2015 Marco Rubio video isn’t evidence Donald Trump will lean heavily on Project 2025

After news reports that President-elect Donald Trump was likely to pick U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., as his secretary of state, one social media user shared a video of Rubio speaking at the Heritage Foundation.

A Nov. 11 Threads post’s caption said, "BREAKING: Donald Trump just announced that Senator Marco Rubio will be his Secretary of State. Here is Rubio admitting the Trump Presidency will lean heavily into the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plans. Retweet so every American sees this clip."

The Threads post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

The post sought to tie the incoming Trump administration to Project 2025, a sweeping policy proposal the Heritage Foundation produced for a Republican administration. A video in the post played a clip of Rubio speaking at the conservative think tank.

But the post inaccurately describes what Rubio said in the clip, and ignores that Rubio was speaking to the group in 2015 — eight years before Project 2025 was published.

(Screenshot from Threads)

In the Threads video, Rubio said, "Thank you to Heritage for inviting us here, giving us an opportunity, and for all the scholarship that they do here. That really serves as a guidepost for a lot of the public policy we choose to make."

He did not mention Project 2025, nor did he in the full video of the April 15, 2015, event, at which Rubio joined fellow Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to discuss tax reform. 

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Rubio could not have mentioned Project 2025 in 2015 because the plan wasn’t published until April 2023. The video also shows a "Road to the White House 2016" logo. (Two days earlier, Rubio had announced his own presidential run, which he would later end in March 2016 after Trump beat him in the Florida Republican primary.) 

Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats similarly tried to make Project 2025 a major campaign issue and tried to tie it to Trump.

Trump sought to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign, calling some parts of the plan "ridiculous." The New York Times reported that about 175 former Trump administration officials and advisers helped write the plan, and some of its policy proposals, such as eliminating the Education Department, mirror Trump’s.

Trump so far has named Tom Homan, formerly his acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, as his "border czar." Homan, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is listed as one of dozens of Project 2025 contributors.

A CBS News analysis of Project 2025 found more than 700 specific policy proposals. Its review found that at least 270 matched Trump’s past policies or recent campaign promises.

Project 2025 calls for extensive overhauls in the executive branch and draws on long-held conservative principles, such as tax cuts that Trump has agreed with or may agree with. Trump, on his own, published a less specific agenda during his 2024 presidential campaign.

When asked about Project 2025 in a July CNN interview, Rubio said he likes the Heritage Foundation and some things it stands for. But he described Project 2025 as a think tank’s work, not as something speaking for Trump.

There may be some overlap between Project 2025 and the policies Trump will seek to enact, but the claim that this 2015 video shows Rubio "admitting" that Trump will lean heavily on the plan is False.

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