Men have to go. That's it.

Brian Lehrer: That's it. Lisa, thank you very much. Well, what about the women in Congress, the Republican women in Congress in particular? Have you gotten to interview them or have many women in Congress, who are obviously career women, embrace this definition of government-incentivized, stay-at-home mothers?

David Graham: They try to split the difference on it. They offer it as a choice that it should be available to people. I think a lot of Republican women push at least an aesthetic of traditional femininity. Of course, they are in Congress and they're here. All that said, Project 2025 wants to sideline Congress and accrue more power to the White House. All of that may be a little bit irrelevant if they're successful.

Brian Lehrer: Sandy in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sandy.

Sandy: Hi, how are you? The reason I called is because I'm just wondering whether the folks designing this new or this old family pattern are aware of the fact that this was a fascist project of the 1920s. In the case of Italy, the doctor who treated a miscarriage could go to jail with the woman if the local judge decided it was a deliberate act. The French came up with the notion of giving medals to families of seven to nine children and free trips and vacations for large families. The idea then, of course, was to replace the population that the First World War had decimated. Excuse me.

Of course, the Nazi policies are so well-known. There's no point repeating them. This business of "restoring the family" is a typical very far-right project. I just don't know how many Americans know any history outside of the popular stuff that comes over the media. It's not just that the left did this. There were countries in Latin America and Central America that still, of course, vilify and lock up women who had miscarriages. They're described as abortion. From the historian's point of view, what I'm listening to about the Christian right here is enough to make my back shiver.

Brian Lehrer: You are a historian, I gather, right?

Sandy: I'm a retired professor of history from CUNY, yes. I have written about this stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that historical perspective. Here's another one. Michael in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael Heller: Hello, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I'm Mike Heller. I'm the Democratic state representative from the 81st Assembly district.

Brian Lehrer: Okay.

Michael Heller: We're very much involved in trying to take Congress back in two years. We have some very specific targets actually being coordinated by the state committee. I have to say, when you try to think about this on a large basis, what they are trying to do is repeal everything that has happened since the New Deal. They want to erase the past 100 years of progress, of change, and revert us back to a pre-1930 world. Does that make sense?

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you very much. Let's ask our guest with David Graham from The Atlantic, author now of The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. Two interesting history calls, David. I wonder if you've been thinking at all about all this in historical context. The first one of the two, the actual retired history professor, was even putting it in the context of the Nazis.

David Graham: Yes, there are very strong similarities with early and mid-20th-century authoritarian movements, fascists, Nazis, the nationalism, the sense of national self-sufficiency, the obsession with manufacturing, and then the obsession with birth rates. I think those are all important comparisons.

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Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

David Graham: Yes, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: No, you go ahead.

David Graham: The second caller also, I think, is exactly right. They're very specific about places where they want to turn things back. They want to overturn the 1935 Supreme Court opinion that establishes independent agencies and means that things like the FCC and FEC are outside of the President's control. They want to abolish the Federal Reserve, which takes us back in 1913. They want to get rid of the social service as we know it, which takes us back to the 1880s. There's an attempt to slice back drastically the Great Society programs from the 1960s. I think the caller is exactly right about the ways in which this is trying to turn back the clock on American life.

Brian Lehrer: Some texts, "Republicans were not going back." Simple one-line text. Someone else, "I am non-binary born, a woman with no desire to ever birth a child. I work full-time and date women. All of this is making me question whether I have a place in this country anymore." Another one, "What does this movement think women should be doing after their children have grown if they have no career to pivot to? Just serve their husbands for the rest of their lives?" Do they have an answer to that question?

David Graham: They don't address that specifically in Project 2025, but I think we can take a clue from what JD Vance said during the presidential campaign when he said that "postmenopausal women" should be helping out on childcare and that should be their role.

Brian Lehrer: Pat in Somerset County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Pat.

Pat: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I'm calling because I feel that it isn't just they're trying to take over the country, but they are also splitting off Christianity. They try to base it in biblical terms, and yet what we have here in this country are many, many different Christianity lines in a sense. I come from one where they got on small boats and came from England because the government was selling them what kind of Christianity they should have and they decided not.

They didn't feel like being persecuted for it, so they came here, but that's happened over and over again. One of the problems that we're allowing now even in the news media is a kind of split between the notion of Christianity and everything else. While I no longer follow religion, I have deep roots in it. My feeling is that we're ceding a victory to them by letting them actually be the Christian-based thing.

They're defining what Christianity is in a new thing, which says that if you do this, that, and the other thing, you are against Christianity. That's certainly not true. This country actually put the business of not allowing a state religion in the Constitution because they were aware not so much that there were Jews and there were Muslims and that sort of thing in the country, but because there were many forms of Christianity. The minute we let that go, we've got real problems.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I'm glad you called. It's something we talk about a lot on this show. Just yesterday, for example, in the context of picking a new pope, we were mentioning how AOC and JD Vance both say their political values come from their Catholic values. I think that's a perfect example of what you were just saying, Pat.

Pat: Yes, I picked that up on your show yesterday and it caused me to think further. I'm 89 and I've been spending some time looking at my genealogy. I realized, these people, they risked a lot because they did not want the government to tell them what their religion was. Now, we have people who are pretending to be the main Christians who are actually trying to have a government that tells you what Christianity is. I think there should be much more talk about that because, in fact, there are a lot of Christians in the country who feel very strongly about a lot of different things. I don't think they want to let their faith be defined.

Brian Lehrer: Pat, thank you so much for your call. David, now, let's pull back to see how Project 2025 is already affecting Trump 2.0 policy. We focus so far on what you think could come next, but that's only one thing in your book. Where would you start?

David Graham: Well, I think they're moving well along their plans to take over the executive branch and accrue power for the President. We see them laying off civil servants, firing civil servants, closing departments. Closing the Department of Education is an idea straight out of Project 2025. All of these are designed to get more power. We see them implementing a series of executive orders, dozens of these things. Most of which seem to come directly from Project 2025.

You can see in the text where the idea is and you can see what the language is. All of these give the President more power. All of them also start to move along some of these fronts, whether that's executive orders on women in trans sports, for example, or trans women in sports. There's a lot of progress along these lines. Their goal is so broad that I think there's a lot they haven't done yet. There's attempts to change things at the Labor Department to reorient around the vision they want.

They want to slash nearly every environmental regulation you can imagine. There's a lot of progress still to be made from their point of view, but I think they've already reshaped the federal government in a way that is going to be permanent. Whenever the next president takes over, they're going to have a smaller and more sharper federal government. They're going to think about what we can do because you can't simply snap back to the way things were before this.

Brian Lehrer: You also write that the Project 2025 goal that Trump has been the most focused on so far, dismantling the administrative state, might ironically make it harder to carry out the pro-traditional family goals that the writers of Project 2025 want. Why is that?

David Graham: There are things they do want to use the government to do. They want to use it for this course of power. If you want to, for example, track outcomes of children based on their family structure, you need to have bureaucrats in place who know how to do that. If you want to expand the nuclear arsenal, which is another thing they want to do, you need to have nuclear scientists who are willing to work for the government and haven't been fired by Elon Musk.

There are a bunch of these places where implementing things does require a government. It requires a government of people who know what they're doing and who are not simply political loyalists or political hacks. Because Musk has proceeded so quickly and so sloppily, I think it's going to make it difficult in some places to do the things that they want to do even if they are managing to grab so much executive power.

Brian Lehrer: To wrap up, you said earlier that Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director and an architect of Project 2025, embraces the label "Christian nationalist." What do you think he would say if somebody suggested that he was a white male, heterosexual, cisgender, Christian nationalist?

David Graham: [laughs] I think he would embrace a lot of those things and he would say, "Cisgender is a false concept. There are two sexes. Gender is a term that we don't need to get into." I think a lot of those things, he would embrace. This is a radical plan. I don't think that the author's see it as anything other than radical. They're willing to accept and own that idea.

Brian Lehrer: David Graham is a national politics staff writer at The Atlantic. He's got a new book called The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. As we've been discussing mostly in this segment, he's also got a breakout article from the book in The Atlantic. He's got a few based on the book, but one of them is the number one goal of Project 2025 hasn't even started to be implemented yet, and that's the promotion of the traditional family through government. David, thank you for sharing all this with us.

David Graham: Oh, thank you.

 

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