Think It's Too Early to Start Thinking About 2024? Then Take a Look at 'Project 2025'
Vote like this could be the last election the United States will ever hold. Because it could be.
While the world’s eyes are on the Middle East again as more violence there threatens global security, back here at home there is a sadistic plot afoot to make the United States the next country to ditch democracy in favor of strong-man autocracy.
No, we are not talking about the chaos in the House of Representatives rendering Congress impotent, although that should concern us, as it could be part of the plan.
We are referring instead to something called “Project 2025,” that, according to its website, 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 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.
“Our current executive branch was conceived by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies”?
Typical rhetoric from a former staffer for the former president who spewed:
We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.
(Note: fascists and Marxists are polar opposites.)
We don’t have to go that far back to recall variations of those very words being promoted before.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung boasted:
[Trump has] laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done. Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.
America has traditionally regarded itself immune to the fissures that condemn weaker democracies.
We hail ourselves (most of the time) as the exemplar of elections, peaceful transitions of power, and civilized political discourse.
We understand intellectually we are imperfect and have done things for which we should not be proud and for which we must atone, like slavery, segregation, and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
We have supervised elections in other countries to ensure honesty and transparency.
While economic interests and hubris have too frequently been behind our decisions more than good intentions, we want democracy to grow across the globe.
It’s hard to think of the United States of America as a fascist dictatorship.
But Project 2025 seeks to make it just that.
A year ago, Donald Trump returned to the Washington, DC to deliver a rant at the “America First Policy Institute” summit.
First, he called for concentration camps.
Yes, concentration camps, this time for the homeless, 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 homeless 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.