I'd spent about a week balls-deep in the hellacious 900-page manifesto from The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, outlining conservatives' plans for "the next conservative president." It's not a Team Trump document; they'd probably rather be giving these marching orders to someone like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, but it's definitely the playbook the GOP's front runner/convicted felon would be handed upon reentry to the White House in January.
It's grim reading. They want to eliminate protections for trans people--if not trans people themselves--and they want to get rid of Congressional oversight over appointees and executive action when possible. They rail constantly against "wokeism" and "climate change alarmism." They want more fossil fuels. They want to axe the Department of Education; they want to slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency. They want lower taxes (of course). They want to merge Immigration and Customs Enforcement--which they want to use to deport as many undocumented people as possible--with other branches of Immigration which work with new citizens--there's more than a whiff of totalitarianism there. They want to consolidate or eliminate outright departments and governing agencies, and they want to ensure everyone respects the president's vision upon taking up their duties. You should see my marginalia. A lot of angrily-scrawled highlighting, "WTF" notations in the margins and chapter summaries consisting of such thoughtful commentary as "Are you fucking kidding me?" and "Where do these people come up with this crap???"
I mean, I could go on for pages about all this, but when Last Week Tonight covered the document Sunday, that sort of pulled the rug out from under me.
John Oliver devoted about a half hour to explaining the potential damages a second Trump term would mean for the country, and Project 2025 is the bedrock of his analysis.
My first response to learning he'd scooped me, of course, was less than poetic. When a friend of mine to whom I'd been railing about the document for days found out about Oliver covering it, this was my reaction:
But then again, it's something of a relief. I can put aside the notes, fact checking and dent in my desk from bashing my head against it. No small relief, that.
Although Oliver covered the project as well as could be expected, there's simply too much in it for anyone to cover in detail. Basically, this document is trying to enable a second Trump administration to carry out is a much more serious threat. Since neither Trump nor any of his staff believed he would win in 2016, they were utterly flat-footed upon taking up power in 2017, a mistake they shan't repeat this time around. This document has reams of eye-glazingly-boring material concerning the restructuring they'd like to see happen, except once you recognize what they're after, it's horrifying.
And their reasoning to get there? Maddening. My least favorite thing about the document is its incredibly lousy sourcing. One brief example: they claim that "The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a DHS component that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections at the expense of securing the cyber domain and critical infrastructure, which are threatened daily."
Quite a claim. And for evidence, their proof is that "Elon Musk said so." You can't get more rigorous than that.
Such claims can be fact checked, of course, and proved to be nonsense by a literate 10th grader. I encourage everyone to download a copy off their website (do not give them any money) and have at it. There is no better way to feed one's self-righteousness than, for example, reading a book by a foundation that believes civil servants should be screened for obesity and given IQ tests indicating high-level intelligence, all while throwing their weight behind a candidate who ticks exactly none of those boxes.
Seriously, at least read coverage of the document. Because whatever happens in November, it won't end there.
Unhappily, Project 2025 reminds us how good the right is at the long game. Look how they captured the Supreme Court. Look how they're working on claiming executive power and disempowering the marginalized. Even if Trump loses, they'll continue with their work, and they'll likely get their way. Let's not forget that the Heritage Foundation has been putting together documents like this for decades. Under Reagan, they produced 1,600 pages of planning and vision, which they largely achieved, to the ruin of us all. Under President George W. Bush, their advice only ran less than 200 pages, because they'd gotten most of what they wanted.
And if it doesn't go their way, they can erase history. The Heritage Foundation was the "think" tank behind an early incarnation of Republican-envisioned government-run health care, what we used to call Romneycare and which morphed into what we called Obamacare and which now the Heritage Foundation despises and insists it had nothing to do with. When, for example, they prioritize choice in education over actual education theory, and when it fails to produce results (as it has all along), they'll rewrite that history as well. They'll rewrite it even better than they do their history of the Civil War.
We could, I suppose, press defenders of these policies to back up their wish list with logic. They suck at it tremendously. In a lukewarm defense of the document, Heritage Foundation Assistant Director Spencer Chretien offered this billet doux to the project's critics in an interview last fall:
"...if you think there's no waste in the government, if you appreciate the fact that we have this unelected, unaccountable fourth branch of government, the administrative state...if you think it's true that 99 percent of career federal employees are currently doing a fully satisfactory job or better...well, then Project 2025 is not for you."
So you want to improve government by giving yourself your very own administrative deep state? So the best you can give me for justification is an either/or fallacious choice that wouldn't pass muster in a remedial composition course? My goodness. I've seen the light, and it's a ten-watt bulb.
At this point, as I've said before, there's no way to convert these particular cult members. They're after the very concept of democracy, and while I'd be delighted to see an opposition party up to the fight, let's face it, it just ain't there. It's up to us.
Immigration lawyer Matt Cameron, in a March episode of Opening Arguments, walked through much of Project 2025's horrifying aspects, but he ended on a note of hope:
"I could yell for hours about this, but I don't think it's fruitful because it's the same thing over and over. We cannot let this happen. No amount of complaints about like, well, but shouldn't we get a better candidate? Yeah, no, we should. Absolutely, all that's true. Doesn't matter. There's one way at a time, at a given time, there's one way to not let this happen. And whatever that is, you need to do it. It's just as simple as that. That's right. Whatever stage we're at. It just doesn't have to happen, and you can stop it.”
Okay, then. Let's get to it.
