“Can you believe they put that in writing?” – Kamala Harris
“He was in our organization. He raised money for our organization. He blessed it…” -Russ Vought, architect of Project 2025, on Trump’s relationship with Project 2025.
In 2016, Trump had no plan for how to actually win. He immediately fired the nominal transition team he had appointed and threw all of its files in the trash. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner didn’t even realize that virtually all of the Obama administration’s staff would go and the Trump administration would have to build a new team. Of course, the entire Trump administration was a chaotic disaster, but it’s important to realize how little of this damage was planned or intended.
This is where Project 2025 comes in. Trump and the MAGA coalition have learned a lot from recent times, and it has long been clear that if these people get another chance to seize power, they will not waste it. Project 2025 is MAGA’s blueprint for reshaping the American federal government and ensuring that America becomes an authoritarian state under their control.
There’s also a plan to implement it. Last week, ProPublica’s Andy Kroll reported on 14 hours of training video footage from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. According to Kroll, the academy exists to “train an army of politicians who could fight on behalf of a future Trump administration against the so-called deep-state bureaucracy that stays the course.” The videos “train future candidates on everything from the basics of governing to how to outsmart bureaucrats. There are strategies to avoid embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and to ensure conservative policies aren’t overturned by ‘left-wing judges.'”
Another way to think of Project 2025 is as a political wish list for people who support pardoning violent insurgents, calling for a second civil war, or, as JD Vance called it, “form the wagons and load the muskets.” And it includes a training academy to help people with these violent takeover fantasies get jobs in federal agencies!
The more Americans learn about Project 2025, the more they panic. Harris and the Democrats, of course, take advantage of this weakness and bring up Project 2025 at every opportunity. Harris always asks the crowds at her rallies, “Can you believe they put that in writing?” Politically, it has become a real albatross for Trump, so much so that he has tried to distance himself from it on several occasions.
READ: Shocking online manifesto reveals Project 2025’s connection to a coordinated “Christian nationalism project”
Yet Project 2025 keeps making headlines that make that distance impossible. This week, the British non-governmental organization Centre for Climate Reporting released audio tapes with Russ Vought, a former Trump administration employee and the person behind Project 2025. In a conversation recorded by a hidden camera, Vought claims that he continues to support their efforts despite Trump’s recent comments. Vought also said that Trump “has been in our organization. He has raised money for our organization. He has blessed it.”
The footage also makes it clear that Project 2025 is even scarier than we thought. CNN reports that Vought claimed Project 2025 “secretly drafted hundreds of executive orders, regulations and memos that would form the basis for rapid action on Trump’s plans should he win, describing its work as the creation of ‘shadow’ agencies.” According to Vought, these secret plans include the “largest deportation in history” as well as a proposal to use the US military against US citizens to suppress mass protests against it.
As I wrote last month, Project 2025 was designed by adherents of neoreactionism, a political ideology that calls for the demise of democracies and a return to monarchy and aristocracy. The people who conceived, funded, wrote and supported Project 20205—the people who attend Project 2025’s Administrative Academy—all aim to destroy democracy and seek to do so by any means necessary. Their goal is to create a so-called natural order at the top of which they conveniently see themselves.
But aside from them and their weird little fantasies about overthrowing the government and oppressing the rest of us, nobody wants what these guys are selling. Most Americans don’t want to live in a fascist hellscape, and they don’t want governed by no one. American democracy has its flaws, but compared to the dystopian nightmare MAGA is trying to conjure up, it looks pretty good.
Our call to action is to ensure that as many American voters as possible learn about Project 2025, the people behind it, and the implications for all of us. Here are some resources to help you start those conversations with people in your life:
– Vox Explainer
– Hub of the CAP Action Project 2025
– Media Matters Guide to Project 2025
– 2025 analysis by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice
– Courier News Video Explainer
– Wall Street Journal explainer video. (Good tip for your right-wing relatives.)
This is an excerpt from Ctrl Alt-Right Del, A newsletter produced in collaboration with COURIER – a citizen media company. It has been republished with the permission of the author. Subscribe HERE.
