President-elect Donald Trump announced a series of Cabinet appointments this week, including naming GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as his nominee to be secretary of state.
“Democratic Wins Media,” a self-described online community with accounts on X, Threads, and Bluesky, has claimed that Rubio said the second Trump administration would “lean heavily into” Project 2025, a public policy manual organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“Donald Trump just announced that Senator Marco Rubio will be his Secretary of State,” the account posted to X and Threads on Monday. “Here is Rubio admitting the Trump Presidency will lean heavily into the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plans. Retweet so every American sees this clip.” The tweet of the video has accumulated more than 900,000 views.
But the claim is false—the C-SPAN video clip in the posts is from 2015. The video clip was first shared on social media in July by the official rapid response X account for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, when Rubio was reportedly among the finalists to become Trump’s running mate. “Unearthed video,” the account tweeted with the video clip. “Trump VP contender Marco Rubio says the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025, ‘serves as a guidepost for a lot of the public policy we choose to make.’”
The video clip is taken from April 15, 2015, where Rubio and fellow GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah were invited to the Heritage Foundation to discuss their plans for federal tax policy reforms. Rubio had announced his 2016 candidacy for president only two days prior to the Heritage event, and it marked one of his earliest public appearances as a candidate. “Thank you to Heritage for inviting us here, giving us this opportunity, and for all the scholarship that they do here,” Rubio said in the clip, “that really serves as a guidepost for a lot of the public policy we choose to make.”
Project 2025 became a lightning rod for criticism from the left over the summer, much of it based on false claims of what was in it, as The Dispatch Fact Check reported in July. But the Heritage Foundation has published similar policy proposals for decades. Project 2025 is the latest installment of Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership series. The first entry was published in 1981, ahead of Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration. Heritage published other entries in the series in 1985, 1988, 2000, 2005, 2016, and 2020. The conservative think tank also published one in 1996 during the Clinton administration, designed as a blueprint for that term’s GOP majority Congress.
However, Rubio did not mention the Mandate for Leadership series at any point during the 45-minute event at Heritage from which the viral video clip was taken.
Donald Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 in the wake of the negative attention it received during the campaign season, and has not mentioned it publicly since his election. (He has named two people who contributed to Project 2025 to posts in his administration, Thomas Homan as border czar and John Ratcliffe as CIA director. Ratcliffe must be confirmed by the Senate.)
Over the summer, Rubio also stated that Project 2025 had no association with Trump’s campaign. “Think tanks do think tank stuff, they come up with ideas, they say things,” Rubio said in a July on CNN with Dana Bash when asked about the conservative policy blueprint. “Look, I like Heritage Foundation. I agree with some of the things they stand for, but there’s a bunch of scholars and people to turn around and work on different projects. But our candidate for president is Donald Trump.”
When asked by Bash whether Project 2025 was “ideological lunacy,” Rubio responded, “No, I think it’s the work of a think tank—of a center-right think tank—and that’s what think tanks do.”
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