A rumor is circulating on social media that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's name is listed 312 times in a document outlining the goals of Project 2025 — a conservative group's plan to reshape the government under a Republican presidential administration.
The claim first spread (archived) in July 2024. One X post with more than 693,000 views as of this writing read: "Trump's name appears in the Project 2025 Manifesto 312 times, but he knows nothing about it." The rumor gained popularity again, months later, shortly after the former president was announced as the winner of the 2024 presidential election.
Project 2025 has four pillars: a policy agenda outlined in a document titled "Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise," a personnel database of "conservatives from all walks of life to serve in the next conservative Administration," a training system for potential political appointees, and a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of a new administration.
We searched and found the word "Trump" does appear 312 times in the "Mandate for Leadership 2025" — the document outlining Project 2025 supporters' proposals.
(Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise)
However, in two instances, "trump" does not refer to the former U.S. president. On one occasion it was used as a verb ("to trump") and in another instance it was used as an adjective ("trumped-up"). Additionally, 158 mentions refer to the Trump administration rather than to Trump himself. Thus, we have rated this claim as being a mixture of true and false information.
Trump and Project 2025
Project 2025 is a policy initiative proposed by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation with the participation of many of Trump's allies. However, Trump has publicly stated he disagrees with some of Project 2025's recommendations and distanced himself from the initiative.
"I know nothing about Project 2025," Trump wrote in a July 5, 2024, post on Truth Social. "I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."
Authors of 'Mandate for Leadership 2025'
The first 23 mentions of "Trump" in the "'Mandate for Leadership 2025" appear in the "Authors" section of the document, which details the authors' backgrounds and experience. Selected examples are below (emphasis ours):
- [Jonathan Berry] previously served as Chief Counsel for the Trump transition and earlier clerked for Associate Justice Samuel Alito and Judge Jerry Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
- [Adam Candeub] served as acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Deputy Associate Attorney General at the Justice Department during the Trump Administration.
- Ken Cuccinelli served as Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2019 and then, from November 2019 through the end of the Trump Administration, as Acting Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
- Rick Dearborn served as Deputy Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump … . He also served as Executive Director of the 2016 President-elect Donald Trump transition team.
- Christopher Miller served in several positions during the Trump Administration, including as Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
- Peter Navarro holds a PhD in economics from Harvard and was one of only three senior White House officials to serve with Donald Trump from the 2016 campaign to the end of the President's first term.
- [Brooks D. Tucker] helped to craft the policy framework for President-elect Trump's transition team and served as the Senior Policy Adviser for National Security and Veterans Affairs to Senator Richard Burr from 2010 to 2015.
Trump Administration
Out of the 312 mentions of the word "Trump," 158 refer to the Trump administration rather than Trump as an individual. Many of these passages call for the restoration or continuation of regulations implemented by the previous Trump administration. Selected examples are provided below (emphasis ours):
- On its first day in office, the next Administration should signal its intent to enter the rulemaking process to restore the Trump Administration's Title IX regulation, with the additional insistence that "sex" is properly understood as a fixed biological fact. ]
- A good first step would be to reinstate an iteration of the Trump Administration's Executive Order.
- Elsewhere, DOJ should target violent and career criminals, not parents; work to dismantle criminal organizations, partly by rigorously prosecuting interstate drug activity; and restart the Trump Administration's "China Initiative" (to address Chinese espionage and theft of trade secrets).
- This means, inter alia, reinstituting and expanding Trump Administration sanctions.
- Second, the next Administration should build on the Trump Administration's diplomatic successes by encouraging other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, to enter the Abraham Accords.
- It should deradicalize USAID's programs and structures and build on the conservative reforms instituted by the Trump Administration.
- The next Administration should continue the policy of the Trump Administration in this area and direct the department to conduct a comprehensive review of all Title VI cases to ascertain to what extent these cases include allegations of disparate impact.
- Restoration of both domestic security and the integrity of the U.S. immigration system should start with rapid reactivation of several key initiatives in effect at the conclusion of the Trump Administration.
Some mentions of the Trump administration provide context about the state of affairs during the administration, while others praise its actions and policies:
- The Office of Global Public Affairs was formed during the Trump Administration by consolidation of the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs and Bureau of Global Public Affairs.
- The Trump Administration proposed to close the loophole with a rule to "increase program integrity and reduce fraud, waste, and abuse. The regulation was not finalized before the end of the Trump Administration.
- The Trump Administration proposed some possible consolidations, but these were not received favorably in Congress, whose approval is necessary for most such proposals.
- Under the Trump Administration, USAID focused on ending the need for foreign aid by placing countries onto a Journey to Self-Reliance.
- The Trump Administration's major space policies—including the U.S. Space Force, the Artemis program to land the next Americans on the moon, and support for a strong commercial space sector—have endured under the Biden Administration.
- During the Trump Administration, PEPFAR increased the share of funding to local entities from about 20 percent to nearly 70 percent.
Moreover, the term "Trump-era" appears five times in the document, and the phrase "Trump years" is mentioned once (emphasis ours):
- Neither the letter nor the spirit of the law was enforced under President Obama, and a Trump-era regulation sought to correct this problem.
- Issue and finalize the Trump-era draft disability rights regulations concerning crisis standards of care and use of Quality of Life Adjusted Years.
- Despite several attempts in the House of Representatives during the Trump years to enact legislation that would modestly increase the weight given to performance over time-of-service, the fierce opposition by federal managers associations and unions representing long-serving but not necessarily well-performing constituents explains why the bills failed to advance.
'President Trump'
There were dozens of instances in the document that directly referred to Trump. "President Trump" was mentioned 41 times, and "President Donald Trump" appeared 14 times throughout the document. Selected examples are provided below:
- Under President Trump, OLMS required unions to disclose involvement in trusts that they either own a majority stake in or control.
- Expand defensive cyber-effects operations authorized by President Trump's classified National Security Presidential Memorandum 13, "United States Cyber Operations Policy."
- The next President should also reinstate the many executive orders signed by President Trump that were designed to make the regulatory process more just, efficient, and transparent.
- After the 2016 election, President Trump faced special hostility from the opposition party and the media in getting his appointees confirmed or even considered by the Senate.
- In 2018, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13855 to, among other things, promote active management of forests and reduce wildfire risks.
- Prior to the arrival of President Donald Trump's appointees in June 2020, budgeting, financial responsibility, and spending totaled over $800 million per year, with virtually no oversight or supervision.
- Reinstate President Trump's plan for opening most of the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska to leasing and development.
Some common phrases in the document involving Trump's name include "Trump-appointed leadership," "Trump-Biden tariffs," "Trump's Schedule F," "Trump rules" and "Trump-Russia collusion":
- Numerous career staff whistleblowers came forward to sound the alarm about OTF to Trump-appointed leadership.
- Job number one for the next Administration is to return to sensible trade policies and eliminate the destructive Trump-Biden tariffs.
- In particular, the IC must restore confidence in its political neutrality to rectify the damage done by the actions of former IC leaders and personnel regarding the claims of Trump-Russia collusion following the 2016 election and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation and media revelations of its existence during the 2020 election.
- Reissue Trump's Schedule F executive order to permit discharge of nonperforming employees.
- Rescind the Biden rules and reinstate the Trump rules regarding … .
Additionally, Trump was quoted once, in the context of trade policy:
Tonight, I am also asking you to pass the United States Reciprocal Trade Act, so that if another country places an unfair tariff on an American product, we can charge them the exact same tariff on the exact same product that they sell to us.
President Donald J. Trump, 2019 State of the Union Address
'Trump' in Footnotes
Out of the 312 mentions of Trump, 23 are in footnotes citing Trump's executive orders (see example below, emphasis added):
President Donald J. Trump, Executive Order 13891, "Promoting the Rule of Law Through Improved Agency Guidance Documents," October 9, 2019, in Federal Register, Vol. 84, No. 199 (October 15, 2019), pp. 55235– 55238, https://home.treasury.gov/sites/default/files/2018-04/0411%20Signed%20Treasury%20OIRA%20MOA.pdf (accessed January 31, 2023).
Additionally, there are 20 other footnotes referencing various documents and sources that include the word "Trump," as illustrated in the examples below.
- "U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific," declassified in part by Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Robert C. O'Brien, January 5, 2021, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wpcontent/uploads/2021/01/IPS-Final-Declass.pdf (accessed March 18, 2023), and Robert C. O'Brien, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, "A Free and Open Indo-Pacific," January 5, 2021, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/OBrien-Expanded-Statement.pdf (accessed March 18, 2023).
- Donald J. Trump, "Presidential Memorandum on Promoting the Reliable Supply and Delivery of Water in the West," October 19, 2018, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/presidentialmemorandum-promoting-reliable-supply-delivery-water-west/ (accessed March 17, 2023).
'Trump' Used as a Verb and Adjective
Among the 312 instances of "Trump" in the document, we discovered that the word was not used as a surname in two cases. Once the word "trump" was used as a verb:
"ERISA should not be allowed to trump states' ability to protect innocent human life in the womb.
In another case, it was used in an adjective ("trumped-up"):
In 2015, for example, Investor's Business Daily accused the CFPB of "diverting potentially millions of dollars in settlement payments for alleged victims of lending bias to a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party" and planning "to create a so-called Civil Penalty Fund from its own shakedown operations targeting financial institutions" that would use "ramped-up (and trumped-up) anti-discrimination lawsuits and investigations" to "bankroll some 60 liberal nonprofits, many of whom are radical Acorn-style pressure groups."
'Biden' Appears 375 Times in the Same Document
"To be fair, Biden's name appears 303 times according to search results of the same document," one X user commented under a post spreading the claim about Trump's name appearing 312 times in the Project 2025 document.
Our analysis found that the word "Biden" actually appears 375 times in the document, with 226 mentions in the context of the Biden administration, 26 instances referring to "President Biden" and six to "President Joe Biden."
(Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise)
Below are some examples of mentions of "Biden" in the document, typically referring to reversing, reevaluating or criticizing Biden-era policies (emphasis ours):
- The next President should critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any USGCRP assessment prepared under the Biden Administration.
- Similarly, the Biden Administration's climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.
- Unfortunately, the order was overturned by the Biden Administration, so it will
need to be reintroduced in 2025.- All were revoked by the Biden Administration and should be reinstated by the next Administration, to include the immediate appointment of the FLRA General Counsel and reactivation of the Impasses Panel.
- President Biden's 2022 NPR described the problem but proposed no recommendations to restore or maintain nuclear deterrence.
- Additionally, regulatory documents should be drafted to review or reverse all regulations promulgated during the Biden Administration.
You can read the full "Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise" document below:
For several months, we received a flood of reader inquiries asking whether Project 2025 was a real effort to "reshape America." In addition to that question, we've fact-checked these Project 2025-related rumors recently: