Here's what his running mate, J.D. Vance, said before Trump announced he was running: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.’”

Exactly. That's exactly the point.

Project 2025 is useless and unnecessary for making this point. Heck, Trump already passed an executive order implementing the so-called "Schedule F" effort to try to do this in his last term. You don't need a Heritage book to make the point that he wants to do this. He says he wants to do this!

This is not a disputed point. It's not a secret. Trump's campaign has confirmed they want to do this:

nbcnews.com - Trump retribution agenda government workers schedule f

The only reason to try to tie Trump to Project 2025 is that Project 2025 includes a lot of crap that Trump isn't openly admitting and proclaiming he's going to do - stuff that Democrats would love to convince voters he's going to do anyway. Like cutting Social Security and Medicare, or implementing a federal abortion ban, or criminalizing pornography. Okay, maybe the Democrats aren't focusing on that last part.

But the usefulness of Project 2025 is an effort to tie Trump to policies that used to be part of mainstream GOP platforms, but that Trump isn't openly and proudly embracing. If they can pull it off, it lets them run their greatest hits from past campaigns.

I don't think they can pull it off.

I think that Democrats are trying to ignore the fact that Trump's takeover of the GOP represents a real political realignment of the major parties, akin to what happened on racial matters in the 1960's and what happened on economic and regulatory policies with the Reagan Revolution. Prior to the 1960's realignment, Republicans and Democrats weren't sorted on racial matters (southern Democrats were among the most virulent supporters of segregationist measures); prior to the Reagan Revolution, there were still plenty of Republicans in favor of governmental spending and regulation in a lot of contexts (Republicans were instrumental in passing the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Acts).

If you went to the voters and tried to pitch Republicans as the party of minority rights in 1978 because the party of Lincoln used to be in that position, it would fail - the Civil Rights Act led to a radical realignment of the parties on those lines, and voters very much knew that the brand had changed. If you tried to pitch Republicans as a party that supported business regulation in 1982, simply because Republicans overwhelmingly voted for the Clean Air and Clean Water Act measures a decade earlier, you would have been laughed out of the room - Reagan had changed the party.

The same thing is happening here. Trump has effected a radical realignment of the GOP away from the Bush, Romney/Ryan, and (dare I say it) Reagan form of conservatism. It is now fully a right-wing populist party, rejecting the old Reagan-Thatcherite free market attitudes towards free trade, industrial policy, and government entitlement programs. Those days are gone, and pointing to Project 2025 as a way to pretend that they're not is going to be a fruitless effort.