Reform’s Plans to Import Trump’s Authoritarian ‘Project 2025’ Blueprint to the UK

“It’s not enough actually to win an election; you also need to completely rewire the system.”

Those are the words of Matt Goodwin – Reform UK’s parliamentary candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election – as spoken to Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025.

Project 2025, conceived and convened by Heritage under Roberts’ leadership is the 900-page authoritarian blueprint for a second Donald Trump presidency. It offered a comprehensive plan – now being implemented – to centralise Trump’s executive power, purge independent civil servants, eliminate civil rights including gender equality, impose evangelical Christian nationalism, and transform agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into instruments of mass surveillance and deportation.

In a podcast interview with Roberts recorded in September 2024, Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin laid out the case for importing that model – which has seen President Donald Trump attack democratic checks and balances – into Britain.

“How can we learn about things that I know Heritage has worked on”, he urged, specifically calling for “what has worked in places like Florida and Texas” to be replicated in the UK.

“What does it mean to take back parts of the state or to reform parts of the state?” he asked.

The answer, he made clear, lay in the Heritage Foundation’s model of centralised state capture.

In both Florida and Texas, new laws installed by Republicans in 2024 made it harder to vote, leading to a sharp decline in mail-in ballots. Florida hindered voter registration by imposing heavy fines on outreach groups, while Texas introduced criminal penalties for poll workers and those assisting voters with disabilities. By redrawing districts to favour their own party and limiting ballot initiatives, pro-Trump leaders concentrated power and effectively silenced the voices of many average US citizens, particularly within minority communities.

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Running ‘the Trump Playbook’

In his interview with the architect of Project 2025, Goodwin laid out his analysis of British politics as being a derivative of the American conservative project:

“We’ve had this global political realignment that 2016 really gave expression to… Trump was one of the only people really that recognised it. I think Nigel Farage recognised that. I think the Brexit campaign – people like Boris Johnson for a while – recognised that.”

He described Farage – “an ally of Donald Trump” – as running “the sort of Trump playbook”, and argued that British conservatism was “five to seven years behind” the American right. The policy agenda he prescribed was explicit: “We’re not hearing the arguments that JD Vance is making, right… We’re certainly not hearing the tough talk on woke ideology.”

Goodwin’s channelling of JD Vance, now Trump’s Vice President, is significant given his ties to an anti-democratic movement spearheaded by his chief benefactor Palantir co-founder billionaire Peter Thiel and blogger Curtis Yarvin, whom Vance has publicly praised and cited as a major intellectual influence. Often called the ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ this ideology argues that American democracy is a failed system that should be replaced by a ‘techno-monarchy’ – unchecked corporate-style government led by a singular, powerful executive.

Two months after his conversation with Kevin Roberts, on 27 November 2024, Goodwin published a Substack post entitled ‘How to Take Back a Country’, in which he praised “Team Trump” for pursuing a strategy to “take back the bureaucracy of the state” by “establishing a ‘counter-elite’”.

He praised his “friend” Kevin Roberts – whom he had met in person in London that month – and claimed that Heritage had been “vindicated by the 2024 election result, and will play a key role in Trump 2, but deserve to be heard because, ultimately, I think their vision is about to go global, including here in Britain.”

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Project 2025: The Heritage Foundation’s Blueprint

Heritage’s Project 2025 blueprint proposed that thousands of ideological Trump loyalists be placed into politically appointed positions across the US federal government, systematically replacing independent civil servants. Roberts declared that this “Second American Revolution” would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”. He has also called for a “long, controlled burn” of American institutions.

Project 2025 further called for centralising executive power around the presidency, dismantling regulatory agencies, ending civil rights protections including gender equality provisions, and expanding the unilateral enforcement powers of agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Within four days of Trump’s second inauguration, nearly two-thirds of his executive actions mirrored or partially mirrored proposals from the Heritage blueprint.

Goodwin’s relationship with this apparatus is longstanding. Months before urging Britain to adopt Heritage Foundation’s Trumpian blueprint, he had in July 2024 been hosted at an online event on the subject of “Popular Sovereignty: The US-UK Special Relationship in the Age of Trump, Farage and the Reform Party”.

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The Declared ‘Trans-Atlantic Hub’

Goodwin’s advice is not simply theoretical – he is part of an institutional vehicle for this transatlantic project in the form of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science (CHSS) at the University of Buckingham, where he is a visiting professor.

CHSS states that it seeks to serve as an “institutional hub for a new trans-Atlantic or global network” of aligned organisations.

In its ‘Our Network’ section naming “mission-aligned” groups with whom it is attempting to build active relationships, CHSS names several organisations at the core of the American Republican infrastructure: the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Federalist Society, and Hillsdale College’s DC Graduate School of Government.

These are the organisations that built Project 2025, captured the US judiciary, staffed Trump’s second administration, and are now networked – through CHSS – with a university centre in Buckinghamshire.

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The Network

The Claremont Institute, named on the ‘Our Network’ page of Goodwin’s CHSS, sits on the advisory board of Project 2025. It provided the intellectual architecture for Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election: Claremont senior fellow John Eastman was instrumental in the plot to recruit fake electors and urged then Vice President Mike Pence to block Congressional certification. The institute’s former president, Larry Arnn, co-founded the Claremont Institute, went on to become president of Hillsdale College, and sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation – binding all three organisations through a single individual.

Another CHSS network name, Hillsdale College, also sits on the Project 2025 advisory board. In 2020, Trump appointed its president, Larry Arnn, to chair his 1776 Commission, which produced a nationalist history curriculum designed to counter progressive education. Hillsdale’s former fellow Michael Anton, who wrote the infamous ‘Flight 93 Election’ essay comparing a Hillary Clinton presidency to a terrorist attack (justifying passengers seizing the cockpit by force) now serves as director of policy planning at the State Department in Trump’s second administration.

In September 2025, Reform leader Nigel Farage was a featured speaker at Hillsdale’s Constitution Day celebration in Washington, DC. The event included panels on “DOGE and the Constitution” and “The Conservative Legal Movement” alongside speakers linked to Heritage and The Federalist. Farage told the audience: “Everything that we value is based on our Judeo-Christian culture and traditions.”

The Federalist Society, another CHSS network partner, is the legal organisation that has over four decades systematically reshaped the American judiciary. It hand-selected all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices are current or former members. During Trump’s first term, 80% of his appellate court appointments were affiliated with the Society. The co-chairman of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, Leonard Leo, helped finance and coordinate what has been described as the far-right takeover of the Supreme Court.

Both Goodwin and Farage have appeared on the Federalist Society’s platform. In February 2020, the Society hosted Farage for a teleforum billed as “World Politics After Brexit: A Conversation with Nigel Farage”. In September 2019, Goodwin spoke at a Federalist Society New York chapter event on “No Deal Brexit: Populism & British Politics”.

The Manhattan Institute, also listed on the CHSS network page, was founded by former CIA Director William Casey and has had significant influence on conservative policymaking since the Reagan era. In 2025, Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon publicly endorsed the Manhattan Institute’s ‘Manhattan Statement’ – a programme to impose ideological conditions on federal university funding that mirrors the approach to institutional capture Goodwin has praised.

The pattern across these organisations is consistent: they are not independent think tanks operating at arm’s length from one another. They share board members, they co-produced Project 2025, they placed personnel in Trump’s administration, and they are now collectively listed as the network partners of a British university centre at which a Reform parliamentary candidate holds a visiting professorship.

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Russian Oil Profits and the Orbán Pipeline

Goodwin alluded to the forces behind this network in his interview with Roberts. “I was in Hungary recently,” he said, “and I was talking with Christopher Rufo from the US. And then I came back to the UK and it was Eric Kaufmann who was setting up a new research centre at Buckingham – he’s creating a heterodox centre for social science.”

The picture he drew was of an international pipeline linking Budapest, Washington and British academic institutions.

Christopher Rufo, who has been bankrolled by the financier behind the relaunch of a Nazi eugenics front (Aporia, which is also part of Goodwin’s CHSS network), is the leading inspiration behind Trump’s assault on fundamental civil rights for minorities. But he is also a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, which researchers have exposed is a foreign influence front for the pro-Putin anti-EU government of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The Danube Institute has received over a million dollars from the Orbán Government to pay foreign collaborators, one of which is the Heritage Foundation – whose president Kevin Roberts signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute in 2022. Leaked Project 2025 training videos have revealed that key personnel involved in the Heritage Foundation programme had ties to Orban-linked groups.

Matt Goodwin himself has appeared on the Danube Institute’s podcast show several times, including one in 2025 titled “European Civil War?” He also has financial ties to a well-known Hungary state-backed foreign influence outfit, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) – a Budapest-based institution with close ties to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In March 2025, the MCC published a policy document called ‘The Great Reset’, which proposed breaking up the European Union – citing issues such as abortion laws as a reason for the proposed reforms. 

As the Good Law Project revealed, Matt Goodwin received a salary of up to €10,000 per month as a visiting fellow at MCC, which holds an endowment of more than €1 billion from the Hungarian state, including a 10% stake in MOL Group, the energy giant that refines oil sourced largely from Russia. Goodwin’s salary, in other words, was downstream from Russian oil profits.  The University of Buckingham also has a partnership agreement with MCC.

Goodwin is not the only Reform figure tied to this funding stream. As Byline Times previously reported, Professor James Orr – appointed in October 2025 as Nigel Farage’s senior advisor in charge of developing policy for a future Reform Government – is a director of the UK arm of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF).

The Good Law Project found that RSLF has received £512,500 since 2023 from MCC – more than 90% of its total funding. Orr has publicly praised Hungary’s pro-Putin foreign policy, telling an MCC event in August 2025 that he salutes “the Hungarian approach” to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Hungary has systematically blocked EU military aid to Ukraine and delayed sanctions on Russian oligarchs.

Reform UK and Matt Goodwin were contacted for comment.