How Project 2025 Compares With Trump's Los Angeles Response
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President Donald Trump's response to protests in Los Angeles is in keeping with suggestions put forth in Project 2025, a political commentator has said.
Allison Gill, who worked at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, said on Wajahat Ali's the Left Hook Substack that the president's military response was "spelled out in Project 2025," a conservative policy dossier. She did not specify how.
Newsweek has contacted the Heritage Foundation and Gill for comment by email.
The Context
Protests against immigration enforcement began in Los Angeles on Friday and have continued, with some isolated incidents of violence and looting.
In response, Trump announced the deployment of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to restore order, without California Governor Gavin Newsom's consent. While the president has said the move was necessary to prevent the city from "burning to the ground" amid protests and riots, officials in California have accused Trump of exacerbating the situation in an "unprecedented power grab."
A police officer firing a soft round near the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on June 8.
A police officer firing a soft round near the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on June 8.
AP Photo/Eric Thayer
What To Know
Gill, who served Trump a lawsuit in 2023 accusing him of conspiring to fire her from the Veterans Affairs Department during his first presidency, said sending in the Marines was "propaganda" because the protests were not severe enough to require them.
Though she said Project 2025 predicted the president's response to the protests, she did not elaborate on how.
Project 2025 is a 900-page document of policy proposals published by the Heritage Foundation think tank. It advocates limited government, border security and tough immigration laws among other conservative measures. The policy proposals have proved divisive, and the president's critics and supporters alike have debated their influence on him.
While Project 2025 does not mention the Insurrection Act, a November 2023 report from The Washington Post, citing internal communications and a person involved in the conversations, said the Project 2025 group had drafted executive orders that would use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military domestically.
Gill told Ali that she warned people of Trump's potential use of the military to curb protests before the presidential election.
"We did everything that we could in leading up to the election in 2024 to tell everyone as loud as we can, they are planning to do this," she said, adding: "Saying he's going to call this an invasion. He's going to call this an insurrection. And he's going to use that to invoke emergency powers so that he can unleash the military on United States citizens and perhaps even suspend habeas corpus so that he can detain his political enemies without due process."
"This is scary," Gill, who hosts the Mueller, She Wrote podcast, continued. "This is full-on fascism, full-on authoritarianism."
"This is a test case for authoritarianism," Ali added.
Before the 2024 presidential election, Democrats accused Trump of planning to implement Project 2025 if he won. While Trump initially called parts of the plan "ridiculous and abysmal," he told Time after his electoral victory that he disagreed with parts of it, but not all of it. He has since appointed a number of people linked to Project 2025 to White House positions.
In an October interview with Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures, Trump indicated that he would use the National Guard or the military if there were disruptions from "radical left lunatics" on Election Day.
What Does Project 2025 Say?
Project 2025 advocates for improved defense infrastructure and for the Department of Homeland Security to "thoroughly enforce immigration laws."
The document added that DHS should "provide states and localities with a limited federal emergency response and preparedness." However, it did not say whether this would occur in the context of protests.
What Trump's Advisers Have Said
Trump's advisers have previously spoken about the use of National Guard troops in other contexts.
According to a February 2024 report in The Atlantic, Stephen Miller, now the White House deputy chief of staff, said that Trump—if returned to office—would take National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and use them in Democratic-run states whose governors refused to cooperate with their mass deportation policy.
What People Are Saying
President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday: "If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can't do their jobs, which everyone knows they can't, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!"
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday: "We will always protect the constitutional right for Angelenos to peacefully protest. However, violence, destruction and vandalism will not be tolerated in our city and those responsible will be held fully accountable."
What Happens Next
The anti-ICE protests, which have spread to other cities, are likely to continue. Newsom has called on the Trump administration to remove federal troops from Los Angeles.
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