Donald Trump’s protests aside, his agenda has plenty of overlap with Project 2025

Atlanta: Donald Trump insists that Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page blueprint for a hard-right turn in American government and society, does not reflect his priorities for a White House encore.

“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it — purposefully,” the Republican presidential nominee said September 10 on the debate stage.

Yet from economics, immigration and education policy to civil rights and foreign affairs, there are common ideas and shared ideology between Project 2025 and Trump’s outline for another term — from his official “Agenda 47” slate, the Republican platform he personally approved and his other statements. There are also differences: Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation and written by many conservatives who worked in or with Trump’s administration, offers more particulars on some issues than the former president.

Here’s a look at how Trump’s 2024 campaign and Project 2025 align and deviate:

Key tax proposals could benefit the wealthy

TRUMP: His tax policies lean broadly toward corporations and wealthier Americans. That’s mostly due to his promise to extend his 2017 overhaul while lowering the corporate rate to 15 per cent from the current 21 per cent. He also would end Inflation Reduction Act levies that are financing energy measures intended to combat climate change.

Those ideas aside, Trump has put more emphasis on his plans aimed at working- and middle-class Americans: exempting earned tips, Social Security payments and overtime wages from income taxes. His proposal on tips, however, could give a back-door tax break to top wage earners by allowing them to reclassify some pay as tip income — a prospect that, at its most extreme, could see hedge-fund managers or top attorneys taking advantage of a provision Trump frames as an aid to restaurant servers, bartenders and other service workers.

PROJECT 2025: The document goes further than Trump, calling for two federal income tax rates — 15 per cent and 30 per cent — while eliminating most deductions and credits. It envisions a “nearly flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction” by adjusting what income is subjected to the payroll taxes that pay for Social Security and Medicare.

An effectively flat tax federally would increase the overall share of taxes paid by poorer and middle-class Americans. That’s because many state and local tax codes, anchored by transactional taxes and flatter income taxes, are more regressive than current federal income tax brackets.

Project 2025 also calls for requiring a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise corporate or individual income taxes in the future.

Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration limits

TRUMP: “Build the wall!” from 2016 has become creating “the largest mass deportation programme in history.” Trump calls for enlisting National Guard and police, though he’s not said how he’d ensure they target only people in the US illegally. He has pitched “ideological screening” for would-be entrants and ending birthright citizenship (which likely would require a constitutional change).