Six Questions for Jonas Vesterberg on Resigning From Project 2025, Which is Building a Right-Wing Army to Work for Trump if He Wins Back the White House

"I find it impossible to serve under a government led by President Donald J. Trump," Vesterberg wrote to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts when terminating his application.

In late-2023, soon after he resigned as editor of The Florida Standard, which promoted Ron DeSantis’s presidential ambitions, Swedish-American journalist and political analyst Jonas Vesterberg applied to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-directed plan to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives” to go to work in Washington for the next president if the GOP nominee won the White House in this year’s election. Vesterberg, who has lived in the US for 20 years, was accepted into the program soon after sending in his application, and was one of the “committed patriots” invited to last June’s “Project 2025 Presidential Administration Academy 101,” where attendees were instructed by “the best and brightest” former GOP presidential appointees and keynote speakers included senior officials in the Trump White House. “This is a unique opportunity to receive direct access to training that will ensure you are fully prepared to serve as a political appointee and learn the ropes of the federal government,” read the invitation.

Though unable to attend the training, Vesterberg was selected to participate in a program two months later that gave Project 2025 applicants “a head start in the security clearance process…to vet their background and determine if they are suitable for access to classified information.” Nevertheless, he withdrew from Project 2025 four days ago, explaining in a letter to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts that it would be "impossible” for him to serve under Donald Trump, in large part due to his blanket support for “Israel’s heinous crimes against humanity…and its insidious, intricate and persistent efforts to infiltrate, manipulate and compromise US agencies and institutions, elected officials, corporate structures and leadership.”

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity. That included minor edits I made to the letter Vesterberg sent Roberts, which is otherwise reproduced in its entirety below, in his response to Question No. 3.

Jonas Vesterberg, who supplied the photo.

1. What is your background and how did you end up in the US?

I grew up in Sweden, in a small fishing village, and my dad was an editor with one of the largest daily newspapers, so I suppose I got journalism by blood. I started working for the newspaper Sydsvenskan in the late 1990s and graduated from Lund University with a master’s degree in political science in 2004, where my focus was mainly post-war Marxism and I became an expert in the Frankfurt School. But I felt very uneasy in Sweden. There was something underneath the surface that troubled me, something suffocating, and that was a disconnect between the Sweden I grew up in – the Sweden of Olof Palme – and where it was heading, and I moved to the United States, where I’d been an exchange student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Skipping forward, in 2022, I was recruited to The Florida Standard, where I was hired as the editor. By then I was of the opinion that it had become impossible to work in truly independent media as it no longer existed, and I’d come to believe the conservative press allowed for greater freedom, less dogmatism, and somewhat greater pursuit of truth. Due to legal constraints, I can’t say more about my time at the Standard other than that I trained and managed five reporters, but resigned in October of 2023 because I couldn’t accept allowing articles to be published that I believed were inaccurate, biased and unethical even by the standards of an outlet that was explicitly conservative. Two weeks later, all my guys were fired and the website was nuked.

2. How did you get involved in Project 2025?

I’d heard about Project 2025 and submitted an application though I never thought I’d be accepted because the questions were in the style of “What current politician do you admire?” and I wrote stuff like, “Not a damn single one of them. I don’t idolize human beings, I’m about principle, but if I have to mention someone it would be JFK.” To my surprise, I received an email a week or so later stating that I’d been accepted into the program. Around that time, I was thinking that since I had some experience with military and intelligence work, let’s say, and I was eager to get out of journalism and actually run operations, run teams. I had some particular ideas I wanted to get on the ground.

I disliked pretty much all of the candidates, especially the warmongering lunatic Nikki Haley. I worked a lot with DeSantis’s team and I know he liked my pieces, so I thought maybe about him, but the fact that he went to Israel to sign blatantly unconstitutional US legislation was deeply troubling. At the time, it wasn’t completely clear Trump was going to be the nominee, but I never understood Americans’ affinity for him. The cult of personality around Trump is the effect of psychological operations, like QAnon, which are aimed at Americans that suffer from magical thinking, a certain detachment from reality. 

But the Democratic side was terrible too and I thought Trump might be fucking evil, but he could turn out to all right, I was fifty-fifty on that. Now, I think he’s an actor, a pied piper, a Manchurian candidate if there ever was one. 

Regarding Project 2025, I was troubled by the Heritage Foundation’s position on the Israel-Gaza war. I could never accept the tactics — the deliberate targeting of civilians, women and children, the rampant destruction of civilian infrastructure, and Israeli cabinet members, senior military staff and various media figures and politicians referring to Palestinians with which can only be described as Nazi-style  vernacular. I mean, it was on such a level that Julius Streicher would have taken notes.

In June, I saw Arthur Bloom had resigned from Project 2025 and I thought about doing the same. A little later I got notice that I’d been assigned a security consultant to personally help me with the clearance process and decided I was down for the ride and hoped things would change for the better. The final straw for me was listening to Trump’s speeches targeting US critics of Netanyahu’s war tactics and basically insinuating that he was going to persecute — possibly even jail or murder —Americans, many of them Jewish, whose moral compass wouldn’t allow them go along with this vile slaughter and rhetoric from supremacist lunatics in Israel.

That’s when I notified Kevin Roberts and others involved that I was withdrawing from the staffing program for Project 2025. I wrote a pretty detailed letter explaining why.

3. What did you write in the letter?

“I am saddened to inform you that I have decided to withdraw from Project 2025. This was not an easy decision, as I had greatly looked forward to giving my all in the service of a new US administration. However, due to a number of reasons that cannot be ignored, I find it impossible to serve under a government led by Donald J. Trump.

“As an immigrant to this great nation, I am unequivocally attached and dedicated to the founding documents, laws and principles of this Republic. Moreover, I have an unyielding commitment to the national security, territorial integrity, self- determination and independence of the United States of America. Regrettably, I have found that my positions regarding these fundamental matters are incompatible with former President Trump’s policies.

“Despite the state of Israel’s heinous crimes against humanity, rationalized by delusional ethno-religious supremacist beliefs, and its insidious, intricate and persistent efforts to infiltrate, manipulate and compromise US agencies and institutions, elected officials, corporate structures and leadership, former President Trump has on several recent occasions expressed his loyalty, dedication and allegiance to it. It seems quite clear to me that former President Trump — along with a baffling number of elected officials and public servants, including at your own Heritage Foundation — systematically grovel before, prioritize and extend undue favorable treatment to a foreign power.

“In performing these activities, you contribute to undermining, disrespecting and deriding the United States and its institutions...I am convinced that this absurd, humiliating, demoralizing and undignified theater greatly contributes to a disastrous disintegration of the social and political fabric of this nation.

“It would be morally impossible for me to extend my services and dedication to a future administration which repeatedly voices plans to usurp the Constitution and the First Amendment, persecute Americans on the basis of their opinions on geopolitical affairs and attack them on their own soil for practicing their inviolable rights to freedom of speech and expression.”

Benjamin Netanyahu: A bridge too far. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

4. Democrats and liberal news outlets describe Project 2025 as nefarious and evil, calling it, in the words of the BBC, “a proposal that would expand presidential power and impose an ultra-conservative social vision.” Republicans, the Heritage Foundation, and conservatives say their opponents have blown Project 2025 entirely out of proportion. What’s your take about this?

A lot of the policy points in Project 2025 are pretty commonsensical. What I don’t agree with are attempts to infuse religion into American politics, but the training program, which I participated in partly virtually, didn’t push anything other than Constitutional values, there was no bible-thumping. 

I came from the Left, Herbert Marcuse was my God once, but I’m vehemently against the government being in your bedroom, and the Left today is completely corrupt and illegitimate. Embracing and promotion of the transgender stuff, drag queens reading stories to kids — all that is fucking insanity, it’s part of multi-spectrum warfare on the population and anyone who participates in it is a fool. I honestly never believed the contemporary Left would actually implement such ideas, which “negate” civilization and serve to disintegrate society. I thought it was mostly intellectual navel-gazing.

5. Trump says he knows nothing about Project 2025 and it won’t be a blueprint for his administration. What’s your belief about his claim?

I don’t have a clear answer to that question, partly because I live in California and was unable to travel to Washington to attend the June training session. However, I believe that when Project 2025 started out, it was a program initiated and designed by what I would call the Eastern Establishment, think Yale, Skull and Bones, and so on. Then, after a barrage of lies about it were told by both the captured Left and the Trump cult — an information operation with significant resources — it was captured by the Russo-Israeli transnational criminal syndicate and the Chabad-Lubavitch apocalyptic-genocidal-messianic death cult that I believe runs Donald Trump. 

But that’s just my theory. You might say I’m conspiratorial, but that’s simply because conspiracies happen all around us, at all hours of the day. A conspiracy is simply two or more people who devise a plan that is unethical and/or illegal with a deceptive or obscured purpose, which sounds a lot like the way Washington works, doesn’t it?

6. If Trump wins and implements Project 2025, would it have significant consequences for better or worse?

I don’t think it won’t matter one bit because Trump will listen to Jared Kushner and Bibi over Kevin Roberts and Peter Thiel. Heritage World and Trump World are entirely separate. Heritage represents the Eastern Establishment, Trump’s sphere is dominated by a Russia-Ukraine-Israel organized crime axis.