Trump’s real Project 2025 was written for him in Moscow by Vladimir Putin’s men

Unless you work on the politics desk of the New York Times or Washington Post, it’s getting harder and harder not to notice the increasingly incoherent yet also dangerously unhinged nature of Donald Trump’s campaign appearances.

On Saturday, the GOP nominee spoke in the rural, 97.6% white central Wisconsin town of Mosinee — his only public rally of the week — and attracted only middling media attention for an off-the-rails rant that casually mixed complete untruths with extreme demagoguery. He repeated his new and absurd claim that young kids are going to school and getting transgender-related surgeries, as well as his assertion that fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter is “representative of who’s coming into this country” before ending with the boast that “I will prevent World War III, and I am the only one who can do it.”

Trump’s word salad drew applause from 7,000 MAGA attendees, but also — it’s hard not to imagine — from the only other person on Planet Earth with as much riding on whether the Republican standard-bearer and convicted felon wins on Nov. 5: Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

The unofficial first week of the fall campaign pitting Trump against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris brought a series of revelations that showed just how extensive and sophisticated Russia has become over the last decade in mounting campaigns to influence U.S. elections, seeking a government that would weaken American ties with Putin’s European adversaries.

In a blitz of federal indictments and affidavits, the charge that captured the most attention on social media was the disclosure that a fast-growing and popular YouTube channel led by “heterodox” extreme-right pundits like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin — all supportive of Trump and dismissive of Ukraine’s efforts to beat back the Russian invasion launched in 2022 — was secretly funded with $10 million that traced back to Moscow.

But that seems only the tip of a Titanic-sized propaganda iceberg. The Biden administration’s U.S. Justice Department alleges that, rather than retreat after Putin’s spy network was caught red-handed trying to help Trump win in 2016, Russia is saturating the American internet with fake news sites that trumpet stories that make Biden or Harris look bad or stoke racial and other social fault lines, often by just making things up.

Last week, federal prosecutors based here in Philadelphia announced they had seized 32 internet domains that pretended to be legitimate U.S.-based news sites, but actually existed to spread pro-Putin propaganda. These were the core of a Moscow-originated effort called “Doppelganger” that was run by a high-ranking Kremlin official, and which outlined in dramatic detail its goal of inflaming American voters to back candidates who might do the strongman’s bidding. In fighting Russian election interference, American intelligence seems to have tapped a mother lode of incriminating documents.

Forget the Heritage Foundation. It turns out the real Project 2025 — a blueprint for a second Trump term — was written in darkened back offices in Moscow, or Putin’s beloved hometown of St. Petersburg. It’s an Agenda 47 that seeks to end U.S. aid for Ukraine but doesn’t care if America devolves into a civil war to make that happen.

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In August 2023, according to Russian documents published by the Justice Department last week in a sworn affidavit, Putin’s spies and their consultants launched what they called the “Good Old USA Project,” which says many of the quiet parts out loud about how Trump and the GOP hope to recapture Washington by spelling out how to use blatant racism to rally disaffected whites.

The document captures both the urgency for Team Putin — whose military misadventure in Ukraine is mired in stalemate — of getting a Trump 47 presidency as well as an exploitive scheme on how to make this happen despite a Trump approval rating that hovers below 40%. The not-so-secret Russian dressing in this recipe is the raw demagoguery of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia, targeting an audience of “primarily poor whites.”

Consider some key “Campaign Topics” from the Doppelganger planning memo:

So when Trump obsesses constantly about the U.S. price of bacon — telling a Miami rally this summer that even as a billionaire (for now), “I don’t even order bacon anymore. It’s too expensive ... [People have been] destroyed by inflation,” you could probably hear the applause echoing against the tall spires of Red Square.

So when Trump tells the Economic Club of New York, in a blatant lie, that “100% of the jobs created under this administration has gone to illegal migrants that came into our country,” is that the voice of a future Republican administration, or the current regime in Moscow?

So when the GOP nominee devotes a good chunk of his rallies to “migrant crime” under Biden and Harris (fact check: immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans), and calls refugees to this country “animals” who, in language that echoes Adolf Hitler, are “poisoning the blood” of the United States, is he reading from his teleprompter, or from a script that comes from a cubicle in St. Petersburg?

So when the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, says that “I do not think that it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine,” and also that “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” is he really serving as an asset for Trump’s campaign, or for Putin?

I could go on and on — how Trump’s obsession with “World War III” matches the Russian agenda to strongly suggest America “is being drawn into the war” in Ukraine, but you probably get the point. I don’t mean to belittle the importance of the actual Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation and its right-wing partners, which is surely the vision for a Trump presidency from the vantage point of Bible Belt true believers.

But the “Good Old USA” plan feels even more like the real Trump agenda because it drops any polite facade that the Trump-Vance campaign is anything but an open appeal to white working-class anxieties around race or gender or sexuality. It’s marinated in a hatred that crudely labels the liberal values shared by a majority of Americans as support for “people of color, perverts, and [the] disabled,” reflecting the prevailing view in both Moscow and Mar-a-Lago.

The evil genius of Putin’s own Project 2025 is the way it separates its tactics for winning an Electoral College majority in America — by appealing to a nation’s crudest, foundational white-male supremacy that keeps surfacing from Colfax, La., to Tulsa, Okla., to Charlottesville, Va. — from the real strategy, which is using this racist vehicle to elect politicians who not coincidentally will trash U.S. alliances with Europe and leave Ukraine undefended as the next domino of an expansionist Russian regime.

This requires a nonstop feedback loop between the YouTube blowhards, drawing an obscene amount of rubles for fake journalism in an era when actual reporters can’t make a dollar, and increasingly online politicians like Vance, a useful idiot who is desperate for the page views and approval bestowed by the propagandists like Pool or Johnson. That’s on top of Russia’s remarkable good luck in the rise of a demagogue in Trump who’ll say anything to win, exactly the way it was written up in the corridors of the Kremlin.

Let’s be clear: It’s not the case that a healthy, well-adjusted United States would be just fine but for pro-Putin hypnotism. Instead, the former KGB man has learned over a half-century that Americans can’t be persuaded to act against its nature — support a communist revolution, for example — but that you can exploit the deep-seated pathologies that already exist. Compare it to football’s 1-0 Eagles and their patented “Tush Push”: Trump is like Jalen Hurts, but carrying a ball of white supremacy to further his own power, and Putin is like Saquon Barkley, surging from the backfield to push Trump those last few inches to get over the goal line.

It’s all out in the open now, and yet, we still might allow Russia to pick the next American president. During this week of so many disclosures of Putin’s interference, the newest New York Times poll shows Trump still in a dead heat with Harris — leading 48%-47% — that would likely hand him the Electoral College if the vote were held today. We can’t let Moscow win in November, but that means real Americans — including people of color, the disabled, and the LGBTQ community — will have to show it what the “Good Old USA” is really all about.

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