Project 2025, GOP platform blast California, teeing up critiques of Biden stand-ins

At the start of Project 2025’s conservative playbook for a second Trump presidency, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts took aim at leaders who he said wield power to “serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second.”

He mentioned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un comfortably ruling over an impoverished nation, “billionaire climate activists” flying on private jets while criticizing carbon-emitting cars, and two “COVID-19 shutdown politicians” in California who were seen out and about — at a hair salon and a fancy restaurant — while calling on their constituents to stay home.

Name-dropping U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom in the conservative right’s blueprint for the White House was a way for Roberts to tie them, and California, to the idea that out-of-touch coastal elites are ruining the country.

That notion — well worn in American politics — appears throughout the Project 2025 plan, a wonky, 900-plus-page manifesto released last year by conservative thought leaders and Trump acolytes.

The idea is also evoked more subtly in the much snappier, 16-page Republican Party platform spearheaded by Trump and adopted by party officials last week, which criticizes American politicians who “insulated themselves from criticism and the consequences of their own bad actions” while average Americans suffered.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-07-14/under-project-2025-or-the-gop-platform-a-trump-win-will-mean-federal-war-on-california