Project 2025's Paul Dans will challenge Lindsey Graham in South Carolina Republican primary
Paul Dans, one of the main forces behind the conservative blueprint Project 2025, will run against Lindsey Graham in the South Carolina Republican primary next year.
News outlets reported on Monday that Dans will join a crowded field of Republican contenders looking to unseat the senator. Dans is planning a formal announcement for Wednesday in Charleston.
Dans served as the director for Project 2025 until July 2024, when sustained criticism of the project threatened Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. Dans left the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, as the project became a liability last year.
Since then, though, as Trump has put in place or introduced many elements of the project, Dans has reveled in it. Dans, who served as chief of staff in the office of personnel management (OPM) in the first Trump administration, told Politico earlier this year that the second Trump administration has been “actually way beyond my wildest dreams”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/28/paul-dans-south-carolina-project-2025
Whether or not he gets very far, it would open the field for a strong Democratic challenger....if there is one.....say, Stephen Colbert...
= new reply since forum marked as read
https://www.propublica.org/article/project-2025-trump-campaign-heritage-foundation-paul-dans
Aug. 1, 2024
In January 2023, a group of about 15 people gathered for three days at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank a few blocks from the Capitol. Their aim was ambitious and farsighted: to start building the next Republican administration, two years before a Republican president might again take office.
The group’s leaders originally cast the initiative as candidate-agnostic, intended to assist the 2024 Republican nominee, whoever that might be. But there was no real doubt who the envisioned beneficiary was. The team included several former members of the Trump administration, and the whole effort was geared to address a perceived shortcoming of that White House: its failure to fill enough key government positions with Trump loyalists. So few had expected Trump to win in 2016 that hiring had been left mostly to GOP veterans, who brought in establishment figures and never managed to fill some slots at all, leaving the president exposed to the bureaucratic resistance that his acolytes believe undermined him at every step: the dreaded “deep state.”
They were determined not to let this happen again. This time, Trump would take office with a fully staffed, carefully selected administration ready to roll. Thus the name of this new effort at Heritage, Project 2025. It would consist of four “pillars”: an 887-page policy plan, a database of conservatives willing to serve in the administration, training seminars for potential new appointees on the functions of government and a battle plan for each agency.
In recent months, Project 2025 has gotten attention for some of the more radical proposals in its policy plan — such as reinstating more stringent rules for the use of the abortion pill mifepristone and abolishing some federal agencies. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made the project the centerpiece of their case against a Trump restoration. Their attacks were so effective that Trump has publicly disavowed the effort (while selecting a running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who is closely allied with Heritage).
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