JD Vance embraced Project 2025 before MAGA Republicans tried distancing themselves from it

JD Vance, theOhio U.S. senator named former PresidentDonald Trump’svice-presidential pick on Monday, has long been a proponent of Project 2025, a controversial policy framework devised by the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation. His support for its policies, which occurred well before recent attempts by MAGARepublicans to distance themselves from the project, underlines Vance’s commitment to a far-right vision for America’s future that includes anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry.

Related: What is Project 2025 and what does it mean for LGBTQ+ Americans?

Vance’s support for Project 2025 has been evident in his public statements and affiliations. At a Heritage Foundation leadership summit, he expressed gratitude for the organization’s “incredible work on conservative policy,” highlighting his alignment with the project’s radical goals, according to Newsweek. These goals include restructuring the federal government and ensuring its officials are loyal to the president. Vance remarked, “We are gonna, hopefully in 2024, take back the White House, and this organization is gonna play a major role in helping us figure out how to govern at the White House, at the Senate, at the House and all across our great country.”

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, has praised Vance for his insight and dedication, Newsweekreports. “He listens. He’s thoughtful. He’s funny. He and I had a similar upbringing, challenging childhood, so we hit it off like that when we met,” Roberts said at the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Fest in Milwaukee on Monday.

Project 2025’s agenda involves significant changes to the federal bureaucracy, including replacing career civil servants with political appointees who would pledge allegiance to Trump. These proposals have been criticized for their authoritarian nature and potential to erode democratic norms.

In a 2017 introduction for The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Culture and Opportunity, Vance emphasized the importance of intertwining culture and opportunity in American society. He argued that economic decline and what he considers cultural decay are interconnected, suggesting that the current state of American society requires both economic and cultural reforms.

Providing analysis onMSNBC, political reporter Vaughn Hillyard noted Vance’s advocacy for “Schedule F,” a Trump-signed executive action aimed at reclassifying many federal workers as political appointees, making them easier to replace with loyalists. Hillyard emphasized Vance’s belief that 90 percent of the federal workforce are liberals who hinder conservative policy implementation, a key argument in favor of the drastic reforms proposed by Project 2025.

Trump’s efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 have added a layer of complexity to Vance’s candidacy. On July 5, Trump posted on social media that he knew “nothing about Project 2025” and described some of its ideas as “ridiculous and abysmal.” The New York Times, however,reports that the project is deeply linked to Trump’s former administration officials and reflects much of his second-term agenda.

Voxnotes that Vance’s worldview is anathema to the basic principles of American democracy. The outlet reports that he has voiced support for overturning the 2020 election results, fundraising for January 6 rioters, and firing bureaucrats who do not align with Trump's vision. His belief in radical, even authoritarian steps to combat perceived corruption in the government is evident in his affection for figures like Hungarian strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

On Tuesday’s Dateline White House on MSNBC, host Nicolle Wallace highlighted elements of Project 2025, pointing out its controversial stances on same-sex marriage and Vance’s views on violent marriages. Wallace read from the document, noting that Project 2025 claims “the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages” and that they involve higher levels of instability and financial stress. None of those assertions are true.

According to a Pew Research Center analysis, men in same-sex marriages are more likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher and have higher median incomes compared to their counterparts in opposite-sex marriages. Additionally, men in same-sex marriages have a higher rate of intermarriage, and both men and women in same-sex unions are less likely to live with their own children than those in opposite-sex marriages. A May Rand Corporation and UCLA report further debunked the negative stereotypes propagated by Project 2025, demonstrating that enacting marriageequality has had positive impacts on both same-sex and different-sex couples. Researchers found no evidence of harm to different-sex couples and even noted a slight increase in overall marriage rates.

Wallace also played a clip of Vance’s controversial remarks on marriage, where he criticized the sexual revolution for making it easier to leave unhappy or violent marriages. “These marriages were fundamentally — they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. So getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear. That’s going to make people happier in the long term,” Vance said in 2021. But that will not make children happier, he said. “That’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time,” he continued. “And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

Tim Miller, a gay political analyst and editor for the conservative publication The Bulwark, commented on Vance’s views.

“Saying that women who are abused should be forced, I guess to stay in marriage is the implication of that. I mean, these are just atrocious policies on the politics and on the morality.” Miller said.“The real threat of Trump 2.0 is that he is going to hire the weirdest freaks and the most ideologically extreme and conspiratorial people that are left.”

Democrats have pounced on Vance as a candidate. “Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6; bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Biden’s campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a statement Monday. This narrative is bolstered by Vance’s history of election denialism and support for anti-voting policies, as detailed by Democracy Docket. Vance has echoed Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and proposed controversial ideas like giving parents extra votes to represent their children.

Democrats have zeroed in on Vance’s stance on abortion. Vance has a record of extreme positions, including opposition to abortions in cases of rape or incest, which he later moderated to align more closely with Trump’s stance of leaving the issue to states. This focus on abortion rights is seen as a critical vulnerability for the Trump-Vance ticket, providing Democrats with substantial ammunition in the campaign.