Spencer Chretien, associate director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — The Presidential Transition Project was the guest at the latest stop of We Win, They Lose — America’s Choice, the Budapest-based think tank Center for Fundamental Rights’ event series dedicated to discussing the 2024 US presidential election.
Mr Chretien sat down with Zoltán Koskovics, the Center’s geopolitical analyst for a public discussion last Wednesday, 29 May in Budapest, Hungary.
The guest spoke about Project 2025, describing its aim as ‘getting a head-start early’ in helping a Republican president in the White House, something the Heritage Foundation has always done once a Republican president took office.
‘Project 2025 is about helping to lay the groundwork for hopefully a successful conservative administration beginning in 2025’,
he explained to the audience.
Mr Chretien also told of Mandate for Leadership, a book series by the Heritage Foundation, the first issue of which was given to President-elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. It seems to have worked wonderfully, as four years later, he won re-election in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history, taking 49 out of the 50 states. As the speaker pointed out, there are many parallels between the presidencies of incumbent President Joe Biden and President Jimmy Carter, whom Reagan beat in 1980.
‘In 1980 in the United States we were wrapping up the one-term administration of an unpopular Democratic president. We had an energy crisis, we had an immigration crisis, there was an economic decline in our country, and a lot of the circumstances we see today,’ Mr Chretien said. A copy of the latest issue of Mandate for Leadership was also given to President-elect Trump in 2016, as well as every candidate in the 2024 Republican primary.
Going back to Project 2025, the speaker explained that one of its main missions is to train the hopefully incoming Republican president and his staff how to cut through the Washington bureaucracy, which is ‘95 per cent Democrat,’ and actually get things done, ‘so we are not only in government but also in power,’ as he put it. Mr Koskovics pointed out that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán expressed similar sentiment after he lost his first re-election bid after serving his first term in office in 1998–2002.
Mr Chretien went on to talk about how it took the first Trump Administration, in which he served, two years to figure out how to navigate through the Washington bureaucracy; and proclaimed that the second Trump administration would attempt a ‘civil service reform’ to make the system more effective and to ‘reduce the size and scope’ of the federal government.
‘Everybody is talking about threats to democracy, but the threat to democracy occurs when the incumbent administration indicts their political opponent,
coordinates four different indictments of their political opponent,’ Mr Chretien noted referring to President Trump’s current legal troubles, not knowing at the time that his trial in New York City, New York would soon end in a felony conviction. However, he added: ‘I think President Trump will overcome it.’
As for the speculation that President Biden may not run for re-election after all and Democrats would hastily find a new nominee, Mr Chretien was very dismissive, saying that he believes the Democrats are now ‘stuck with Biden’.
When asked why he decided to visit Hungary, Mr Chretien replied: ‘It is very important that we cooperate with our conservative friends. And I think there is no country other than Hungary where you really have as much of a shining example of what a conservative government can do.’
You Can Watch the Center for Fundamental Rights’ Event in Full Below
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