The former director of Project 2025, a right-wing plan for what Donald J. Trump could achieve in a second term, has slammed the Trump campaign, accusing his top two advisers of a series of missteps, lack of preparation and hubris that he says have jeopardized Trump’s chances in November.
The criticism marks the first public statement from Paul Dans, a longtime Trump supporter, since he announced his departure from Project 2025 in late July. Dans oversaw the project for more than two years until Democrats made the proposals public and turned it into a political liability for Trump. The former president ultimately rejected the venture.
In an interview, Mr. Dans, a lawyer who served in various roles in the final two years of the Trump administration, blamed Mr. Trump’s senior advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, for the episode and the neck-and-neck race, and urged Mr. Trump to replace the two advisers.
“Trump should be running like Secretariat at the Belmont, but instead it's a close race,” Mr. Dans said.
His complaints reflect a discontent that has been simmering for weeks among a faction of Trump’s supporters on the right. Several media figures, activists and former Trump administration officials say they are troubled by what they see as strategic missteps this summer, followed by the campaign’s centrist outreach in an attempt to win over swing voters.
As is customary in Mr. Trump’s circle, the complaints are rarely, if ever, directed at the former president himself, but instead at his top advisers. They recently became so loud that the hashtag #FireLaCivita briefly trended on the social media network X.
A summer of discord also marked Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. In those races, Trump responded by shaking up his campaign leadership. This year, Trump has given no indication that he plans to sideline his top advisers in the final weeks of the race.
“Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita have done a tremendous job, and I couldn’t be more pleased with them,” Trump said in a statement to DailyExpertNews in response to Dans’ comments.
Trump has, however, brought in additional advisers. Last month, he added Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager Trump fired in 2016, to the team. He has also recently sought advice from Ben Carson, Trump’s former housing secretary, as well as independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and billionaire Elon Musk.
Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles, both longtime Republican insiders, have forged close ties to key figures on the right, including Russell T. Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, and Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA.
In an interview, Mr. Kirk pushed back against Mr. Dans's criticism: “Chris and Susie are very competent, sophisticated and loyal to the president. I think they've got their heads in the game. We're in a good position and they deserve a lot of credit for that.”
Raheem Kassam, editor in chief of The National Pulse, a right-wing news site, and a frequent host of Stephen K. Bannon's popular podcast “War Room,” is among those who have been calling for a leadership change for months.
In an interview, Mr. Kassam called himself the “ombudsman” and “chief public whip” for the loosely knit group of people — most of whom have refused to speak publicly for fear of retaliation — who remain concerned about the state of the campaign. He portrayed Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles as those most concerned about their potential for personal gain from the campaign. “I really don't think Chris and Susie care if they win. I've never had that vibe,” he said.
Both Mr. Dans and Mr. Kassam said they viewed Mr. LaCivita as insufficiently committed to Mr. Trump’s movement and his false claims of a stolen election in 2020. They complained that advisers were unprepared for President Biden to withdraw from the race, and that Mr. Trump’s positions on policy issues, including abortion and trade, have alienated significant parts of the party base, dampening enthusiasm.
But no issue is as contentious for dissident loyalists as the approach to Project 2025.
At the heart of the Heritage Foundation-funded project, Mr. Dans said, was a database of about 20,000 party loyalists who had been vetted and were ready to fill positions in a Republican administration. “The focus was on draining the swamp,” he said.
But most public attention has focused on the 900-plus page policy book called 'Mandate for Leadership'.
Although Democrats first embraced the document a year ago, it didn't gain traction as a line of attack until early July, when Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a podcast interview that the country was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left lets it.”
The comment went viral and three days later, Trump used Truth Social to disavow Project 2025, claiming he had “no idea who was behind it” and that “some of the things they’re saying are just ridiculous and horrible.”
Mr. Dans said he was surprised by the report, calling it an unintended signal to Democrats to push harder to tie Mr. Trump to Project 2025.
“They took the bait,” Mr. Dans said of the campaign leadership, pointing to comments Mr. LaCivita made at the Republican National Convention, where he called Project 2025 a “pain in the ass” and said the people behind it “do not speak for the campaign.”
The strategy raised concerns among loyalists, who interpreted it as the campaign excluding anyone involved in Project 2025 from a possible transition. Those fears were underscored when the campaign appointed Linda McMahon, president of the America First Policy Institute, to the transition team. The group, a conservative think tank, has been working on a transition blueprint entirely separate from Project 2025’s.
Tim Chapman, president of the conservative policy group Advancing American Freedom, called Project 2025's approach a “rude awakening to the realities of politics.”
He said he was even more concerned about some recent policy positions, including what he sees as a more moderate stance on abortion and proposals for 20 percent tariffs on imported goods. Both ideas, he said, reflected a shift to the center in an effort to appeal to independent voters but risked alienating the party's base.
“The campaign is made up of political animals who don't care about the ideological wing of the conservative movement,” Chapman said.
Another point of contention was the Trump campaign’s debate strategy. In April, Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles pushed to hold the first debate between Mr. Trump and President Biden earlier than the planned September showdown. The campaign ultimately decided to hold the first debate in late June.
Mr. Dans and others said the timing was a mistake. Mr. Biden’s disastrous performance led to him dropping out of the race, but with enough time for Democrats to select a new candidate and build momentum behind Vice President Kamala Harris.
Neither adviser seemed to believe the president would actually drop out. In July, just 11 days before Biden's departure, LaCivita was quoted in The Atlantic as saying that Biden “doesn't look like he's going anywhere.”
Mr. Dans called that a sign of arrogance. “They pushed Biden off the stage and they had no plans for Harris,” Mr. Dans said. “That amounts to historic campaign malpractice.”
Despite the campaign commotion and Democratic enthusiasm, recent polls have shown Mr Trump in a solid position — essentially neck and neck with Ms Harris. Tuesday night’s debate is a chance to make more ground.
“I understand the election is close, but I don’t think it has anything to do with Chris and Susie,” said Mr. Vought, who is president of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank that contributed to Project 2025. “They ran a great campaign.”
Since leaving Project 2025 in mid-August, Mr. Dans said he had been working on “election integrity” issues to support Mr. Trump, but he declined to provide details. He said he still hoped Mr. Trump would win in November and finish the projects he started during his first term.
One, he said, was the reinstatement of Schedule F, a new federal job classification that Mr. Dans played a key role in pushing through in late 2020. The change made it easier to fire thousands of government workers on ideological grounds, but was repealed by President Biden.
But Dans feared that Trump was losing too much support from grassroots conservatives.
“Who's going to vote? Who's going to fight for you?” Mr. Dans said. “There's no transition without a win and there's no win without those loyalists putting their boots on the ground.”
