A hidden camera video featuring a key Project 2025 proponent and a former Trump administration official details that the project is still alive and running, despite claims by others that work on it stopped weeks ago.

Project 2025 is a manifesto organized by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative groups that aims to provide a framework for how Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, should transform the government and its agencies if he wins office this fall.

Among the coalition’s many wish list items are rolling back protections for LGBTQ people, further weakening reproductive rights, privatizing Medicare, abolishing the Department of Education, and eliminating the federal civil service program. The goal is to require employees to pledge loyalty to the president rather than the public institutions they serve.

The document also contains ideals familiar to the Christian nationalist and white supremacist movements, and at least five of the authors have expressed views of the latter movement in the past.

Trump himself has notable ties to the document – ​​at least 140 people who helped draft Project 2025 have worked for him in the past, and in 2022 he appeared at a Heritage Foundation event where he praised the group’s coordination in drafting the project and said it was “laying the groundwork” for the future of conservatism in the US.

However, in the face of negative news reports and opinion polls showing public dissatisfaction with the document, Trump and his campaign team sought to distance themselves from it, claiming to be unaffiliated with the initiative and refusing to support any of the ideas it contains – even though Trump’s own Agenda 47 borrows many of its core points from Project 2025.

Late last month, Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, said the group would slow down its work ahead of the election.

New evidence from a hidden camera from someone deeply involved in Project 2025 suggests the opposite: work on the project is still ongoing, but not public.

Russell Vought, a former Trump administration official who served as head of the Office of Management and Budget and was a co-author/contributor to Project 2025, recently spoke with two men he thought were related to a conservative donor about the document. The two men were actually journalists from a British nonprofit called the Center for Climate Reporting and secretly recorded Vought discussing Project 2025 in a Washington, DC hotel room. The reporters posted videos of their conversations with Vought on YouTube.

In the video, Vought describes the creation of “shadow” agencies for a new Trump administration. He also explains that far from distancing himself from the project, Trump is “very supportive of what we’re doing,” and that the former president “blessed” Vought’s own organization, the far-right Center for Renewing America, which continues Project 2025’s work behind closed doors.

Vought also told reporters that his organization is preparing hundreds of executive orders and other action plans for Trump that should be immediately ready for implementation in the White House should he win the election and be sworn in as president on January 20.

“Eighty percent of my time is spent developing plans for how we can take control of the agencies of the government when Trump takes office,” Vought told reporters. “We’re working diligently on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ sense of independence from the president … or figuring out how the deportation would work.”

“The relationship” with Trump “is great,” he later assured journalists.

Vought also said Trump could easily use his new powers and reshape the government as he sees fit, even going so far as to suggest he could use military force against Americans who rebel.

Trump will have the power to “use the military to maintain law and order throughout the United States,” Vought said, adding that it was “important for him to remember that and for his lawyers to affirm that.”

Vought stressed in his meeting with the journalists that Christian nationalism is an ideal he proudly represents and suggested that a new Trump administration (and Republicans in general) should focus less on general “religious freedom” and instead more “argue that we are a Christian nation.” Vought said:

I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation. And my position is mainly that I would probably be Christian nationalism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I believe in nationalism too.

Vought also called for the country to move away from the idea of ​​”multiculturalism,” saying this was necessary to implement the largest deportation policy in the country’s history against immigrants currently living in the United States.

Vought also expressed no concerns that Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025 or its ideals, but viewed these moves as purely strategic for his presidential campaign.

“I see him very, very consciously distancing himself from a brand,” Vought said. “It’s interesting that he actually doesn’t even oppose a particular policy.”

Responding to Vought’s statements and views revealed in the video, Alex Floyd, rapid response director for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), said this was further proof that Trump still supports Project 2025.

“Behind closed doors, Project 2025 Chief Architect Russ Vought confirmed that Donald Trump has ‘blessed’ the work of Project 2025 architects as they work on ‘phase two’ of their dangerous MAGA design,” Floyd said in a press release signed with Truth“Trump’s MAGA lackey Russell Vought is saying loudly what Americans have seen all along: The Project 2025 agenda is the Trump-Vance team’s plan to erode checks and balances, ban abortion nationwide, and raise taxes on the middle class.”