The perpetually whiny Donald Trump has been trying to distance himself from the extremist blueprint called Project 2025, which would transform the United States into an authoritarian theocracy. In what will come as a shock to no one at all, he’s been lying.
The Washington Post just posted the story:
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about the Project 2025 policy blueprint or the people behind it. “Have no idea who is in charge of it,” he wrote in a social media post in July.
But in April 2022, Trump shared a 45-minute private flight with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, according to people familiar with the trip, plane-tracking data and a photograph from on board the plane, which has not been previously reported. They flew together to a Heritage conference where Trump delivered a keynote address that gestured to Heritage’s forthcoming policy proposals.
“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in the speech.
As Markos recently noted, the authoritarian extremists behind Project 2025 are trying to pretend to have shut it down. As if laying out a highly detailed 900 page blueprint for the destruction of representative government goes away just because those who designed it want to hide it. As if they wouldn't just pull it out from under J.D. Vance's couch for implementation the day Trump— or any of his future doppelgangers— was inaugurated president.
They really really really don't want American voters to know about it. They don't want American voters to read about it. They don't want American voters to know before they vote that despite Trump's boilerplate lies that it has nothing to do with him, it was concocted by dozens of people closely associated with Trump. And his running mate loves Project 2025 so much that he wrote a laudatory foreward to a book by the same Kevin Roberts. But they really really really don't want American voters to know that, either.
From The Guardian:
A JD Vance-introduced book by a leader of Project 2025, the vast and controversial hardline rightwing plan for a second Trump administration, will be delayed until after the 2024 election.
“There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours – and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country,” the book’s author, Kevin Roberts, told RealClearPolitics, which first reported the news.
“That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”
Could he be more explicit that he doesn't want voters to know what they have planned until after voters vote? Why would that be?
Pro Publica:
The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.
Purge the government of professionals and experts and replace them with Trump sycophants.
Michael Waldman at the Brennan Center:
The Project 2025 book sets out in detail the plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with loyalists. Trump tried to implement a similar scheme, known as Schedule F, near the end of his term but ran out of time. Now, the Heritage Foundation writes, “Empowering political appointees across the Administration is crucial to a President’s success.” This may sound bland, but it is a truly radical proposal. No president has ever sought anything like this power. It is inherently corrupt.
The book is stuffed with stratagems to advance Christian nationalist social policies. The authors call the pharmaceutical abortion treatment mifepristone “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.” They demand “a campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” that originated in the 19th-century Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of “abortion-related paraphernalia.” It aims to override most Americans’ preference for abortion rights, and it makes a mockery of right-wing promises to leave such decisions to the states.
In a particularly Orwellian turn, Project 2025 would bar from all federal regulations and contracts terms including “sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, [and] reproductive rights.”
As scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained:
Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Wednesday warned that “one of the most alarming things” in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” handbook is the admission that Donald Trump didn’t accomplish all he wanted to in his first administration.
“They got a slow start […] so their codeword is ‘day one,’” Ben-Ghiat told MSNBC’s Katie Phang of the think-tank’s proposal document that is widely expected to form the basis of a potential second Trump term’s policies.
“Already politically-vetted people” are in place and will immediately implement the plans if Trump wins the 2024 election, said the history professor at New York University who authored “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”
Professor Steve Corbin of the University of Northern Iowa:
The 30 chapters of Project 2025 are a daunting read. Project 2025 proposes, among a host of things, eliminating the Department of Education, eliminating the Department of Commerce, deploying the US military whenever protests erupt, dismantling the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, removing sexual and gender protected discrimination and terminating diversity, equity, inclusion and affirmative action.
Additional mandates include: siphoning off billions of dollars of public school funding, funding private school choice vouchers, phasing out public education’s Title I program, gutting the nation’s free school meals program, eliminating the Head Start program, banning books and suppressing any curriculum that discusses the evils of slavery.
Project 2025 also calls for banning abortion (which makes women second-class citizens), restricting access to contraception, forcing would-be immigrants to be detained in concentration camps, eliminating Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, recruiting 54,000 loyal MAGA Republicans to replace existing federal civil servants, and ending America’s bedrock principle that separates church from state.
More from The Guardian:
“I’m hard-pressed to find any candidates anywhere who are so open that they would use the power of the state to go after critics and enemies,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor and co-author of How Democracies Die.
“This is one of the most openly authoritarian campaigns I’ve ever seen. You have to go back to the far-right authoritarians in the 1930s in Europe or in 1970s Latin America to find the kind of dehumanizing and violent language that Trump is starting to consistently use.”
Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general who served in the George HW Bush administration, said: “It is appalling that a presidential candidate could suggest using the Department of Justice to go after his political adversaries, to go after Biden and his family, and to effectively make the Department of Justice an arm of the White House to be used for its political purposes.”
Even Politico has reported on it:
An influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and has remained close to him. Vought, who is frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, is president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term....
Vought, who declined to comment, is advising Project 2025, a governing agenda that would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. The effort is made up of a constellation of conservative groups run by Trump allies who’ve constructed a detailed plan to dismantle or overhaul key agencies in a second term. Among other principles, the project’s “Mandate for Leadership” states that “freedom is defined by God, not man.”
A reminder from Scientific American:
Although Trump is not among its 34 authors, more than half are appointees and staff from his time as president; the words “Trump” and “Trump Administration” appear 300 times in its pages. At least 140 former Trump officials are involved in Project 2025, according to a CNN tally. It’s reasonable to expect that a second Trump presidency would follow many of the project’s recommendations….
What is even more unusual, and also mapped out in detail, is a plan to exert more presidential control over traditionally nonpartisan governmental workers—those Trump might describe as members of the “deep state,” or regulatory bureaucracy. For example, Project 2025 claims that the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other scientific institutions are “vulnerable to obstructionism” unless appointees at these agencies are “wholly in sync” with presidential policy. To that end, it would reclassify tens of thousands of civil service jobs as political positions that answer to the president.
“The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document,” says Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists. “The importance of this science is that’s how we can ensure people’s health and the environment are being safeguarded.” (Cleetus notes that her comments address the policy agenda’s contents, not the upcoming presidential election.)
Its damage to the economy was recently outlined in Forbes, of all places:
Unfortunately, this Project 2025 agenda is brimming with extremely outside-the-mainstream ideas that threaten to roll back many Americans' fundamental rights and cause grave and perhaps permanent damage to our democratic system of government. Even if you agree with the far-right ideology this report espouses, the policies it advocates will very likely plunge the American economy into a death spiral.
Vox also had a good article:
One of Project 2025's most pernicious elements is its call to return America to a nineteenth-century "spoils system" of government. Under the so-called "Schedule F" plan, about 50,000 federal workers would lose their civil service protections and become at-will employees, meaning they can be fired if they are not sufficiently loyal to the President.
Along with the usual slate of tax cuts for the wealthy, Project 2025 also calls for abolishing the Federal Reserve, ending its role as the lender of last resort, and letting the President weigh in on interest rate hikes. Trump has also called for a 10% across-the-board tariff on imported goods, which could kick off a global trade war, rapidly accelerate inflation, and cost the average family $1500 a year. It doesn't sound great for business.
On top of everything else, Project 2025 also aims to roll back protections for LGBTQ Americans, further reduce women's access to abortion, cut overtime protections for 4.3 million workers, slash food assistance for 21.6 million households, weaken Social Security and Medicaid, stop efforts to lower prescription drug costs, and much else.
This is a screaming alarm, and Trump, Vance, and those who devised Project 2025 don’t want us to know that it’s Trump’s true agenda. It is. The future of representative government is on the line.
