Amr Bo Shanab

Editor's note: Today’s American right has radically changed since Donald Trump’s political emergence. What’s less well understood is that the right is still transforming rapidly, and that the movement is in a vastly different — and more radical — place than it was even four years ago. Today, Vox is launching The present — and future — of the American right, a series featuring eight new stories, publishing today and tomorrow, that explain the current state of the movement: its dominant ideologies, its newest obsessions, its defining thinkers, and its latest policy positions.

First up, Today, Explained brings you Andrew Prokop’s look at Project 2025’s sweeping anti-abortion agenda and how Trump has — and hasn’t — helped to shape it. 

Since it unexpectedly became a viral phenomenon earlier this year, Project 2025 has loomed extraordinarily large over the presidential campaign.

On the debate stage, Kamala Harris called it “a detailed and dangerous plan” that Donald Trump “intends on implementing if he were elected again.”

Trump, meanwhile, insists we should pay no attention to that 922-page policy plan behind the curtain, claiming that he has “nothing to do” with it and has “no idea who is behind” it.

In reality, Project 2025, an initiative put together last year by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to plan for the next GOP administration, was shaped by longtime close allies of Trump. Detailed planning for a second Trump term agenda along these lines is very real, and though the Project 2025 initiative itself has seemingly fizzled out, other groups have picked up the slack.

Furthermore, many of Project 2025’s key proposals — to centralize presidential power, crack down on unauthorized immigrants, deprioritize fighting climate change, and eliminate the Department of Education — are fully and openly supported by Trump.

Yet Trump’s intentions are less clear on a vitally important issue where Project 2025 made some particularly extreme proposals: abortion.

The project’s plan called for using presidential power to aggressively restrict abortions in several ways. Trump, wary of these proposals’ unpopularity, has said during the campaign that he won’t support some of them. He also evidently feels hesitant to outright disavow the social conservatives who have long been a key part of his base.

Harris, meanwhile, wants to associate Trump with the most extreme version of the conservative anti-abortion agenda. “Understand in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion ban,” she said at the debate.

That isn’t strictly true. It doesn’t call explicitly for a ban, but does include a proposal that some experts say could lead to a “backdoor abortion ban.”  

At the moment, Trump is caught between his fear of electoral defeat if he backs social conservatives’ unpopular ideas and his desire to reward their loyalty to him and keep them by his side.  

If he wins, the question will be whether Trump feels freed up to reward his longtime allies with control over federal abortion policy, much as he did last time around when he appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.

While Trump may not have been personally involved in Project 2025, much of it was clearly written in the hope of appealing to him. The group’s key policy document conspicuously avoids taking sides on key issues where Trump has broken with conservative dogma, like trade and the future of Social Security and Medicare. 

But the one issue where they really got out in front of Trump, it seems, is abortion. 

Project 2025’s policy plan was put together in the months after the Supreme Court achieved social conservatives’ long-held priority of overturning Roe v. Wade. It argues that abortion should be understood as the murder of unborn children, and it wants to use federal power to cut down further on abortions.

“Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, wrote in the foreword to Project 2025’s policy plan.

The plan recommends many anti-abortion policies, but three in particular stand out.

1) Enforcing the Comstock Act: Project 2025 calls for prosecuting “providers and distributors of abortion pills that use the mail,” via an old anti-obscenity law called the Comstock Act — a law that, my colleague Ian Millhiser writes, “has not been seriously enforced for nearly a century.”

Reproductive rights activists have warned, with alarm, that the Comstock Act could be used to enforce “a backdoor abortion ban” nationally. That’s because the very broad law says it’s illegal to send not only any pill, but any “thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion” through the mail or across state lines in interstate commerce. If it is seriously enforced, they argue, it would be effectively illegal to send abortion clinics basic supplies.

Some anti-abortion activists have a similar interpretation. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan Mitchell, an influential conservative lawyer (who represented Trump in one legal proceeding), told the New York Times in February.  

2) Banning the abortion pill mifepristone: Asserting that “abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” Project 2025 calls for revoking FDA approval of the pill mifepristone, which is used in about half of US abortions. 

Because mifepristone has been under legal challenge, many abortion providers have prepared for such a ban and said they can switch to a different regimen requiring only the drug misoprostol. But they fear that drug would become the next target of anti-abortion activists, as NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin wrote earlier this year.

3) Demanding data from states on who is getting abortions: Complaining that liberal states are “sanctuaries for abortion tourism” (because red state residents can travel there for the procedure), Project 2025 says that HHS needs to ensure every state reports to the feds “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders,” including data such as “the mother’s state of residence.”  

Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images via AFP

It’s those proposals from Project 2025 that have proved so politically inconvenient for Trump during this campaign. He has sounded the refrain that he merely wants to let states decide on abortion policy, saying “the federal government should have nothing to do with this issue.” But he also constantly promises that new details on his intentions for federal policy are forthcoming — details that somehow never arrive.

Asked last month about enforcing the Comstock Act, Trump seemed to say he wouldn’t, but he did hedge a bit: “No, we will be discussing specifics of it, but generally speaking, no.” On banning mifepristone, the Trump campaign’s line is that the Supreme Court has settled the matter — which makes no sense because the court merely ruled on a procedural issue.

So Trump is claiming women will have nothing to fear from his abortion policies if he wins. But there are many reasons to wonder whether to believe him.

Some of Trump’s most important political allies are people deeply committed to restricting abortion in the United States. Take, for instance, his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance. In 2022, Vance called for enforcing the Comstock Act and said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”

Notably, the chapters of Project 2025 that touch on abortion were written by two important Trump administration officials: Roger Severino, who served in the Department of Health and Human Services, and Gene Hamilton, who served in the Justice Department (and is a longtime close ally of Trump policy guru Stephen Miller).

Trump “had the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policies of any administration in history,” Severino told the New York Times in February. “That track record is the best evidence, I think, you could have of what a second term might look like if Trump wins.”

There’s a classic political saying, “Dance with the one that brung ya,” explaining why politicians feel compelled to stick with their loyal supporters. While Trump may be currently trying to strike a more moderate tone on abortion, he is a transactional person and he knows that social conservatives are among his most important and loyal supporters. 

That was demonstrated at the end of August: After several days in which Trump had taken heat from anti-abortion groups, he announced that, on a Florida abortion ballot measure, he’d stand with them.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

A holdout in Nebraska: Sen. Mike McDonnell — who switched from the Democratic to the Republican party earlier this year — said he was still opposed to a rule change that could allow former president Donald Trump to lock down a key electoral vote in the state of Nebraska. Former president Donald Trump won Nebraska by a 19-point margin in 2020. However, President Joe Biden came away with one of its electoral votes, because he won in Nebraska’s Second District. As a result, Trump is pushing for a winner-take-all system to lock down that vote this time around.

What the swing states show: Speaking of key votes, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is currently leading national polls, by 2 or 3 percentage points on average. She also leads in the key electoral college states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. If she wins all three, Harris would likely win the presidency (as long as she holds onto the other blue states, and Nebraska’s Second District, too). However, all seven of the swing states are close enough in polls that they could easily go to either candidate.

The Israeli attacks in Lebanon, explained: More than 450 people were killed and 1,500 injured in Israeli airstrikes targeting southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as the country’s capital, Beirut, on Monday. The airstrikes come after a recent Israeli attack using explosive pagers. It is still unknown whether Hezbollah can or will respond, and whether the US will — or can — force Israel to pull back. Here’s what we know so far about the escalating attacks.

Plastic promises: The United Nations has been negotiating a treaty that could set firm limits on plastic production, establish commitments to reducing plastic pollution, and encourage new investments to improve our ability to recycle plastics. Despite aiming to achieve a deal by the end of the year though, with only three months left, the UN still has not reached an agreement.

Chappell Roan’s take on toxic fans: Pop star Chappell Roan has spoken out about the dark side of fame, pushing back against the “abuse, harassment, and stalking” she has been met with as her music career has taken off. While this inappropriate behavior is nothing new, her comments have opened up discourse about the pervasive toxicity of fan culture, and how it has intensified in the age of social media.

Tropical Storm Helene could become a hurricane: Tropical Storm Helene is threatening to hit Florida, where it would be the strongest storm to make landfall in the United States in over a year. After forming Tuesday morning, in only 48 hours it could go from a 45 mph tropical storm to a Category 3 major hurricane. [CNN]

Brett Favre diagnosed with Parkinson’s: On Tuesday, NFL hall of famer Brett Favre revealed that he was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Favre made his diagnosis known during a congressional hearing on federal welfare reform, in which he came to speak about the misuse of TANF funds. [Yahoo Sports]

That's how many people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. According to a 2014 study, roughly 4 percent of those sentenced to death are innocent. 

That’s one of the reasons why the upcoming execution of Marcellus Williams, a 55-year-old man from Missouri, is making headlines. Williams maintains that he is innocent of the 1998 killing of social worker and former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia “Lisha” Gayle. 

Since his sentencing in 2001, new questions have been raised about how evidence in the case was handled and whether jury selection for his trial was fair. Here’s what we know about the case, and the protests calling to stop Williams from being executed.

Jim Salter/AP

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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