Just days after suspending his run for the White House and endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an interview with Tucker Carlson he has been asked to join the ex-president’s presidential transition team and “help pick” the administration officials in charge of running the government.

Although Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s extremist and now-toxic Project 2025, what RFK Jr. is describing is central to what Project 2025 was designed to do: Heritage calls its nearly 900-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” a “Presidential Transition Project.”

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” explains The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 website. “This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.”

ProPublica earlier this month explained, “The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.”

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Enter RFK Jr., an attorney, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, and HIV/AIDS denialist. Despite having initially launched his 2024 campaign as a Democrat, the Kennedy scion denounced by some of his family members is apparently familiar with Project 2025.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Democrat populist running for president as an independent, has a copy of Heritage’s ‘Mandate for Leadership’ on his desk. He attributes his own study of Heritage’s plan as an effort to collect ‘all of these different points of view about wasteful programs in government that could be eliminated,'” Deseret News reported in December of 2023. “Kennedy denies that he’s had any conversations with Project 2025, but he left the door open.”

Last month the progressive political action committee MoveOn commented on the report, writing: “That doesn’t seem like reference material a so-called ‘independent’ candidate would need to have.” 

The progressive group’s spokesperson Britt Jacovich wrote: “RFK Jr. has told us he’s open to using MAGA’s Project 2025 playbook for inspiration. That’s troubling and disqualifying. The Trump and Heritage Foundation effort would gut checks and balances and give MAGA full rein to ban abortions and end the rule of law by allowing the Justice Department to prosecute Trump’s political enemies.”

“You either support Trump and Project 2025, or you don’t,” Jacovich added. “By spoiling the race and reelecting Trump, he’d all but ensure this hellscape would become the law of the land.”

Project 2025 also appears to be familiar with RFK Jr.

Last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, James Bacon, described in the WSJ as “a senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project,” penned a piece titled, “2024 Presidential Candidates Against the Administrative State.”

“Trump, DeSantis and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” he wrote, “recognize the need to reassert political control.”

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” he added, “began his White House bid by saying he’d ‘take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'”

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Fast forward to last week.

Paul Dans, the former Heritage official who was head of Project 2025 until he “stepped down amid intense criticism including from the former president,” as CNN reported his exit at the end of July, is supportive of RFK Jr.

“I can’t tell you how many MAGA people that I work with, really the hardcore, the most based, who are huge RFK Jr. fans,” Dans said last week, Media Matters reported. “And they kind of were always kind of talking about it. But, remember, RFK Jr. went and interviewed for a job in 2016 at Trump Tower. So, you know, their relationship goes back years. Obviously there’s a lot that doesn’t — some of his positions aren’t square with America First, traditional America First. But certainly, there’s no one better, I think, in the entire country to take on the administrative state, particularly HHS.”

In his interview with far-right host Tucker Carlson, RFK Jr. says, “I’ve been asked to go on to the transition team to help pick the people who will be running the government.”

Watch below or at this link.

RFK Jr tells Tucker Carlson that Trump asked him to join his transition team to “help pick the people who will be running the government”

Vote!pic.twitter.com/n2Nn2BRr2h

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 27, 2024

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The four-night Democratic National Convention concluded Thursday with Kamala Harris’s speech accepting her party’s nomination for President, and a massive balloon drop, as the polls show the Vice President continuing to beat and increase her lead against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

After Monday night’s four-minute standing ovation of President Joe Biden, with Chicago’s United Center arena filled with thousands of cheering supporters shouting “We love Joe,” Los Angeles Times‘ columnist LZ Granderson wrote those “deafening chants” really meant, “We love American values.”

American values were the centerpiece of the Democrats’ convention.

Vice presidential nominee Governor Tim Walz “sought to turn Republican arguments on their head while making an appeal for common sense rooted in his Midwestern values,” the Associated Press wrote after the third night. “’When they were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,’ he jabbed.”

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“The differences between Harris’ speech in Chicago and the one Trump delivered last month at the Republican convention in Milwaukee could not have been more stark — and set the stage for the sprint to the November 5 election, with head-to-head confrontations in debates yet to come,” CNN reported Friday. “Vice President Kamala Harris capped one of the most extraordinary months in modern political history Thursday night with a speech that rallied Democrats around themes of patriotism — and cast Donald Trump as the enemy of classic American principles.”

But over at The Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan, the former President Ronald Reagan speechwriter, had a different take.

“Kamala Harris’s speech was fine, and delivered with assurance. I prefer ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ to ‘Never do anything half-assed,’ but tastes vary,” was Noonan’s opening salvo, criticizing the Vice President for sharing a direct quote from her late beloved mother, whom she and her sister had paid homage to on stage during the convention.

Harris on her mom: “She taught Maya and me a lesson that Michelle mentioned the other night. She taught us to never complain about injustice, but do something about it. Do something about it. And she also taught us: Never do anything half-assed.” pic.twitter.com/yKuides37K

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 23, 2024

To her credit, Noonan’s piece is titled, “Kamala Harris Gets Off to a Strong Start,” and she offered up this comparison of Democrats vs. Republicans, or at least their parties:

“The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.”

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But Noonan is being resoundingly chastised for this allegation: Democrats “stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own.”

The Washington Post‘s Mariana Alfaro on Tuesday had reported: “The Democratic Party is presenting a message that there is ‘nothing more American than freedom,’ Democratic National Committee spokesman Abhi Rahman said.”

“’There’s no reason for us to be afraid of using those symbols, because those symbols are our symbols and there’s nobody that’s more proud to be American than we are,’ Rahman said.”

Hakeem Jeffries just delivered one of the best speeches of the DNC. Crowd on its feet, cheering USA. This is what patriotism looks like! pic.twitter.com/YLNdLkPnMQ

— Ben Friedman (@BenFriedman) August 22, 2024

Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn responded to Noonan:”Stole? No one has an exclusive claim to patriotism.”

Former political science professor and attorney Carol Schultz Vento wrote: “My WW paratrooper dad was a patriot and person of faith and a Democrat before Peggy Noonan was born. The Republicans can no longer hijack those values from the rest of us.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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On night one of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the words on a massive screen just before Vice President Kamala Harris in a surprise move walked out on stage read: “For the people, for our future.” Throughout the week the convention has showcased the strength of the Democratic bench, according to numerous experts.

Thursday’s final Democratic National Convention night will showcase some next-generation Democratic leaders, while using those speaking slots to try to protect the Senate Democratic majority, which Vice President Kamala Harris will likely need to be an effective president should she win the 2024 election just 75 days from now.

Despite complaints the evenings have been too packed with a wide, diverse swath of Democratic talent, the DNC so far this week has been heralded as one of the best in recent memory by political observers and experts and former government officials.

“Party conventions usually are scripted, ‘life-like,’ deadly bores – regardless of party,” wrote former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann, a popular MSNBC legal analyst. “Is it just me, or is this the best friggin convention we have ever seen? Inventive, inspiring, energizing.”

“It is the best convention in my lifetime and I have been to several,” responded Mike Walker, formerly an official at the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and at FEMA.

“This DNC convention is so hopeful, energetic, positive, and forward looking. One of the best conventions I have ever seen. Dems have amazing talent,” observed Olga Lautman, an expert of authoritarianism and fascism.

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Talent is always on the menu at political conventions.

The list of speakers for Thursday night’s DNC leading up to presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s highly-anticipated speech includes two current Cabinet Secretaries, five current U.S. Senators, three current governors, and ten current and former members of Congress, according to Scripps News’s Congressional Correspondent Nathaniel Reed.

Among them are three U.S. Representatives who are running for the U.S. Senate: Elissa Slotkin (MI), Colin Allred (TX), and Rubén Gallego (AZ).

Also speaking Thursday night are: U.S. Representatives Joe Neguse (CO), Lucy McBath (GA), Katherine Clark (MA), Maxwell Frost (FL), and Democratic Caucus Vice Chair Ted Lieu (CA). Two governors, Gretchen Whitmer (MI) and Roy Cooper (NC), and U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, who were on the short list for possible vice-presidential running mates, will all also be speaking Thursday night.

“The Harris-Walz campaign,” Axios on Wednesday reported, “is staring at tough odds for keeping the Senate and wants to do whatever it can to help.”

“The party needs non-incumbent nominees like Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), Ruben Gallego (Arizona) and Colin Allred (Texas) to win in November if it has any shot of keeping its Senate majority.”

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Political consultant Stuart Stevens, a Lincoln Project member and a former Republican, is praising the Democratic bench.

“I’ve spent a lot of my life sizing up political talent. The secret of success as a political consultant is working for candidates who are going to win anyway. The talent disparity between the Dem[ocratic] and R[epublican] parties is like nothing I’ve seen. What happened? R’s became more white, more evangelical, more angry when the rest of the country was becoming less white, more secular and more optimistic. The better candidates were drawn to the D party,” Stevens wrote.

“Trump exposed the Republican party as a fraud and now you have freaks like [Silicon Valley billionaires] Peter Thiel and Elon Musk picking a freak like J.D. Vance,” he added. “It takes a long time to develop talent and the R’s have squandered decades.”

Longtime reporter James Fallows, a former White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, responded, writing: “Like my friend @StuartpStevens, I’ve watched political talent emerge since the 1970s.”

“The Dems have had rich next-generation rosters at several points before. (Look at their primaries 1988 & 1992. Look at the ‘Watergate babies’ who ran Congress for a couple of decades.) But current crop exceptionally talented, promising, diverse. Just think of half-dozen all-plausible VP possibilities for KH. Look at all these governors,” he noted.

“The Repubs have a North Korean-style wasteland of next-gen survivors. Consider: Tim Scott vs Wes Moore,” he aded, referring to South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Scott and the Democratic governor of Maryland, Wes Moore.

He also set up comparisons between South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem vs. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Republican former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy vs. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, all rumored to have been on VP short lists.

Trump running mate U.S. Senator JD Vance vs. Harris running mate Governor Tim Walz.

House Republican Caucus Chair, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY) vs. U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (MI).

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis vs. California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, both considered possible presidential candidates.

“Crab-style, they’ll all scramble up to say they never really believed in Trump once the air finally goes out of him,” Fallows wrote. “But it’s been like one of those fires that removes all the substantial tree growth from a forest. Will take a long time to recover.”

“Maybe the last time there was a gap like this was right after the Civil War,” he observed.

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