There’s One Project 2025 Goal That Trump Has Yet to Realize. It Won’t Be Easy.

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Right after President Donald Trump got elected in November, the Atlantic’s David Graham gave himself an assignment: Read all 922 pages of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” Cover to cover.

It’s been a good predictor of what Trump will try to do. But there’s one goal in here that Graham thinks hasn’t gotten enough attention. A goal he thinks this administration is likely to turn to next. It’s the very first goal: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life—and protect our children.”

On a recent episode of What Next, host Marry Harris spoke to Graham about how far Trump is willing to go to make families great again—and who will pay the price. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: You’ve said you can see how the Trump administration is beginning to lay a path to deliver on the “restoring American family” idea. Tell me a little bit about how you see that.

David Graham: Education is the place that I see it most. The framers of Project 2025 subscribe to this idea laid out by Milton Friedman, which is that the government should pay for education, but it shouldn’t necessarily provide that education. Or at the very least, parents should be able to choose that.

So really what this means is vouchers as a national system for private schools, for religious schools, whatever that may be. To make that happen, they want to reduce the strings that the federal government has on states to ensure equal opportunity, to ensure certain baselines of fairness in education. They want to reduce federal funding. And they just want to let states do what they want. They also talk a lot about things like parents’ rights.

I think the most notable sign that gender was important to this administration came on Day 1, when Donald Trump signed this executive order asserting that there are only two genders and that they’re immutable. We’ve also seen the executive orders about trans people in the military. You’ve written that basically none of this traditional family-forward stuff works without first the elimination of the idea of trans rights. Can you explain why?

Trans rights is important for unifying a lot of people behind this project. It’s kind of the tip of the spear. They say, “Well, here is this example of gender ideology.” They choose something that is not as popular as, say, same-sex marriage. And so you start to use this as a way to talk about places where “woke” ideology is a problem. You use it to take apart equal opportunity protections. And that allows you to start dismantling a lot of these other protections that are broader.

For the Project 2025 people, this is a matter of religious conviction. And for Trump, it’s a matter of political convenience.

Can we talk about some of the individual policies that are laid out in the Project 2025 document? Some of them are aimed at making getting married more advantageous and making having lots of kids easier. How would that work?

The first thing is they want to reorient the Labor Department’s collection of data. The Labor Department keeps many of the important government statistics. They want that to be reoriented around family structure, so they want to keep better data on all these things.

The problem is that so often when they talk about wanting to do more research in Project 2025, they are starting with a clear goal. They know what the conclusion is they want, and they’re designing research to do that. One example of this is they talk about research into the harms of abortion. It sounds like they know what they want the research to say; they’re just looking to figure out what numbers they can get to bolster that.

Once they have the data, how does Project 2025 envision using the money of the federal government as a way to nudge people toward what they want them to do?

They want to make benefits more advantageous for people who are in married relationships. They also want to push federal money through religious organizations that will push parenthood, fatherhood in particular. Rather than secular programs doing these things, they would use faith-based initiatives. Those faith-based initiatives would focus on, as they say, “a biblically based social science reinforced definition of marriage and family,” so that anybody who is getting public benefits is going to come through these religious programs, and they are going to be preached at about the benefits of those.

Do we know how that’s worked out in the past, given that some of this has been going on for a while?

You don’t have to look very much further than the rhetoric from Project 2025 about how bad things are to see that it has not been successful. Another example of this is that there’s a real focus on abstinence-only education, which was such a cause for the right in the Bush years and was a total flop.

One of the most interesting and important things that you highlight is that the authors of Project 2025 don’t seem to agree on what their goals are in some ways. There are contradictory things in here, which means we’re not sure where this lands, but that also we’re going to see friction over the coming years as this is used as a blueprint for whatever happens. Do you want to lay out some of those contradictions? 

The thing that sticks out to me is child care. You have, on the one hand, some people saying, “Child care should be provided at work locations so the people can be closer to their children; we have data that shows there’s better bonding and there’s better outcomes.” On the other hand, you have folks saying, “No, what we need to do is provide money to family members, most likely mothers or grandmothers”—some sort of maternal figure, although it’s not always explicit—“to provide child care in the home, because we just don’t want to be sending kids to day care. We want them to be at home, because that encourages the kind of biblically based family and value promotion that we think is really important.”

If Donald Trump moves forward with Project 2025 when it comes to the family, in the same way that he’s moved forward with Project 2025 when it comes to the economy, what do you think the United States will look like in five years? 

In a lot of ways, it does look something like the ’50s. You have trans people driven underground. You can nudge mothers out of the workforce. You can orient things around male breadwinners. You can push toward private schools, and you can disempower public schools. You will get more de facto segregation if you have less federal oversight on some of these things. So you’re moving backward on all of them.

When you say that aloud, do you kind of think, Am I nuts here? Do you start to doubt yourself? Because that would be a massive change. 

I don’t know. When I started this project, I thought that there were a lot of things about Project 2025 that were overstated. And there were things that were misstated about Project 2025, but I came to appreciate the real radicalism at its heart through reading all of it. It does sound crazy to say, but it’s what they’re pushing for, and they want to get as far as they can on it.

How are you going to know that this push by conservatives to retraditionalize, for lack of a better word, gender roles is working?

One thing the right has become very good at is taking things really slowly. That’s the way they approached loosening gun laws and overturning Roe. And so we have this plan that tells us what they want to do, but they see this as a project that stretches well beyond a Trump administration. This is a plan that is meant to last for decades. And they think they have a unique moment to change the federal government right now in ways that will enable that down the line. We will not know for a long time how successful they are.

The women who are going to be most affected most immediately are the poorest. What I suspect is that there are going to be cuts to public assistance programs. Any changes in encouragement of fatherhood, if that works, would only work very slowly.