WASHINGTON — Facing blowback against Project 2025, Donald Trump is now claiming he doesn’t know anything about the right-wing policy and staffing manifesto — even though it was founded by his own former aides to prevent a repeat of the start of his first term when a lack of competent staff led to chaos.

More than half of the authors in the 920-page document, described by critics as an authoritarian playbook, are former Trump White House advisers or current campaign aides. His own campaign press secretary is featured in a Project 2025 recruitment ad, and many of the actual policies have been boiled down and produced into videos Trump has recorded for his Agenda 47. At a Florida rally Tuesday night, Trump publicly praised one of the project’s authors, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his administration.

“By the way, we’re bringing back Tom Homan,” the coup-attempting former president said to thousands of followers gathered at his golf resort in Doral. “We’re bringing back all of the guys that did such a great job on the border.”

And Trump personally thanked the think tank running Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, at an April 2022 dinner: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

The shoutouts belied his Truth Social post from last week, when he denied any knowledge of Project 2025 or the people who created it.

“I know nothing about Project 2025. 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,” Trump wrote on July 5.

The disavowal came three days after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts hinted at violence while discussing the implementation of Project 2025 in a podcast: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Born Of The Chaos Of 2017

While Project 2025 is only now getting widespread attention, the impetus for its creation actually began eight years ago, when Trump was suddenly the president-elect, with thousands of administration jobs to fill and no plan to do it — primarily because Trump assumed that he was going to lose the 2016 election.

With that working premise, he gave the task of filling the mid- and lower-level political appointments in a potential Trump administration over to the former Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who relied upon the same network that had sought out applicants in previous GOP administrations.

But after Trump won, he discarded all of Christie’s work and handed over the project to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, with just weeks to go before inauguration day.

As a result, the new administration for many months went with key jobs either vacant — and therefore being done by career civil servants — or by appointees of Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.

Efforts to enact Trump policies were messy and often ineffective. When Trump wanted to fulfill his campaign promise of a Muslim ban within days of taking office, for example, the person who ended up writing it was Stephen Miller, an anti-immigration activist and former congressional staffer who had suddenly become a top White House adviser. Miller is not a lawyer, and his travel ban was quickly thrown out by the courts.

“Very few politicals were put into key positions,” a high-level Trump White House official — who is now also a Project 2025 participant — complained during a 2019 “background” briefing with reporters.

What’s more, the constant churn of staff entering and fleeing Trump’s administration meant that what brains were there were often drained quickly — to the point that some important White House posts were given to college students who had yet to graduate.

To avoid repeating that scenario, the Heritage Foundation three years ago started creating both a detailed agenda and a list of conservative loyalists who would be willing to take jobs in the next Republican administration. Over time, it brought aboard other conservative and pro-Trump groups and has now produced a plan to radically restructure the federal government, largely by giving a president sweeping new powers — the ability to fire tens of thousands of civil servants, for example, and replace them with political appointees. The pairing of an ideological framework with people capable of pushing it through would make for a far more efficient and effective administration than the one Trump had in his first term.

In response to a HuffPost query about Trump’s disavowal, Heritage Foundation spokeswoman Ellen Keenan said: “As we’ve been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign. We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president. But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”

Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and now a researcher for the United to Protect Democracy group, said Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the effort now is laughable.

“Trump has promised that if he returns to power that he will pardon January 6 rioters, purge civil servants and replace them with loyalists, weaponize the Department of Justice and other agencies against his perceived enemies, and order the military and other federal law enforcement to carry out the biggest deportation operation in history and militarize our streets. His words,” she said. “Project 2025 is simply the plan to make his own rhetoric our reality.”

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung defended Trump’s blanket denial.

“He really doesn’t know what every single former staff member is doing,” Cheung said.

A Radical Plan To Restructure The Federal Government

How many of the hundreds of policy proposals contained within Project 2025 — including limiting the use of the abortion drug mifepristone, basing government social services on “biblical” values and eliminating research into climate change — could actually be implemented in a second Trump presidency is an open question.

Trump had a notoriously short attention span during his four years in office, and many of his demands were simply ignored with the knowledge that he was likely to forget about them. For example, his insistence that U.S. aircraft carriers with magnetic launch systems be retrofitted instead with old-fashioned steam catapults was repeatedly ignored after Navy officials tired of explaining to him that such a request would require completely gutting and redesigning the multi-billion dollar ships.

During his 2024 campaign, Trump has made it clear that his focus in a return to the White House will be to seek revenge on those he believes have wronged him, potentially providing the space for high-ranking officials to pursue their own agendas as they see fit.

Democratic President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is using the fresh attention on Project 2025’s radical proposals to attack Trump.

In a social media post from his campaign account on Wednesday, Biden wrote, “Project 2025 will destroy America” and provided a link to the document.

“Despite Donald Trump’s lies, his extreme Project 2025 agenda is written and led by his own inner circle — the same extremists who stacked Trump’s first administration with loyalists and fired anyone who opposed his dangerous instincts, and the same enablers who will help Trump go even further to ‘terminate’ the Constitution, get ‘revenge’ on his enemies, and govern as a ‘dictator on day one’ if he wins this November,” said Biden campaign senior spokesperson Sarafina Chitika.

Rick Wilson, a former Republican consultant who is now with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said the Trump campaign team understands how “poisonous” Project 2025 has become to many voters in polling, which he said was behind the decision to distance Trump from it.

He said Trump’s actual plans remain just as Project 2025 has outlined them, as evidenced by the all-capital-letter synopsis of the Republican National Committee’s platform released this week.

“The thing that was put out as the RNC platform was the equivalent of saying to ChatGPT: ‘Rewrite Project 2025 as if Donald Trump was yelling it out at a rally,’” Wilson said.

Trump is set to officially receive the Republican presidential nomination in Milwaukee next week, despite his recent criminal conviction on 34 felony counts following a New York City trial and an additional 54 felony counts he faces in three outstanding federal and state indictments. Trump has yet to be sentenced for his conviction.