Donald Trump shaking hands with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts at a Heritage event, April 2022
Originally published on The Conversation:
EA-Times Radio Special: A New Trump Coup Attempt? Explaining Project 2025
Think-tank policy proposals rarely make the headlines, but 2024 is no ordinary year and Project 2025 is no usual set of plans for government. This is a not-very-secret set of plans that Republicans have put together in order to be ready to leap into the White House, if elected, and instantly get to work.
But the twist in this tale is that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump says he doesn’t know anything about it, or does he?
Incongruously, Trump has declared: “I know nothing about Project 2025” and “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying.”
This is despite many of its authors of the document, prepared by right-wing think-tank the Heritage Foundation, having a close association with Trump and his inner circle. Many expect to receive jobs if he is elected. One of the authors recently even said that Trump had given it his blessing.
While Trump may be trying to keep Project 2025 under his hat, the Democrats are not. It was referenced in many speeches at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, including by Vice-Presidential hopeful Tim Walz.
The scale, ambition, and impact of the proposals presented in Project 2025 offer an idea of what Trump 2.0 might look like, reflecting the frustration of the right with the outcome of the first Trump Presidency.
When Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 election, he had few clear plans of what to do in office. His inexperience was exacerbated by his unstructured approach to the working day. As the former UK Ambassador to Washington, Kim Darroch observed: “He didn’t want a diary full of formal meetings … He wanted to decide, spontaneously, hour by hour, what he was going to do next”. In practice, this meant most days were consumed by “executive time” – watching cable television and calling Trump’s golf friends.
As a result, Trump’s administration achieved very little during his term in office. So in 2022, the Heritage Foundation began planning to ensure that a second Trump term is not wasted.
First, a cadre of Trump loyalists, vetted and ready to replace career civil servants in the “deep state”, was established. Then Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — commonly referred to as Project 2025 — set out 920 pages of right-wing measures across every aspect of government.
Ready, Set, Go
While there is nothing unusual about think-tanks preparing policy suggestions for a new administration in Washington, what stands out with Project 2025 is the scale of its ambition and the radical nature of the changes they propose.
Central to its sweeping goals is the shifting of the balance of power towards the Presidency by placing the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the FBI and Department of Justice, under direct executive control. Such a move would enable the next President to direct these agencies at his bidding, to “impound” monies voted by Congress, to redirect them for the Trumpists’ purposes, and to sideline the legislative branch of government.
Another key enabler of this strategy is the replacement of career civil servants to ensure that they do not obstruct the White House’s radical agenda, and replace them with Trump supporters. An analysis by news group AP suggests this could mean 50,000 federal workers losing their jobs.
Heritage has been actively recruiting and interviewing conservative loyalists to be ready to fill newly vacated government positions. In its own words assembling “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State”.
To execute its agenda, Project 2025 proposes the abolition of several government departments – including Homeland Security and the Department of Education. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the scientific body that produces evidence that substantiates environmental impact, will be disbanded as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.
Trump’s pet hate, the FBI, is also targeted. It is described as “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization” and in need of radical reform.
Christian nationalist ideas are central to the motivations behind many proposals. The Project’s first aim is to “restore the family as the center piece of American life and protect our children”. This is a restrictive view of family where “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them”.
Opposition to abortion suffuses the entire document and is central to many of its chapters. The first goal of health policy, the Project states, is that all “programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care”.
Remaking America
Project 2025 advocates ending carbon reduction schemes and supports unrestricted oil and gas drilling. It proposes reducing corporate and income taxes, abolishing the US Federal Reserve and increasing defence spending. These would be paid for through cuts to US health care provision from Medicaid, Medicare, and other government bodies and programs.
Immigration would be tackled by a full-length border wall. Pornography would be banned. China is the focus of foreign policy where the Project warns that “a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic cold war against America’s interests, values, and people”.
Many executive orders are being drafted, ready to be put into use swiftly. Heritage’s model is the its 1981 blueprint that Ronald Reagan’s government used to move speedily on priority issues. By the end of that year, more than 60% of recommendations had become policy. Whether that pattern is replicated in 2025 is now a central issue of the Presidential election in November.
Hard to believe what hate can do to ones sanity. Trump didn’t even make up 2025. All this stuff about 2025. , reminds me of the Russia hoax. Time to stop throwing temper tantrums everytime you feel you might not get your way. Take your hate bind off and act like an American. . Instead of trying to destroy or demonis people just because
they have a different opinion Libs dont have a right to do this to others/Trump/ RFK Jr. / or anyone else who has the audacity to think different. It seems the sky’s the limit for lies, (talk about misinformation!)wake up America to this non sense before it destroys our beautiful country/ us
You are right. Smart people believe in a “fixed election” which is a physical and otherwise impossible feat, where in a two-party system one side watches the other at every step. You are right that intelligent adults ought to believe uneducated people who tell us that ray guns from outer space, controlled by Jews, zapped the voting machines, which were secretly manufactured by a communist regime in Venezuela, for American use, without anyone’s knowledge – a la M.T.G. Sixty-six Republican judges (all chosen by Trump) disproved the entire charade, along with anyone else that had any brains! But hey…if you lose an election it’s a really smart and sporty idea to attack the center of government which is home to our constitution and set up a hanging gallows for the Vice President and raid the Capital. You are absolutely correct in all your learned assertions. I seem to recall you speaking of “Misinformation”.