YYou could be forgiven for thinking that Vice President Kamala Harris’ first attack ad against Donald Trump was a little far-fetched. The TV ad, which launched this week, has all the hallmarks of a YouTube video promoting an internet conspiracy theory. There’s the obligatory spooky music and the baritone narrator warning of a mysterious manifesto with a cartoonish name, the kind a Bond villain would give to his plan for global conquest: Project 2025.

And yet this is no parody of Dr. Evil: Project 2025 is very real, it is definitely Trump’s agenda, and it wasn’t a sloppy text that came out of nowhere. It is the culmination of the 50-year conspiracy that our reporters at The Lever uncovered in our new audio series, Master Plan. – a plan first pioneered by the U.S. Supreme Court justice who laid the foundation for Citizens United and the modern era of corporate politics.

Project 2025 bills itself as “a concerted effort by the conservative movement to be ready for the next conservative administration that will take power at noon on January 20, 2025” – a boastful and self-congratulatory announcement, but no exaggeration. The 922-page manifesto is a plug-and-play agenda of detailed actions aimed at immediately giving power to the conservative movement, billionaires and Republican donors once Trump is sworn in for a second term.

Highlights include plans to eliminate climate change regulations, gut environmental protection laws, dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects Americans from Wall Street fraud, raise taxes on the middle class to fund tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, empower the White House to replace officials with ideological loyalists, and limit the government’s power to enforce campaign finance laws designed to prevent corruption from “pay-to-play” campaigns.

Because of its origins, this draft is not a fanciful wish list, but a carefully crafted plan of action that will be implemented in the same way as an earlier version was implemented during Trump’s first term.

Project 2025 involved at least 140 former Trump administration officials, is backed by a number of conservative, oligarch-funded groups, and is published by the powerful Heritage Foundation, which Trump himself praised as a “great group” that will “lay the groundwork and develop detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us the tremendous mandate to save America.”

This connection to the Heritage Foundation is no accident. It tells us that conservatives see a Trump presidency as the final stage of their grand, half-century plan to destroy the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society – a plan first outlined half a century ago.

Heritage was originally founded in the early 1970s with seed money from beer magnate Joseph Coors, who told one historian that his political involvement at the time was specifically “awakened” by a 1971 memo written by Lewis Powell, later a Supreme Court Justice. In the memo, written to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he urged corporations and oligarchs to be “far more aggressive” in engaging the political system, which he felt was far too responsive to popular demands for economic regulation.

“It is critical that spokesmen for the corporate system — at every level and on every occasion — be far more aggressive than they have been in the past,” wrote Powell, who soon afterward authored a landmark Supreme Court ruling giving corporations new rights to spend money to influence elections. “There should be no hesitation whatsoever in pushing vigorously for support of the corporate system in all political arenas. Nor should there be any hesitation in politically punishing those who oppose it.”

Documents revealed in Master Plan reveal that the Chamber of Commerce set up a working group on the Powell memorandum, made up of executives from some of the country’s most powerful corporations, including General Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Amway and United States Steel.

In a series of secret meetings in the 1970s, these power brokers worked out ways in which corporate groups could expand their political, legal and communications apparatus. The resulting political infrastructure – conservative think tanks, law firms and interest groups – aimed to loosen campaign finance laws so that corporations could exercise more power and then use that power to influence courts and legislative systems in their favor.

As a result of Powell’s memo, Coors received generous financial injections, and Heritage played a special role in this fledgling organization: the company focused intensely on public policy.

“Circled around the maelstrom of Heritage are projects, individuals and organizations dedicated to Coors’ goal of rescuing the United States from the gloom and despair in which he sees it,” the Washington Post reported in 1975. “Weyrich and Coors agree that the liberalizing trend must be stopped or the United States will become, in effect, another version of godless communism.”

Shortly before this story was published, Dick Cheney, deputy chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, told his boss Donald Rumsfeld in a White House memo: “Coors could get into trouble if it uses this tax-exempt foundation to support political activities.”

Yet while the conservative legal groups of the Powell Memo movement won victories before the Supreme Court by undermining campaign finance laws and ushering in the era of “dark money,” these groups were rarely criticized for blurring the legal line between charitable causes and political machinery.

Heritage was certainly the latter. Within years of its launch, it was focused on influencing presidential administrations with the original version of Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, which the press described at the time as “a blueprint for grabbing the administration by the frayed lapels of the New Deal and leaving 48 years of liberal policies behind.”

“‘Mandate for Leadership’ was published in January 1981 – the same month that Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president,” Heritage enthuses in the foreword to Project 2025, officially the ninth installment in the ‘Mandat for Leadership’ series. “By the end of the year, more than 60 percent of the recommendations had been implemented into policy.”

To underscore this success, Reagan gave a speech at Heritage in which he praised “the importance of the Heritage Foundation, the remarkable work of Ed Feulner, Joe and Holly Coors (and) so many of you in this room who have brought the political revolution to Washington.”

Fast forward through the neoliberal wave of tax cuts and deregulation that characterized Reagan’s term and three subsequent Republican presidencies, and the question now is: Would the same political revolution sparked by the Powell memo master plan continue if Trump wins again?

Recent history offers clues: In Trump’s first year in office, Heritage boasted that two-thirds of the recommendations in his 2016 Mandate for Leadership were supported by the Republican president.

Will Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s agenda resonate in the same way under a second Trump administration? Or should we trust Trump when he now, under pressure from Harris’ criticism, insists he doesn’t even know what Project 2025 is?

The answer can be found in the words of Trump’s own vice president.

“The Heritage Foundation is not just an outpost on Capitol Hill,” wrote Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. “It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

• David Sirota is a columnist for the Guardian US and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at Jacobin and founder of The Lever. He was a speechwriter for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.