The former director of the Project 2025 hard-right policy playbook has slammed the Trump campaign and accused two of Donald Trump’s top advisers of “malpractice.”
“Trump should be running like Secretariat at the Belmont, but instead it’s a race to the wire,” Paul Dans told the New York Times, referring to Secretariat’s 31-length win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes horse race.
Dans, a lawyer who for two years was head of the group that produced the controversial 900-page blueprint for a second Trump term, blamed Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles for the tightening race with Kamala Harris and said the former president should fire them.
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He claimed the Trump campaign helped push Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential contest but then wasn’t prepared for Harris’s candidacy.
The Trump campaign reportedly pushed for a June debate with Biden rather than leaving the first match-up until September. The timing meant that Democrats had plenty of time to select a new leader after the president’s disastrous performance and build a new campaign around Harris.
“They pushed Biden off the stage and they had no plans for Harris. That is on par with historic campaign malpractice,” said Dans.
Dans said he was blindsided when Trump disavowed Project 2025 after the Democratic Party targeted the Heritage Foundation-funded document outlining how a right-wing leadership would operate.
Concerned at the backlash, Trump said he didn’t know who was behind it and that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Dans said the move by Trump’s advisers to distance himself from the project helped fuel the Democrat attacks.
Referring to the GOP campaign team, he said: “They took the bait.”
Dans said LaCivita called Project 2025 a “pain in the ass” during the Republican National Convention.
But he told CNN that it was “fake news” that Trump was linked to the playbook to overhaul the federal government. He insisted to anchor Caitlin Collins that Project 2025 was not a liability for Trump.
“Well, he personally didn’t have anything to do with it,” Dans said.
“Sure, a lot of us have worked in the admin and came together, but this started long before he even announced a run for president,” he added. “Not everyone agrees with what’s in that book, but the book’s actually only a part of that plan.”
Dans told the Times he’s worried about losing GOP grassroots support as the campaign heads into the fall. “Who is going to work the polls? Who is going to fight for you? There’s no transition without winning and there’s no winning without those loyalists putting their boots on the ground,” he said.
Trump said in a statement to the Times: “Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita have done a great job, I could not be more happy with them.”
