Donald Trump is continuing to hitch himself to Project 2025’s policy proposals, even after he spent months working to publicly disavow the Christian nationalist manifesto.
During a campaign stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, the Republican presidential nominee reiterated a key talking point of the 920-page executive branch blueprint: dismantling the Department of Education. But this time, Trump offered the radical policy shift with a candid dismissal, asking the crowd, “What the hell do you have to lose?”
“You know I’m gonna take the Department of Education, close it in Washington, let the states run their own education,” he said. “Very important. Because we spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world by far, and yet we’re ranked at the bottom of every list.”
Neither of those points are true. A 2023 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found that while the U.S. did spend 38 percent more per student than the average of other member countries, it still ranked behind Luxembourg, Norway, Austria, and the Republic of Korea for its per-pupil spending. And America’s education system doesn’t rank last, either—instead, it ranks twenty-second out of 41 countries, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Index.
“So, you know the expression? What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump added, shortly before blaming the current state of America’s education system on incoming migrants.
Last week, Trump shared his vision for the country’s education system without the massive federal agency guiding it. According to him, some states will “do very good,” while others will, admittedly, be “terrible.”
“We’re going to have 35 like, different ones—Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30, 35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK. You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump told 5,000 people in Indiana, Pennsylvania. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt, they run a great state.”