President Joe Biden on Friday traveled to crucial 2024 battleground Michigan to slam Donald Trump over Project 2025, trying to tie the controversial conservative presidential transition blueprint to his rival and contrast it with what he envisions for his own second term were he to win, his campaign said.
Biden has been using the line of attack as he tries to recover from his disastrous debate performance by shifting the focus to Trump — as he did during his news conference Thursday night.
“Do you think democracy is under siege based on Project 2025? Do you think he means what he says when he says he is going do away with civil service, eliminate the Department of Education, make sure — I mean, we — we’ve never been here before,” he said ahead of his Detroit rally where his performance would again be scrutinized.
The 900-plus page Project 2025, fronted by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, is meant to lay the groundwork for in incoming Republican administration. The document laments presidents assuming office only “to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences.”
A successful “conservative President” will need “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states,” the document reads.
In recent days, the Biden campaign has redoubled its efforts to highlight Project 2025 — including airing a new ad on it — as it looks to shift the narrative from debate fallout and calls from Democrats for the president to drop out of the race.
In a social media video on Wednesday, Biden said “Project 2025 will destroy America.” The post directed followers to a page on his campaign website that dissects the blueprint.
Vice President Kamala Harris has also taken it on while on the campaign trail.
“Some of you, of course, have heard that Trump’s advisors have created a 900-page blueprint for their agenda for the second term, if they were to have one,” Harris said at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Thursday. “They call it Project 2025 and it includes, check this out, it includes a plan to cut Social Security; it includes a plan to repeal our $35 cap on insulin…”
“If implemented, Project 2025 would be the latest attack in Donald Trump’s full-on assault on reproductive freedom,” Harris later added, pivoting to an issue that has galvanized Democrats in recent years and the campaign is relying on in November and pointing to Trump’s appointment of three Supreme Court justices who help override Roe v. Wade.
“Let us be clear,” she told a crowd in Dallas Wednesday, “this represents an outright attack on our children, our families, and our future.”
The Trump campaign has long sought to distance itself from policy proposals from outside groups and Trump himself in recent days has denied involvement or even knowledge of what’s in Project 2025, but its architects and advisers include some of his own former senior officials as well as those involved in the Republican Party platform.
“Team Biden and the DNC are LYING and fear-mongering because they have NOTHING else to offer the American people. Remember this is the same group that lied to Americans and hid Joe Biden’s cognitive decline all these years,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez.
Meanwhile, speaking to supporters at a grill in Detroit before his rally, Biden tried to allay fears about his age.
“For the longest time I was too young, because I was the second youngest man ever elected to the United States Senate, and anyway, and now I’m too old, but I know hopefully with a little bit of age comes a little bit of wisdom,” he said.
He continued to contrast himself with with Trump: “And hopefully that in this in this moment, I think the alternative is not much of an alternative. And I do think ethics matter. I do think decency matters.”
He ended by assuring the crowd, “I promise you, I’m okay. Thank you.”
Also before the rally, supporters ABC News spoke with said he should keep campaigning.
Regarding calls for Biden to drop out, 74-year-old Hamid Alghali, said, “I disagree…He’s done so much for minorities, for women’s rights, and all the good things for the country, so I do not see he should drop out. He has to stay in. It is far better than his opponent … We have to go out, we have to make a telephone call to our own supporters, in order for them to stop all this nonsense that you know, they’re talking about for him to drop out. We the voters want him to stay in.”
