The plan for an imperial Trump presidency by IVO VEGTER

Project 2025 is a 900-page plan for a conservative takeover of the US government at the next election. It is, in many respects, chilling.

The first thing US Vice President Kamala Harris posted after Joe Biden dropped out of the race for re-election and endorsed her in his stead, was: “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party – and unite our nation – to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.”

Project 2025 is an all-encompassing campaign coordinated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, designed to provide a radical conservative agenda for an incoming Republican president.

Donald Trump, however, says he knows nothing about Project 2025. “I have no idea who’s behind it,” he posted on his own social network, Truth Social. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Speaking to an audience in Michigan, Trump said: “Like some on the right, the severe right, came up with this Project 25 [sic]. I don’t even know… I mean, some of them I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative. Just like you have… they’re sort of the opposite of the radical left, okay, you have the radical left and you have the radical right, and they came up with this Proj… I don’t know what the hell it is, this Project 25 [sic]. ‘He’s involved in Project…’ And then they read some of the things and they are extreme, I mean, they’re seriously extreme. But I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Man of the Year

The question is, should one believe Trump? At the same event, he told his audience that Michigan had once made him ‘Man of the Year’. Yet there is no evidence that this ever happened, or that such an award even exists.

There are some clear contradictions in Trump’s denials. He claims to have no idea who’s behind it, but he knows some of them. In fact, 31 of the 400+ people who contributed to Project 2025 served in the previous Trump administration.

Trump has supported many of the policies contained in Project 2025 in his speeches over the years, and in his actions as president. His campaign officials have acknowledged that Project 2025 aligns very well with Trump’s own Agenda 47 manifesto (47 referring to the number of the next presidency; Biden is the 46^th president).

It is also plausible that Trump has been asked to deny any association with Project 2025, because the Heritage Foundation’s tax status depends on not promoting a particular presidential candidate.

Billed as a “presidential transition project”, Project 2025 claims to co-ordinate input from a broad coalition of over 100 conservative organisations, and aims to be “a movement-wide effort guided by the conservative cause to address and reform the failings of big government and an undemocratic administrative state”.

This isn’t a fringe affair. To quote Heritage: “…as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement.”

Project 2025 consists of four pillars: a policy agenda presented in a 900-page book entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the identification of thousands of candidates for public appointments, the training of those candidates, and a “playbook” with specific plans and actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new administration.

It has precedent. The first Mandate for Leadership was presented to President Ronald Reagan in 1980, setting out policy prescriptions, agency by agency, for the incoming president.

In 2016, the Heritage Foundation presented Trump himself with a Mandate for Leadership, and later claimed that he had enacted two thirds of its agenda. Trump’s claims of ignorance ring hollow.

Liberal

At first glance, Project 2025 looks like something liberals might want to get behind.

“The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” the book says. “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand [is] to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings.”

In the afterword, Edwin J. Feulner, the founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation, wrote: “The vision for Mandate for Leadership was that it would serve as a guidebook of specific policy recommendations for reducing the size and scope of the federal government and for ensuring that it stayed within its constitutional bounds. Positive plans for freeing the private sector from overblown government interference and regulation could, we believed, result in an explosion of entrepreneurial activity that would reassert America’s leading role in the world’s economy.”

The plan includes the repeal of massive spending bills, such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act.

It promises to rein in federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

It seeks to eliminate the federal Department of Education, dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, and defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

It wants to cut aid and other support from countries that do business with US enemies such as China.

The plan vows to “stop the war on oil and gas”, gut climate policy and anti-pollution regulations, and end US support for a green transition in other countries.

It even cites South Africa as an example: “South Africa, for example, relies on coal-powered plants to generate 80 percent of its power needs. It would need $26 billion in foreign aid to make the full transition away from coal. Multiplying this amount by dozens of other countries on the continent, the financial resources needed to transition away from fossil fuels are unachievable.”

Awokening

It also has a great deal to say about what it calls “the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening,’” and promises to end both legislated preferences and legislated protections on the basis of race, gender, or other physical characteristics.

“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

Taking a weed trimmer to the massive regulatory bureaucracies does sound like a splendid policy direction. Fighting the identity politics of the radical left, and in particular ending preferential treatment on the basis of race or other immutable physical traits, should also appeal to classical liberals.

Belligerent

However, Project 2025 goes much further than this.

A lot of the language of Project 2025 is partisan and belligerent. It says the government has been weaponised against conservative interests. The project is described as a “battle plan”, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts spoke of “a second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.

“Conservatives – the Americanists in this battle – must fight for the soul of America, which is very much at stake.”

The book explicitly describes the Democratic establishment, a.k.a. “woke revolutionaries”, as the enemy within.

Family values

In broad terms, Project 2025 seeks to impose conservative moral and social values upon Americans. “[T]he very moral foundations of our society are in peril,” it says.

Its four main promises are:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely – what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

This doesn’t sound too bad, but it is far-reaching, and the adjectives matter.

By “family” it means, exclusively, a nuclear family involving a married biological man and woman and their children. No other family arrangement should be supported by government programmes, according to the document.

When it proposes, for example, to “[eliminate] marriage penalties in federal welfare programs”, it really means ending welfare payments to single mothers.

It wants to see a federal policy to restrict social media, on the grounds that these platforms “fuel mental illness and anxiety, [and] fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings”.

Project 2024 is openly hostile to LGBTQ+ interests, considers our nature as men or women as “given”, wants “sex” to be formally defined as being limited to biological sex recognised at birth, wants “marriage” to be defined as “between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman”, removes legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, rejects gender-affirming care in its entirety, and rejects abortion in all circumstances.

It seeks to reinstate the right of doctors and pharmacists to refuse to supply medicines on the basis of their personal religious or moral views.

This will also have implications overseas, for example by withholding US support for family planning or healthcare initiatives that include elective abortion, the morning-after pill, or even contraceptives.

Hard line

Project 2025 takes a very hard line on illegal immigration, recommending the arrest, detention and deportation of undocumented migrants. Its policy even on legal immigration and asylum is a frank rejection of the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

It supports the death penalty for “applicable crimes”, and in particular for violent or sexual crimes against children and wants the 44 people presently on death row executed as soon as possible.

It supports using the military for immigration enforcement, a prospect already reported in 2023, and led by one of the contributing authors of Project 2025, Jeffrey B. Clark.

“Liberty”

The Heritage Foundation plan proposes to ban pornography outright: “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

It says that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children”, which extends the definition to sexual education material aimed at pubescent and adolescent children.

So much for “individual rights to live freely”. Sexuality outside the bounds of a Christian marriage is, of course, not “God-given”. As I said, adjectives matter.

The document is clear that “liberty” extends only to living a Christian life: “[A]n individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained – to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. … Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness around the world.”

The US Constitution does no such thing. It does not restrict liberty to doing only what one “ought”, by some conservative moral standard. And that religion is the greatestsource of happiness is a subjective opinion, not objective fact.

This is a dangerously authoritarian interpretation of the idea of liberty, and in fact, contradicts its very essence.

Christian nationalism

When Project 2025 talks about “religious freedom”, it does not mean the freedom to practice any religion of one’s choice, or no religion at all. It does not mean freedom from the religious prescripts of others. It means specifically the freedom of Christians to insist that others acquiesce to and comply with their moral values.

So, for example, choosing to take a morning-after pill is not an exercise of religious freedom, but refusing to sell a morning-after pill is.

The project seeks to protect the tax-exempt status of religious organisations, secure federal funding for private schools including religious schools, and place faith-based organisations at the centre of government-funded social and welfare programmes.

Many of the policies of Project 2025 would serve to infuse an authoritarian Christian nationalism into government and public life and weakening the separation between church and state.

Unitary executive theory

The means by which all these policies would be introduced is known as the unitary executive theory.

This theory holds that the US Constitution grants the president control over all executive power. That means that the civil service has no right to operate independently and must obey the president’s policy diktats.

When Project 2025 talks about dismantling the “administrative state”, it means disallowing government institutions and agencies to operate free from political interference.

The Treasury, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, what’s left of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, intelligence agencies, and dozens (if not hundreds) of other agencies will fall under direct executive control of the president.

To achieve this, it proposes to reclassify tens of thousands of civil service positions to be politically appointed (up from about 4 000 at present) and to ensure that all influential posts are occupied by a loyalist to the conservative cause or the president personally. This is the purpose of its Presidential Personnel Database.

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official, told the Associated Press.

Project 2025 has also established a political school, called the Presidential Administration Academy, where would-be Republican administration officials and civil servants can receive indoctrination in the rules of conservative governance.

If this sounds suspiciously Marxist, that’s because it is. It is analogous to the ANC’s cadre deployment policy, and its O.R. Tambo School of Leadership.

Unprecedented expansion of power

Project 2025, if adopted, would herald an unprecedented expansion of presidential power in the United States. It would establish a loyalist civil service driven by cronyism and patronage. The unitary executive theory that Project 2025 endorses is a prescription for authoritarian abuse.

It runs directly counter to the stated objective of defending the liberties Americans are guaranteed in their Constitution.

“Project 2025 seems to be full of a whole array of ideas that are designed to let Donald Trump function as a dictator, by completely eviscerating many of the restraints built into our system. He really wants to destroy any notion of a rule of law in this country,” Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general who served in the George H.W. Bush administration, told The Guardian.

The Project 2025 authors may be right to describe the bureaucratic state as having been weaponised by the left. Its answer, however, is to weaponise the government for its own conservative and religious ends.

Project 2025 is less about dismantling bureaucracy than it is about taking it over and deploying it in the service of conservative interests.

Some of its policy proposals might find favour with classical liberals, but as a manifesto, it represents a dangerously authoritarian political roadmap in service of the religious right and would make Donald Trump – should he win – an imperial president with unprecedented power. That should strike fear into the hearts of liberals everywhere.

 

source:The plan for an imperial Trump presidency – Daily Friend