No link between 2015 Marco Rubio video and Project 2025 | Fact check

A Nov. 11 Threads video (direct link, archive link) shows Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida speaking in front of a backdrop with the logo of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“Thank you to Heritage for inviting us here, giving us this 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,” Rubio says in the clip.
The post’s caption reads, “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.”
The post was shared more than 200 times in two days. Other versions of the claim were shared on Facebook.
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The video was captured in 2015, eight years before Project 2025 was published. Rubio doesn’t mention President-elect Donald Trump in the original footage.
Trump has already started filling positions in his Cabinet less than two weeks after winning the presidential election. One of his latest picks is Rubio, whom he selected on Nov. 13 to be his Secretary of State.
But the viral video of Rubio dates back years before Trump’s Nov. 5 win.
The footage was captured in 2015 when Rubio and Utah Sen. Mike Lee discussed their tax reform plan at the Heritage Foundation, according to C-SPAN. No one mentions Trump in the original footage.
Both the C-SPAN video and the Threads clip include the words “Road to the White House 2016” in the bottom-right corner.
The Associated Press also captured several photos of the two men at the 2015 event.
The video was published eight years before the 2023 release of Project 2025, a “presidential transition project” created by the Heritage Foundation in collaboration with more than 100 other conservative groups.
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USA TODAY has previously debunked the claim that Trump created the project. Though many Trump allies are involved with Project 2025 and some of the playbook’s proposals overlap with the president-elect’s platform, Trump has distanced himself from it and said he disagrees with elements of the playbook.
Still, Trump announced in a Nov. 10 Truth Social post that he’d picked Tom Homan, one of the project’s contributors, as his “border czar” who will oversee the deportation of immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally.
USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
PolitiFact also debunked the claim.
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