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Today, I link tok and excerpt from the New York Times article, Don’t Lose Sight of Project 2025. That’s the Real Trump, by Dr. Paul Krugman.
All that follows is from the above July 15, 2024 resource.
As Republicans head into their convention this week, it’s important to understand the potential ramifications of both their official platform, about which I wrote last week, and their unofficial aspirations, embodied by Project 2025.
For anyone new to this: Project 2025 is a blueprint by and for some of Trump’s close allies, put together by the Heritage Foundation, to ensure that if Trump wins in November, MAGA will hit the ground running. It seeks to provide “both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.” The particulars are laid out in a roughly 900-page document, “Mandate for Leadership,” with specific action plans for many parts of the federal government.
How radical is the Project 2025 agenda? Earlier this month, Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Republicans seem, however, to have belatedly realized that much of what’s in Project 2025, especially its multipronged attack on reproductive rights, is deeply unpopular. Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, claiming last week that he knows “nothing” about it, even though quite a few of the people who’ve worked on it are former Trump officials and aides, and even though in 2022 Trump told a Heritage conference that its people were “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
More generally, since Trump has never shown himself to be a policy wonk, there’s every reason to believe that if he wins he will, as he did in his first term, leave a lot of the granular policymaking to people who do sweat the details — so it’s more than reasonable to think of Project 2025 as a guide to what could happen in a second Trump term.
What would that mean? There are many, many things to object to in Project 2025, but I’d argue that the most important thing is right at the front, in the section titled “Taking the Reins of Government.” There’s a lot in this section, but it basically calls for replacing much of the federal work force, which consists mainly of career civil servants somewhat insulated from partisan pressures, with political appointees who can be hired or fired at will.
Trump actually made a significant move in this direction near the end of his presidency, issuing an executive order that created a category of political appointee, Schedule F, which would have allowed the replacement of many career officials with partisan loyalists. President Biden rescinded that order, but Project 2025 would bring it back in some form — probably on a much larger scale.
Remember, during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump openly suggested that he might not help states whose governors didn’t support him: “It’s a two-way street. They have to treat us well, also.” If he wins and Project 2025 goes into effect, he’ll be in a position to engage in that kind of arm-twisting on a massive scale.
There’s a lot of additional stuff in Project 2025, which I’ll get to in future columns. For now, let’s just say that it’s every bit as menacing as critics report. And despite Trump’s disingenuous attempts to distance himself from the project, it gives us a very good idea of what a second Trump term could be like.
