David A. Graham offers an indispensable digest of Project 2025.

On this episode of Fully Booked, journalist David A. Graham joins us to discuss The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America (Random House, April 22), a granular look at the modern American Christian nationalist playbook. Kirkus calls Graham’s powerful work “essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the Trumpian maelstrom.”

Graham is a staff writer at the Atlantic and an author of the Atlantic Daily newsletter. He previously reported for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, the Wall Street Journal, and the National in Abu Dhabi; he won the Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reportingin 2021 for his coverage of the 2020 presidential election. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Here’s a bit more from our review of The Project:“Atlantic staffer Graham dubs the authors of the Heritage Foundation–funded Project 2025 ‘contrarians,’ but they’re more than that: They believe ‘that the only way to deliver the Christian, right-wing nation they desired was a carefully organized assault on the U.S. government as it existed.’ That radical assault has four chief aims: to restore the man-headed family, dismantle the ‘administrative state,’ close the border and defend the nation’s sovereignty, and ‘secure our God-given individual rights to live freely.’ Trump claimed not to have heard of Project 2025 and its playbook, but as Russell Vought, an author of the platform who’s now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, proudly acknowledged, he and his Heritage cohort were busily writing executive orders long ago, a stack of them awaiting Trump in his first minutes in the Oval Office.”

Graham and I dig into the main document of Project 2025—Mandate for Leadership—which details the Christian right’s plans for restoring “traditional” family structures, dismantling the administrative state, closing borders, and defending national sovereignty. Graham highlights key figures, including Paul Dans and Russell Vought, and their respective contributions to Project 2025. We note the sweeping nature of the plan—from trade policy tweaks to environmental regulation rollbacks—and emphasize the serious impact it’s already making.

Then editors Mahnaz Dar, John McMurtrie, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

An Immense World (Young Readers Edition): How Animals Sense Earth’s Amazing Secrets by Ed Yong, illus. by Rebecca Mills, adapted by Annmarie Anderson (Bright Matter Books)

The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin by Daniel Brook (Norton)

Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Dawnland by Tess Callahan

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.