Kamala Harris and Dems vilify Project 2025 — but Trump should embrace its winning ideas

Kamala Harris went to Las Vegas over the weekend and flagrantly stole one of Donald Trump’s signature policies: No tax on tips.

Trump, who got the idea for the populist policy from a waitress, responded with a furious Truth Social post and a new nickname: “Copy Cat Kamala … has no ideas, she can only steal from me.”

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it is strange chutzpah for Harris to model herself on a candidate her entire party has spent eight years demonizing as the second coming of Hitler.

It’s all a fraud anyway. She could roll back the draconian new tax compliance regime for hospitality workers the Harris-Biden administration brought in last year. But she’s pretending to be an outsider running against her own government.

Drawing a blank

Harris is presenting herself as a blank slate on policy. Her official campaign website is as bare as her media engagement schedule, apart from a donation tool and a brief bio for herself and running mate Tim Walz.

All Harris has offered to flesh out her ghost candidacy in the past month is a vague promise of getting “an interview scheduled before the end of the month” with one of the many tongue bath specialists in the Democratic media firmament.

By contrast, Trump did a 70-minute, no-holds-barred press conference last week, JD Vance did a muscular blitzkrieg of three Sunday morning news shows, and even the elusive Basement Joe Biden offered himself up to the tender sycophancy of CBS.

On the policy front, Trump has a 20-point platform, Agenda 47, on his campaign website that runs the gamut of vote-winners from “Seal the border and stop the border invasion” to “End inflation and make America affordable again.”

If the election were simply about policies and not “vibes,” Trump would win in a landslide, since Harris owns the stinking baggage of the past four years of inflation, illegal migration, crime and disunity.

Any effort to define a new policy direction, as she has promised to do this week, puts her on a collision course with Biden, whose sole purpose is to defend his legacy to the death (or get Dr. Jill and Hunter to do so on his behalf).

Democrats know that policy is Harris’ Achilles’ heel and that time is running out to add substance to their flimflam candidate before her past — and Biden’s — irrevocably defines her.

That is why they weaponized the Heritage Foundation’s excellent Project 2025. The array of sensible policy suggestions was created by the conservative think tank in 2022, before the GOP primaries, to help guide the thinking of the next Republican administration.

Democrats knew that the policies were popular and lethal to their cause, so they set about systematically destroying Project 2025 in the public mind.

Harris and Walz have lied their heads off about it as a substitute for coming up with their own palatable policies.

Even CNN fact-checked as false Harris’ assertions about Project 2025 at her first campaign rally: “When you read it, you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare. He intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and make working families foot the bill.”

None of that is true.

It worked for Reagan

Walz falsely portrays Project 2025 as some weirdo “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia that bans abortion and IVF, enslaves women and demonizes LGBTQ concerns.

Nothing like that is in the unfairly maligned 900-page book that Heritage put out in April 2023 and that was conceived a year earlier.

Unfortunately, the demonization campaign worked. Trump freaked out and disavowed Project 2025, denouncing it as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The problem is that it contains a vast number of eminently reasonable policies that are based on the common-sense thinking that his campaign embodies.

It overlaps with Trump’s Agenda 47 and is modeled on a similar conservative playbook Heritage produced in 1981 in time for the new Reagan administration.

In response to the Democrats’ dishonest disinformation campaign, Heritage has polled Project 2025’s main policies in swing states.

The polling, revealed here exclusively, shows public perceptions of the project are overwhelmingly positive. In other words, it’s a blueprint for electoral success, not to mention governing magic.

Proposals with the highest support include:

• Require businesses to verify that their employees are legal residents of the United States — 82% support, 13% oppose.

•  Cut the growth of government spending every year to reduce inflation — 81% support, 12% oppose.

• Enforce existing immigration laws, including deporting individuals who have violated these laws — 79% support, 16% oppose.

•  Ensure married couples don’t pay higher taxes than unmarried couples who live together — 74% support, 12% oppose.

Project 2025 might be relegated to the dustbin of history, but any conservative government worth its salt would be implementing a lot of its common-sense proposals.

Unlike Trump, Ronald Reagan embraced Heritage’s original 1981 suggestions, giving a copy to everyone in his cabinet and asking them to see what ideas they might incorporate.

Why wouldn’t you take the best of conservative economic and social policy thought to try to improve the complicated business of government? It’s a no-brainer.