Project 2025 April 22nd Update

Project 2025 Is Here.

With Trump’s presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe.

More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy. Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.

The document calls for dismantling federal agencies, rolling back civil rights protections, gutting environmental regulations, and concentrating executive power. Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.

GPAHE tracks how Project 2025 and Christian nationalism are becoming a reality under Trump, and their impact on the American people and democracy, and advocates for ways to stop the implementation of authoritarianism in the U.S.

This week, we look at Turning Point USA pitching a $500,000 one-on-one with Trump three days before filling only two-thirds of a Phoenix megachurch, the administration installing Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy on the U.S. Arctic Research Commission after 16 months of personnel changes and science cuts that track Project 2025 policies line by line, and Amazon briefly pulling The Camp of the Saints — the Great Replacement novel whose new introduction is written by a Russell Vought protégé — before reversing itself in 72 hours.

Turning Point’s Phoenix Rally Priced Trump at $500,000. Nobody Bought.

Three days before Donald Trump flew to Phoenix for a Turning Point USA rally on April 17, a volunteer fundraiser for the Project 2025 organization emailed a handful of deep-pocketed donors.

The pitch from Sinan Kanatsiz was simple. Write a check to Turning Point USA PAC for $500,000 and get a one-on-one meeting and private photo with Trump at the rally, a tour of Turning Point headquarters, dinner with its leadership, and a ride to and from Phoenix on a semi-private charter. Kanatsiz stamped the email “NOT FOR SHARING.” Judd Legum of Popular Information got it anyway. Kanatsiz admitted no one bit. A single $500,000 check would be the biggest the PAC has ever received. Only five donors have ever written checks for more than $100,000.

The rally itself was run by Turning Point Action, the group’s 501(c)(4) political arm, and simply attending was a second fundraiser in its own right. Everyone who came through the door had to check their voter registration status on a tablet before getting to a seat, a form that also collected name, address, phone number, and 2026 voting plans. KJZZ, the Phoenix NPR affiliate, reported that the form runs on Vote.Online, a nonprofit that works out of Turning Point’s headquarters and employs former Turning Point staff, though it carries no public connection to the group. Turning Point Action built the Arizona field operation that won Trump the state by 5.5 points in 2024. The parent organization, which Charlie Kirk grew into the largest Christian nationalist youth group in the country, sits on Project 2025’s advisory board.

But Turning Point has been coming apart since Kirk’s assassination in September, and the Phoenix rally didn’t break the trend. The megachurch used to have to turn people away when Kirk spoke. For a sitting U.S. president on Friday, it filled just 3,000 of its 4,500 seats. Trump’s national approval is at a record low 39 percent, and in a CBS-YouGov poll the same week, 70 percent of voters under 30 said they disapprove of him.

Erika Kirk came onto the stage in a light-blue pantsuit to a booming sports entertainment score, spotlit and waved on by the crowd, and introduced Trump. A second viral clip from the same sequence showed Trump holding her by the shoulder and kissing her on each cheek before taking the podium.

Dream City Church has been a federally tax-exempt 501(c)(3) since 2012, which means the Johnson Amendment bars it from endorsing candidates. What happened on Friday was a Republican campaign event. Trump opened with shout-outs to Arizona athletes who retired before most college freshmen were born. He promised the crowd UFO files because Phoenicians were “a little bit out there.” Then he endorsed Rep. Andy Biggs for governor, and Biggs told the room that Arizona couldn’t afford another Katie Hobbs term. Rep. Paul Gosar, from the same stage, endorsed a candidate for Arizona attorney general. Trump read out preferred Republicans for three more statewide offices. This is what the Johnson Amendment exists to prohibit. The Trump IRS has been trying to carve a hole in the amendment anyway. In July 2025, the agency signed a settlement that would have exempted churches from it entirely. A federal judge threw the deal out on March 31. The amendment survived the lawsuit. Enforcement is a different question.

Some of the backlash is coming from inside Turning Point’s own Christian base. In Portland, Maine, the Rev. Norman Allen booked an interfaith counter-event called “Love Is the Point” for May 15, the same night Turning Point USA Faith’s “Make Heaven Crowded” tour rolls into the Portland Expo. Fifteen congregations signed on in a matter of hours. In March, the University of Arkansas chapter cut ties with the national group after its president accused leadership of using Kirk’s name in ways he found disingenuous.

And the day before the rally, the labor-focused media group More Perfect Union launched More Perfect University, an economic-populist campus organizing project explicitly designed to compete with Turning Point. Bernie Sanders co-hosted the virtual rollout. The argument from More Perfect University is that Turning Point has been selling young people a culture war when what they’re actually worried about is rent.

Dream City hosted a Trump rally in 2020 and fielded the same complaints about tax-exempt status. It kept the exemption. The organization running the door sits on Project 2025’s advisory board. A sitting president endorsed a gubernatorial candidate from a church pulpit, along with half the state’s Republican House delegation. And the Treasury Department under that president is drafting guidance to make exactly those endorsements legal. From that stage, Erika Kirk promised to put her husband’s friend JD Vance in the White House in 2028 “in the most resounding way possible.” A thousand of the seats in front of her were empty. Nobody wrote the $500,000 check for a Trump selfie, and the IRS is not on its way.

Drilling for Dominance: How Project 2025 Is Remaking the Arctic

No sitting governor has ever served on the U.S. Arctic Research Commission (USARC). That changed on April 14, when Trump appointed Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The appointment follows 16 months of personnel moves and budget cuts, and it tracks with Project 2025’s blueprint for the commission: less climate science, more drilling off the coast of Alaska.

Since 2019, Alaska has paid Mary Vought $5,000 a month on a no-bid public relations contract that has been extended or amended eight times without public justification. She is the ex-wife of Russell Vought, Project 2025’s key architect and current Office of Management and Budget director. Until this month, she also ran strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation, the organization that produced Project 2025. The Spectator reported that she left with what the magazine described as a $500,000 payout and a non-disclosure agreement. Weeks later, Dunleavy got the Arctic seat.

Dunleavy has been a Trump ally since 2018. In 2021, Trump endorsed his reelection on the condition that the endorsement would be null and void if the governor backed Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who had voted to convict Trump at his impeachment trial. Dunleavy accepted the terms. Former USARC Chairman Mead Treadwell told Alaska Public that the new seat gives Dunleavy a platform to press the Interior Department on energy and critical minerals projects across the more than 520,000 square kilometers of extended continental shelf that the State Department mapped north of Alaska in 2023.

The Project 2025 blueprint for this is explicit. The document calls the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency most responsible for Arctic climate monitoring, a driver of climate alarmism that should be broken up and downsized, with the preponderance of its climate research disbanded. It declares a federal obligation to develop oil, gas, and coal resources, and calls for reopening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas exploration, expanding the Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve, and reexamining national marine sanctuaries for mineral extraction. Russell Vought wrote the chapter on the Executive Office of the President. In it, he calls for eliminating climate change from the National Security Council’s agenda and for reviewing flag-officer promotions so that military careers do not advance on the basis of concerns about newly opened Arctic sea passages.

The personnel changes came first, and they ran in the family. Paul Dans directed Project 2025 itself at Heritage from April 2022 until August 2024. In December 2025, Trump installed Paul’s brother, Thomas Emanuel Dans, as USARC chairman. Tom Dans is not a scientist. He is a venture capitalist from Sugar Land, Texas, who worked on Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation as a visiting fellow in its Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, and who went on to found American Daybreak, a nonprofit that organized controversial visits to Greenland as part of the president’s push to acquire the island.

Under Dans, the commission’s July 2025 report reframed its entire portfolio through four “security” sectors — military, community, energy, and economy — with climate science stripped out as a standalone priority. Arctic researcher Michael Walsh at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich told High North News that the report had reduced U.S. Arctic interests to national safety and security alone.

The personnel changes rolled in first. The science cuts followed. In May 2025, NOAA decommissioned its snow and ice data products, ending support for datasets tracking sea ice extent back to 1850, the World Glacier Inventory’s 130,000 glaciers, and the photographic records of glacier retreat — cuts that followed directly from Project 2025’s prescriptions. In September 2025, the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States shuttered after nearly four decades, a direct casualty of Vought’s 56 percent cut to National Science Foundation funding. The Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and the University of Minnesota’s Polar Geospatial Center also closed. Climate scientist Rick Thoman at the University of Alaska Fairbanks identified the common thread in NOAA’s data cuts: every canceled dataset tracked change over time.

There is no Project 2025 chapter on Arctic militarization. There doesn’t have to be. NOAA is gutted in the commerce chapter. Drilling is mandated in the energy chapter. Climate is pulled off the National Security Council in Vought’s chapter on the Executive Office. Sixteen months into the administration, the commission that used to track vanishing sea ice is mapping the seabed for what can be pulled out of it.

Banned for Thee, Not for Me: As Schools Pull Angelou, Amazon Puts Raspail Back on the Shelf

A parent in Escambia County, Florida, can file a form and get Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings pulled from her child’s school library by the end of the week. PEN America has counted nearly 23,000 such removals since 2021.

On April 17, a different book was briefly banned. Amazon pulled the paperback of a new translation of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints from its United States listings, citing offensive content. The hardcover followed three days later. By the morning of April 21, both were back, and the paperback had climbed to No. 138 in Amazon’s entire catalog. The reversal took 72 hours. It did not happen by accident.

Raspail’s novel imagines a fleet of a million migrants from Calcutta landing on the French Riviera. Europe, as the book’s readers have known it, ends. The migrants pillage their way violently through France. The novel was out of print in English for most of the Obama years and traded on eBay for $200 a copy. Stephen Miller, now the White House deputy chief of staff, emailed a Breitbart editor about it in September 2015, after Pope Francis spoke up for migrants. The book’s Great Replacement conspiracy theory has surfaced in the manifestos of the Christchurch, El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo mass shooters.

The introduction to the restored edition is written by Nathan Pinkoski, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America (CRA). The CRA was founded by Russell Vought, who now runs the Office of Management and Budget. The CRA sits on the Project 2025 advisory board, as does the Claremont Institute, where Pinkoski publishes. In November 2024, Pinkoski shared a panel with Rod Dreher of the Orbán-aligned Danube Institute titled “Global Replacism: Reading Renaud Camus in and Beyond the French Context.” Camus coined the term “Great Replacement” in 2011.

The reversal came fast because the book’s defenders sit close to the Vice President. Vance’s 35-year-old chief of staff, Jacob Reses, worked “a few feet” from Vought at Heritage Action before joining Vance’s office, according to New York Magazine, which named Miller and Heritage Action’s former Chief Executive Michael Needham among Reses’s close working partners. Needham is now chief of staff to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who in May 2025 moved to open an Office of Remigration inside the State Department, borrowing a term popularized by the Austrian white supremacist activist Martin Sellner.

Vauban Books, Raspail’s American publisher, said the New York Magazine profile of Reses was what prompted Amazon to act.

Vauban Books is run out of a post office box in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Its catalog consists of seven titles. Three are by Renaud Camus, the French writer whose 2011 book, Le Grand Remplacement, gave the movement its name. One Camus volume opens with an elegy for Enoch Powell, the British politician who warned in 1968 that immigration would produce “rivers of blood.” Britain banned Camus himself from entering the country last April.

The sales page for Camp of the Saints on Amazon features a blurb from the far-right French politician Éric Zemmour praising Raspail for foreseeing “the ‘Great Replacement’ of Europe’s peoples.” It has been on the page since July. Amazon has not flagged it.

On April 20, 2026, Pinkoski announced on his Substack that he was now a banned writer. Jack Posobiec, the Human Events podcaster, went on air and told viewers to buy the book anyway. Blaze Media columnist Auron MacIntyre posted that Amazon was “committed to the burning of your fine oak doors” — the novel’s most-quoted passage, in which migrants burn the doors of European homes for warmth. The Federalist’s senior editor, John Daniel Davidson, said the quiet part out loud on April 21: Amazon had pulled the book not for its content but because it is “an extended (and effective) argument for the active defense of western civilization against alien cultures.” Once the listing returned, Pinkoski thanked supporters on X, and Posobiec announced the book was soaring up the bestseller lists.

The novel’s previous American distributor was the Social Contract Press, owned by the late John Tanton, the now deceased Michigan ophthalmologist who built the modern anti-immigrant movement. Raspail’s novel was central to Tanton’s project. Linda Chavez, a Reagan White House official who served as the founding executive director of Tanton’s Federation for American Immigration Reform, resigned in 1988 after his racist memos leaked. Four decades later, the book’s introduction is written by a senior fellow at a Project 2025 think tank whose founder runs the federal budget, and by many accounts, the White House.