The Trump campaign has spent several months trying to distance themselves from Project 2025, a conservative think tank-based project to suggest policy positions and staff for a second Trump Administration. Project 2025 has always been staffed with Trump veterans, but the Trump campaign, seeing how unpopular many of those ideas are, has run in the other direction.
However, continuing connections keep emerging. And the latest is a Project 2025 staffer advising J.D. Vance in preparation for the vice presidential debate.
According to The New Republic, Monica Crowley, a longtime conservative movement figure and one-time Fox News fixture, is among the prep team for the upcoming VP debate. Crowley is listed as a contributor in Project 2025’s policy book. Crowley served in the Trump Administration as assistant secretary of the Treasury for public affairs. The report said Crowley is portraying the moderator in debate prep.
New: Inside JD Vance’s debate prep sessions
A mock debate will happen this week with Tom Emmer playing Tim Walz and Monica Crowley playing the debate moderator.
– Jason Miller and Usha Vance playing a key role in the “murder board” sessions. https://t.co/YVgeXljeoy
— Reese Gorman (@reesejgorman) September 23, 2024
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Crowley has also been controversial for other reasons: In 2017, Politico reported that she had plagiarized parts of her PhD dissertation and lifted more than 50 passages from her 2010 book What the (Bleep) Just Happened. This caused her not to accept the original position with the National Security Council, although she later took the position with the Treasury Department outside of the White House instead.
On Fox News at the time, Crowley played victim and stated that her plagiarism had been “debunked”:
Monica Crowley, in her 1st tv hit since @KFILE @chrismassie @natemcdermott exposed her plagiarism says what happened to her was “despicable” pic.twitter.com/Ia1pW1z0mY
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) March 8, 2017
A series of scandals this year about prominent academics caught plagiarizing does not appear to have reflected poorly on Crowley. In addition to helping Vance, she recently stumped for Trump in Arizona, although the media outlet In Maricopa erroneously described her as a former cabinet member; the assistant secretary of the Treasury for public affairs is not a cabinet-level position.
While Donald Trump, not a man known for getting into the weeds policy-wise, has claimed to know nothing about Project 2025, Vance seems more committed to the Project’s goals.
The vice presidential nominee wrote the forward for Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, an upcoming book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who has been described as the mastermind of Project 2025. Roberts was back in the news this week, for having told colleagues that he once killed a dog with a shovel.
“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote in the forward to the book.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune photo library.
