Leaked Project 2025 Training Videos Reveal Indoctrination Of Trump Loyalists
Newly leaked Project 2025 training videos reveal exactly how thousands of Trump loyalists are being instructed to twist the government into a tool of the far-right after a civil servant purge.
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While Project 2025’s 922-page policy playbook has rightfully garnered a lot of attention, the engine that powers this authoritarian project is its personnel operation.
As I’ve been writing about for almost a year, the Heritage Foundation and its 110 right-wing partner organizations have been recruiting and training thousands of future Trump appointees. They’ve prepared a personnel database so that on day one of a potential second Trump administration, these loyalists can be installed.
The plan, according to both Project 2025 and the Trump Campaign’s own Agenda 47, is for a second-term President Trump to purge over 50,000 civil servants and replace them with a self-proclaimed “army” of Trump loyalists. The goal is to remove all the guardrails that restrained Trump’s worst impulses in his first term and to abuse executive power to pursue an unchecked radical right agenda.
We now have the most in-depth insight into exactly how these would-be Trump appointees are being trained.
In a phenomenal result of investigative journalism, ProPublica and Documented received and published 23 videos, totaling over 14 hours, of Project 2025 training videos. These videos were sourced from Project 2025’s “Presidential Training Academy,” which is the hub for Project 2025 recruits to learn how government works, how to enforce the Republican Party line, and how they can enact their authoritarian agenda.
The videos are focused on ideological indoctrination as well as professional development, breaking down the mechanisms of government and how to twist them into tools for the far-right. The trainings include detailed breakdowns on deregulation, how to write executive orders, policymaking, social media messaging, and more.
Of course, we’ve known about Project 2025’s ongoing training of loyalists, but this is the first time the public is seeing the videos for ourselves. It really showcases exactly how radical Project 2025 wants the future Trump administration to be and how much disdain they have for career civil servants.
The videos depict liberalism as an evil ideology that has somehow infected the federal bureaucracy and needs to be purged. The clips offer training exercises on how these loyalists can ruthlessly pursue the Republican president’s agenda, how to eliminate LGBTQ+ protections and terms from federal policy, how to shut down equity programs, and overall, how to reshape the federal government into the image of the far-right.
These leaked videos also reveal even deeper ties between Donald Trump and Project 2025. As I’ve written in this newsletter, in spite of Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, dozens of former Trump officials are behind Project 2025, and Trump's official agenda directly aligns with it. Now, we can add more connections to the list.
According to ProPublica’s review of the training videos, 29 of the 36 speakers in Project 2025’s training videos have worked for either the Trump transition team, the Trump administration, or Trump’s presidential campaigns:
“..The links between the speakers in the videos and Trump are many. Most of those served Trump during his administration, working at the White House, the National Security Council, NASA, the Office of Management and Budget, USAID and the departments of Justice, Interior, State, Homeland Security, Transportation and Health and Human Services. Another speaker has worked in the Senate office of J.D. Vance, Trump’s 2024 running mate.”
The ties between Donald Trump and Project 2025 are clear. Before I get into the videos, I also want to clarify some recent claims Trump has made about Project 2025.
After Paul Dans, who previously served as the Trump Administration’s Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management, stepped down as Director of Project 2025 two weeks ago, the Trump Campaign falsely declared the project’s demise. But, as I outlined in my article at the time, Dans stepping down only marked the end of Project 2025’s policy work, which culminated at the RNC. That was always the plan.
Project 2025 has already written its 922-page “Mandate For Leadership” policy playbook, and Trump’s Agenda 47 now directly aligns with many of its key plans. Not only are Project 2025’s plans integrated into Trump’s official agenda, but one of Project 2025’s key architects, Russell Vought, was policy director of the RNC’s platform writing committee, as I detailed to MSNBC last month.
While Project 2025 isn’t drafting new policies at the moment, its personnel operation is still very much active, according to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and multiple people involved in the project.
The Heritage Foundation and their 110 right-wing partner organizations are still recruiting, training, and screening ideologically a self-proclaimed “army” of Trump loyalists. These trained loyalists will be waiting at the ready to replace tens of thousands of civil servants after Trump executes his planned “Schedule F” executive order.
So buckle up as we dive into the planned purge of civil servants, analyze why Project 2025 is training loyalists to replace them, and take a look at some of the most concerning training footage I found while reviewing the videos ProPublica and Documented exposed.
Explaining The “Schedule F” Purge Of Civil Servants
Before we dive into some of the details of the training videos, I want to explain in more detail how Trump’s planned purge of civil servants would work and why he plans to pursue it.
Donald Trump, the Heritage Foundation, and their partners want to avoid what happened in 2016 when Republicans weren’t fully prepared for Trump’s win. Trump’s first year was absolute chaos and sparked multiple legal challenges. While Trump’s administration was surely authoritarian, it was also incompetent. Trump did not know how the government worked. Project 2025 wants to make sure in the next Trump administration, he can walk in on day one and inflict his will on the American people.
Trump blames the chaos of his first term not on himself, but career civil servants who keep the government running. Trump has for years now been talking about how he wants to “dismantle the Administrative State” or “dismantle the Deep State,” as Trump described it in his Agenda 47 platform. Both Trump’s plan and Project 2025 call for the purging of federal workers through the reinstatement of “Schedule F.”
In October 2020, during the final months of his presidency, Trump signed a “Schedule F” executive order that reclassified tens of thousands of federal workers as “at-will” employees, making them easier to fire for no cause. Non-political federal workers usually have civil service protections that prevent them from being directly fired by the President. This protection prevented Trump from purging vast swaths of federal workers who, at times, questioned or refused to implement some of his often illegal proposals.
Upon taking office, President Biden immediately rescinded Trump’s Schedule F executive order and recently put rules in place to protect civil servants. But if he’s re-elected, Trump could roll back the new rules Biden implemented, re-issue Schedule F, and begin his purge.
The next part of the plan after the purge of tens of thousands, as many as 50,000 workers has been discussed, is to replace them with loyalists. Project 2025 has a detailed plan for how to accomplish this quickly. This is why they’ve created their database of conservatives eager to serve in the federal government. Think of it as a Republican LinkedIn. They’ve been recruiting and training thousands of right-wing professionals, so they’re ready to be installed on day one.
Paul Dans, former Director of Project 2025, explicitly said that they are “systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.”
Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, told Politico about how unprecedented this effort is:
“What we’ve never gotten right in the modern conservative movement, even under Reagan, was having a network of right-of-center professionals who were ready to go. To get 10,000 to 20,000 names into this database who are not only submitting their resumes but also being vetted to some extent, and who, depending upon the classification of the position we think they’re suitable for, are going through these training modules — that’s the part that’s never been done before.”
After these trained loyalists are installed, Trump plans to consolidate power in the executive branch by dismantling multiple departments, like the Department of Education, and bringing independent agencies like the FCC and FTC under direct White House control - this plan is in both Agenda 47 and Project 2025.
In a recent conversation I had with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), the lead Democrat of the “Stop Project 2025 Task Force,” we broke down this planned purge and what it would mean in more detail. Here’s a clip of that part of our discussion:
The Most Concerning Project 2025 Training Videos
Now that you have the context behind the planned purge of civil servants and why Project 2025 wants loyalists surrounding Trump if he gets back in office, let’s take a look at some of the most concerning parts of these training videos.
Preparing Appointees To Pursue Trump’s Agenda At All Costs
In one clip from ProPublica’s repository of Project 2025 videos, former legal adviser to Trump’s Presidential Personnel Office, Dan Huff, prepares Project 2025 trainees to be ready to shamelessly pursue a far-right agenda in spite of the social and career ramifications.
“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it. That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out,” Huff warned.
In the full-hour training clip, Huff goes into detail about how trainees should be “undaunted” and “unrelenting” in the pursuit of the president’s agenda in the face of “bureaucratic and legal hurdles.” This is notable because many of Trump’s plans, like invoking the Insurrection Act to use the military to suppress dissent and dismantling agencies, are unconstitutional, so Trump needs loyalists who won’t question the legality of his orders.
Huff went on fear-monger about "leftists” and falsely detailed how they’re corrupting America: “The next Republican Administration will be the most important one of our lives. There's too much to do, there's no time to lose, and the stakes are too high. The leftists used this monopoly over education media and culture to crack the pillars of American society…”
All lies, of course, but they need to radicalize their trainees so they can be shameless when following Trump’s orders.
Rolling Back Climate Progress
Another video that’s gotten a lot of attention is a training video by Bethany Kozma, former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration. Kozma questions climate change science, saying it seeks to “control people.”
Kozma says, “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
A central part of Trump and Project 2025’s agenda is their anti-climate goals. The Project 2025 playbook mentions the EPA 90 times, aims to gut the agency, and plans to roll back all climate regulations implemented during the Biden-Harris administration. Project 2025 is training future Trump officials to set back climate progress generations.
Ending Equity Programs And Erasing Inclusive Terms From All Policy
That climate change moment above was part of a broader training video about “Left-Wing Code Words and Biased Language” that the right should eliminate from government.
The video starts by falsely claming socialism is represented by terms like social justice and equity. Bethany Kozma then makes an eerie comment about how dictators control language, with the irony of the fact that she’s accusing liberals of exactly what she’s calling for clearly escaping her:
“What brings to mind is the quote he who controls the language rules the world. It's attributed to Joseph Stalin and other tyrants. George Orwell stated he who controls language controls culture. Even more, Hitler and others lived by the creed, ‘If you repeat a lie often enough people will believe it.’ Without doubt it's true. Language is a powerful and often controlling tool.”
Katie Sullivan, who is also seen in this training video, was acting assistant attorney general under Trump’s Department of Justice. Sullivan goes on to say that all the equity programs meant to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity” that were established during the Biden Administration will be quickly rolled back.
Sullivan then says that the gender advisor position “has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
The video goes on for 50 minutes, describing how a future right-wing government should erase certain terminology from all policy.
These aren’t empty threats. Project 2025’s playbook not only calls for the elimination of federal LGBTQ+ protections and equity programs, they also want to eliminate the words used to describe those protections and women’s rights entirely:
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
This is truly Orwellian insanity. No other way to describe it.
Attacks On Education
The video with Bethany Kozma and Katie Sullivan really is among the wildest of all the training videos. That same video goes on to attack the education system. Katie Sullivan calls for the removal of critical race theory from public education:
“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” Sullivan says.
This aligns with Project 2025 and Donald Trump’s planned policies. Agenda 47 specifically calls for shutting down the Department of Education, targeting Critical Race Theory (which usually just means teaching America’s history of racism), promoting the nuclear family, teaching the role of mothers and fathers, a “patriotic” education 1776 commission, creating “anti-woke” curriculums, and establishing an “American Academy” endowed with billions collected from taxing large endowments of private universities.
Only Engage With Right-Wing Media
Another noteworthy training video instructs these potential future Trump appointees not to engage with the mainstream media.
Alexei Woltornis, who was former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security and is apparently cosplaying as the American Rasputin, made this point:
“The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times, they’re not reading The Washington Post. To the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.”
A Recipe For Covers-Ups
In another interview, the trainees are instructed to essentially avoid leaving paper trails. Tom Jones, who runs the American Accountability Foundation, said: “If you need to resolve something if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy, and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision.”
Jones continued: “You’re probably better off going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through, and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”
This advice is in an effort to evade Freedom of Information Act requests and ensure Trump appointees avoid creating evidence for potential investigations. They’ve clearly learned from the January 6 Committee and Special Counsel Jack Smith probes.
This Is What’s At Stake
There is so much more in these videos I could get into, but for the sake of your reading time, I’ll stop there. You can access all 14 hours of these Project 2025 training videos on ProPublica’s website.
These aren’t all the training videos. This is only what’s been made public so far. It’s incredibly damning and lays out the stakes clearly in this election. If Donald Trump and J.D Vance win, their “army” of trained loyalists will unleash an overtly authoritarian agenda.
That agenda includes efforts to dismantle multiple agencies, consolidate power in the White House, roll back environmental regulations, weaponize the DOJ, execute mass deportations, build detention camps for migrants, use the military against civilians, end federal protections for LGBTQ+ people, push “Christian Nationalist” ideals, and undo all progress made in diversity, equity, and inclusion within the federal government under the guise of religious freedom.
Luckily, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz are doing very well in the polls, so hopefully this agenda never sees the light of day.
But, even if Harris wins, Project 2025 will then become Project 2029, so we have to stay engaged. If there’s one thing the right is good at, it’s long-term planning - just look at the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
We have to keep doing everything we can to inform and mobilize voters. These authoritarian right-wing organizations won’t stop working - so neither should we.
Thank you, Ahmed, for this detailed horror story. The clips from the videos are enough to make me run into the streets screaming. I’m not sure I should attempt the longer versions. Perhaps with my morning strength I’ll take a stab at one or two. Always good to see what’s behind the curtain.
I also thank you for your reporting! Project 2025 is absolutely horrifying. It baffles me that so many people really want to destroy our democracy.