Maggie Haberman Reveals Trump Allies Fuming Over Project 2025 Rant
New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman revealed that allies of President Donald Trump are privately unhappy about his Project 2025 rant because it complicates the politics of a government shutdown they’re trying to blame on Democrats.
Trump highlighted the unpopular Project 2025 in a rant encouraging OMB Director Russell Vought — a key architect of the plan that Trump once tried to distance himself from.
Haberman was a guest on Thursday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, during which anchor Kaitlan Collins asked for her insights into the White House vibe as the shutdown unfolds. The scribe revealed Trump’s rant has “quietly frustrated” some Republicans:
COLLINS: But as this comes, you know, obviously the White House has been dealing with the government shutdown. It’s very quiet here on Capitol Hill tonight, I’ll say, because basically no negotiations are happening in any real way that we’ve heard of.
I wonder what you make of how the White House is feeling about whether or not this is working out in their — in their favor at all.
HABERMAN: The White House has been projecting great optimism, and more than optimism, confidence, Kaitlan, that this is going to wrap up in the next couple of days.
They believe, whether — I don’t know what their evidence for this is, but they believe that they are seeing some signs that the Democrats will come toward them. We have seen — I have certainly seen no signs of that in my own discussions and reporting. But we will — we will see where this is in a few days.
I will say that even some Republicans were quietly frustrated by President Trump’s social media post, highlighting Russ Vought’s connection to Project 2025. Even though the notion, that the President had no idea what Project 2025 was during the campaign, was absurd, or that he didn’t know the people who were involved with it was absurd.
It was not actually his campaign’s platform. It also — but there was overlap between his campaign’s advisers, or some of their advisers, and the people who worked on Project 2025. It was also an unpopular agenda item, in a lot of polling, just objectively unpopular. And that was part of the reason why you saw the Trump campaign trying to distance him from it.
Now, he’s just openly talking about it, and it is just providing fresh fodder for Democrats, who the White House had been trying to blame for the fact that the shutdown exists in the first place. This complicates that. And it’s not the first time, Kaitlan, as you know, that we have seen President Trump make life harder for his own aides during a shutdown.
COLLINS: Yes, and he was calling it, saying they were going to evaluate Democrat agencies.
HABERMAN: Yes, right.
COLLINS: I mean, every single federal agency is run by someone the President handpicked to be in that role.
Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.
