"Project 2025" and "Agenda 47": the Morbidly Wealthy's Blueprint for America's "Bloodbath"
The Constitution is only effective if those sworn to uphold it actually do.
Interestingly (and not surprisingly), the corporate-funded mainstream media isn’t giving enough urgency to what is possibly the most important story the American electorate should know about.
The outcome of November’s election could mean nothing less than the United States being the next country to ditch democracy in favor of strong-man autocracy.
The blueprint for this is called “Project 2025,” and, according to its website, it proposes a goal to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left” by “build[ing] on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”
What are those “four pillars”?
A policy agenda
Personnel
Training
The fourth pillar, the so-called “playbook,” is the proposed culmination comprised of “a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency”.
The website explains:
Only through the implementation of specific action plans at each agency will the next conservative presidential Administration be successful.
Pillar IV will provide the next President a roadmap [sic] for doing just that. To learn more about Project 2025’s vision for a conservative administration, please read our recently published book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.
We should consider that book, “a 1,091-page manifesto of conservative governance,” as reported in Politico, a manual written by morbidly rich corporate CEOs in which the federal government is rendered nothing more than a bureaucratic shill.
Its author, the Heritage Foundation’s Paul Dan, explains the process seeks to “roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington.”
They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today. They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets.
Here’s the most concerning part:
They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.
According to Salon:
This wide-ranging plan would include bringing independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency directly under the president, the return of “impounding” funds — a strategy banned during the Nixon administration that empowered a president to refuse to spend Congressionally allocated money on programs they dislike — as well as the removal of employment protections for thousands of career civil servants and an intelligence agency purge of officials he holds personal vendettas against and has deemed to be “deep staters” and “the sick political class that hates our country.
Whether or not Donald Trump ever sees the inside of the White House again, Project 2025’s “candidate-agnostic” goal is “to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative.”
Apparently laid out during Trump’s tenure in the White House, the plan would require independent agencies, like the Federal Reserve and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to submit action proposals directly to the president himself “for review.”
Former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) head during the Trump administration, Russell Vought, told the Times:
What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them. It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.
In other words, if it isn’t in the Constitution, it’s perfectly fine to hand it off to the president to control it.
Former White House personnel chief John McEntee was behind Trump’s scheme to purge officials perceived as opposed to him.
He explained:
The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal. Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.
Writing for The Grio, Antjuan Seawright states at the beginning of his article, “Project 2025 is the MAGA manifesto that’s plotting a nightmare scenario for marginalized communities in America”:
The people behind Project 2025 are committed to an unapologetic vision of white Christian nationalism, and they don’t care who knows it.
He adds:
Want to bypass the Senate confirmation process and stop notifying Congress when we sell weapons to foreign governments? Project 2025 does. What about terminating every diversity, equity and inclusion program in the federal government? Project 2025 says right on. What do you think about invoking martial law, using the military as local law enforcement and locking up Trump opponents? Project 2025 calls that progress.
The problem is not enough know about it despite it being right there hiding in plain site.
The Heritage Foundation is only part of a cadre of right-wing organizations hoping for a pseudo-Christian corporate takeover of the American government “institutionalizing Trumpism", though. The Trump campaign has emphasized external efforts to influence a potential second Trump presidency are unofficial. Internally, “Agenda47” lays down the formal blueprint, including “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Now, at this point you’re probably saying to yourself, “No one is going to allow this to happen. What about Congress? The Constitution will protect us.”
The Constitution is only effective if those sworn to uphold it actually do. Otherwise, it’s just a useless piece of handwritten old parchment.
To circumvent it, enter “Schedule F,” an executive order issued at the end of Trump’s presidency that never came to fruition involving the firing of thousands federal employees and replacing them with MAGA sycophants pledging their fealty to Trump, not the United States of America or the Constitution.
As Carlos Lozada wrote in a Times op-ed:
That deconstruction can be blunt. Portions of “Mandate for Leadership” read as though the authors did a Control-F search of the executive branch for any terms they deemed suspect and then deleted the offending programs or offices. The White House’s Gender Policy Council must go, along with its Office of Domestic Climate Policy. The Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is a no-no. The E.P.A. can do without its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be dismantled because it constitutes “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
The takeover of the Republican National Committee (RNC) was the beginning of this process. As Axios reported:
The Republican Party is now effectively the Trump Party. It’s been remade in a way that echoes Trump’s 2025 plan to oust moderates and nonpartisan civil servants from the government, pack federal offices with loyalists and expand presidential powers.
If Trump were to win, thousands of Trump-first loyalists would be ready for legal, judicial, defense, regulatory and domestic policy jobs. His inner circle plans to purge anyone viewed as hostile to the hard-edged, authoritarian-sounding plans he calls “Agenda 47.”
In 2022, Donald Trump returned to the Washington, DC to deliver a rant at the “America First Policy Institute” summit.
First, he called for concentration camps for the unhoused, in addition to the ones he established for migrants at the Southern border with Mexico.
Combining the human rights violations we committed against Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries and Japanese Americans during World War Two, Trump asserted the government should “remove” thousands of unhoused Americans and relocate them to tents on “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities” with “permanent bathrooms” and “medical professionals.”
Then, channeling his inner former Philippine president Roderigo Duterte, Trump suggested executing drug dealers.
He praised China’s undemocratic policies toward suspected criminals.
In addition to favoring a return to the racist “stop-and-frisk policies in cities,” Trump insisted that if he were still in office, he would override governors and mayors, and deploy the national guard to high-crime neighborhoods.
Echoing shades of his 2017 inaugural speech in which he intoned about a dystopic nation ravaged by “American carnage,” Trump claimed:
The dangerously deranged roam our streets with impunity. We are living in such a different country for one primary reason: There is no longer respect for the law and there certainly is no order. Our country is now a cesspool of crime.
We might be inclined to laugh and dismiss this as mere bluster, the tormented rantings of a delusional, ill-qualified, washed-up old wanna-be despot.
But we do so at our own peril.
Should Trump or anyone aspiring to be like him ever again gain the levers of power, this is part of the road map toward autocracy we can expect.
About the most recent details of Trump’s authoritarian blueprint should he — or anyone who wants to be like him — reclaim the levels of power, Laura Clawson, writing for The Daily Kos, explained:
In 2016, Democrats warned that a Trump presidency would mean the end of Roe v. Wade. That warning was widely ignored, even mocked and dismissed by the traditional media. Then Trump, with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, packed the court, and those predictions came true with the 2022 Dobbs decision. This time around we have a warning just as dire: Trump and Republicans want to expand the president’s powers to have fewer checks and balances and more decisions in one man’s hands. That Donald Trump is their current plan for who that man will be isn’t even the scariest thing about this.
How long are we still going to pretend we are immune to fascism?
We do so at our own peril.
We can prevent this.
Vote.
Vote like this could be the last election the United States will ever hold.
Because it could be.