Danger Ahead: Project 2025

If you intend to vote for Donald Trump next November, you are doing so either because you want to destroy America’s democracy and your own civil rights, or you have been duped.

But either way, a vote for Trump is a vote for the so-called Project 25, a blueprint for Trump’s second term as president.  Designed by the far-right Heritage Foundation in cooperation with a hundred or so other far-right organizations, it would:

• Strip approximately 50,000 federal employees of their civil service protections so that Trump could fire them at will – which he has promised to do — and replace them with people who would swear allegiance to him instead of the Constitution.
• Severely inhibit the federal government’s protections involving reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, civil rights, climate change efforts and immigration.
• Grant Trump impunity from any congressional oversight.
• Give Trump absolute control over long-independent government agencies, thus granting him unchallengeable power to dictate and enforce the agencies’ actions, including the power to abolish them at will.
• Allow Trump to deploy the armed forces to enforce  domestic dissent, effectively turning them into Trump’s private militia.
• Direct the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s adversaries.
• Weaken the system of checks and balances to give the executive branch unfettered power.
• Instill the precepts of Christian nationalism into government and public life.
• Dismantle strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, including gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
• Outlaw pornography, imprison its purveyors, and force any educators or public librarians who purvey it to register as sex offenders. (Since defining pornography in legal terms has been likened to “nailing custard to a tree,” Trump alone would decide what is pornography and who is guilty of it.)
• And much, much more.

During a recent segment on MSNBC, New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an authority on fascism and dictatorial leaders, said the project would effectively transform American government into a regime resembling Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“The essence of authoritarianism is removing restraints on the leader and making him immune from prosecution by domesticating government,” she said.  “And so some of what Project 2025 proposes, like abolishing the DOJ and the FBI, is designed for that end, to make it impossible to prosecute Trump and allow him to commit crimes with impunity.”

She said the adoption of Project 2025 would result in entire departments coming under the control of “a band of criminals supported by oligarchs.  You need corrupt people to come into power to sustain an autocracy.”

Ben-Ghiat is far from alone in warning us about the prospects facing us.

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, author of Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity, criticized Project 2025’s opposition to the Respect for Marriage Act, a landmark law that codified the federal definition of marriage to recognize same-sex and interracial marriage.

LGBTQ writers and journalists have blasted it for its intended removal of protections for LGBTQ people, and for declarations to outlaw pornography by claiming it is an “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.”

Writing for Dame magazine, Brynn Tannehill argued that the 902-page document “The Mandate for Leadership”, which is a significant component of Project 2025, “makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority” and links “transgender ideology” to pornography.

Even many Republican leaders are expressing alarm.

Republican climate advocates have been especially virulent in opposing Project 2025’s climate policy.  Several Republican-led states, including Vermont, New Hampshire and South Dakota, have gone against the tide and made significant strides in reducing their carbon footprint.

Sarah Hull, president of the non-aligned Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, says she considers it crucial that Republicans  support Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden described as “the biggest step forward on climate ever — ever!”

U.S. Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah) said it is vital that Republicans “engage in supporting good energy and climate policy.”

Benjamin Backer, founder of the GOP-connected American Conservation Coalition, noted that most young Republicans’ believe that climate change is human-induced and called the Project 2025 “wrongheaded.^”  Backer seeks to persuade Republicans to address environmental challenges.

Do not think for one moment that the sorts of things Project 2025 proposes won’t happen if Trump is elected.  Listen to what Trump himself has said, on Truth Social and in public speeches across the nation, about how he will govern if elected.  Among other things, he has promised to:

• Impose the death penalty on drug dealers (which would mean more than 200,000 persons would be executed every year).
• Pardon “a large portion” of the 600-plus rioters who assaulted the Capitol in 2021, wounding some 140 police officers with flag poles, baseball bats and pepper spray.
• Arrest millions of undocumented residents and establish a massive retention facility to hold them so he could expel them from the country – “as soon as possible.”
• Require (!) police officers to “stop and frisk” even though a federal court has declared it unconstitutional because it discriminates against minorities.
• Issue an executive order ending the long-standing policy of granting citizenship to U.S.-born children with undocumented parents.
• Fire “radical Marxist prosecutors destroying America” and appoint “rock-hard” conservative judges and justices “in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.”
• Disband college accreditation boards because they “have become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
• Seize university endowments and fine the schools millions of dollars if he dermines – repeat, if he determines — the schools are Marxist and/or discriminating against white people.
• End the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” (probably by ending all American assistance) unless Zelensky agrees to Putin’s demand and forfeits Ukrainian land to Russia.
• Have the Justice Department investigate Comcast, NBC and MSNBC because they “are a threat to democracy and THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.”
• Terminate the Constitution if he determines – again, if he determines – fraud occurred during an election.
• Eliminate early and mail-in voting in America (even though that’s how he votes).
• Abolish the Department of Education.
• Reinstitute a travel ban on all people from Muslim countries.
• And so, so, so much more.

And yet, many people from greedy corporation executives to everyday citizens remain committed to the idea that a second Trump term will benefit them.  They arrogantly insist that things will be fine in a second Trump term while somehow not seeing what history shows dictators throughout the  world have always done.

Quoting Ben-Ghiat again: “Every country is unprepared for an authoritarian assault, and … even when one takes place, and certain groups are targeted, other groups think ‘they’ll never come after me.’”

And so I repeat: If you intend to vote for Donald Trump next November, you are doing so either because you want to destroy America’s democracy and your own civil rights, or you have been duped.

What other conclusion can there be?

Skip Johnson writes an occasional newsletter on current events.  If you like this post, please consider forwarding it to your contacts.  If it has been forwarded to you, please consider subscribing by clicking here. It’s free.