Trump has a plan to destroy democracy. Why haven’t people heard of it?

For a nation that still prides itself on its exceptionalism, Americans are exceptionally indifferent to the workings of their own government. One explanation for that complacency is that, at least in recent times, our government’s powers have rarely been wielded specifically for the purpose of intimidating and harming American citizens in the manner of less benign societies, such as dictatorships and autocracies.

Republicans now aim to change that, and they are convinced that if Donald Trump is elected in November, he will provide them their moment.

While all Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan’s have taken advantage of their stewardship of government to gorge themselves at the public trough, Trump’s first term might have been the most egregious in history.

But even Trump’s record of craven political corruption was apparently not enough for the people who now dominate the GOP.

While draining public funds through corporate tax cuts and exploiting the country’s surfeit of natural resources is still the GOP’s paramount goal, the opportunity to transform the tools of government into a weapon to attack their political opponents now appears irresistible, particularly if those tools are handed to them by an administration that simply does not care how they are used.

So they’ve created “Project 2025,” a manifesto supported by 100 right-leaning organizations that satisfies those aims while enriching themselves in the process. They know that they have a uniquely clueless and mercurial vessel in Trump. One who is profoundly uninterested in governing, whose only real aim has always been to line his own pockets. So they assume with a reanimated, vengeful Trump in charge they’ll be given free rein to run amok, as long as Trump’s needs are met.

That 920-page tome, prepared by the Heritage Foundation, is a blueprint of right-wing grievances geared toward dismantling or coopting every aspect of the federal government and trampling over the rights of everyone they despise in the process. That includes women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and just about anyone opposing their white supremacist and Christian nationalist agenda.

It’s written broadly to apply to any Republican administration, but most particularly one under Trump, whose name is referenced in the document some 300 times.

Unsurprisingly, few American voters are even aware of the existence of Project 2025, let alone what it portends for their future. It’s a recipe for the total destruction of U.S. democracy through the imposition of a virulent, white, Christian nationalist regime, answerable only to Trump.

A poll conducted last month by Global Strategy Group for its Navigator Project indicates fewer than one in four registered voters in this country has heard of Project 2025. More Democrats have heard of it than Republicans, possibly because its existence is rarely mentioned by Fox News. 

Project 2025 envisions a federal government wholly refashioned in the service of Trump’s political patronage, informed by his billionaire donors and the white Christian right. It’s best understood as a plan with two main components: first, a road map for depleting the public treasury, and second, the complete weaponization of government against (mainly) nonwhite U.S. citizens and women. 

The initial aim of Project 2025 is to create a cadre of federal employees absolutely loyal to Trump. As explained by Russell Berman in The Atlantic, this would involve a wholesale purge and subsequent loyalty test administered to key employees in every federal agency and department. Trump would accomplish this by reissuing an executive order (Schedule “F”) that he signed at the end of his first term, effectively eliminating civil protections for 50,000 federal employees and allowing them to be fired at will for “disloyalty.”

In an essay titled “The Corruption Playbook,” written for the New York Review of Books, Walter M. Shaub Jr., director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in the Obama administration, explains the consequences of Project 2025:

Giving Trump absolute control over federal employees, including legions of prosecutors and law enforcement officers, will shatter one of the last major checks on presidential abuses of power … Government will cease to function as a guardian of public safety and be transformed into the weapon of a rogue politician. Science will take a back seat to political ambition. The president will inject political bias into the delivery of services and benefits, possibly to the advantage of swing district voters at the expense of other citizens (liberals and conservatives alike). 

As David Corn emphasized in Mother Jones when this plan was initially revealed, subjecting federal law enforcement to this loyalty litmus test would eliminate the independence of the Justice Department and FBI, for example, resulting in selective, ideology-driven enforcement of the law against those elements of U.S. society the administration deems undesirable or adversarial.

Corn explains how reformulation of the DOJ’s role would translate in practical terms:  

Trump has already vowed to pardon the January 6 assaulters if he returns to the White House—which would reward and validate violent insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, and seditionists. Now suppose Trump’s supporters—in large or small numbers—mounted new acts of political violence. Under the proposals advocated by Project 2025, Jeffrey Clark, and others, Trump could order the Justice Department not to investigate or prosecute these criminals. He could protect the brownshirts who engage in violence against his opponents. Similarly, Trump could do the same in cases of election interference or voter suppression. 

But as conservative Tom Nichols wrote last year in The Atlantic, when Project 2025 was announced, “the goal is not simply to institutionalize political oppression, but to make it a permanent feature throughout much of the U.S.  By converting the Department of Justice, the FBI and perhaps most ominously, the leadership of the U.S. military into vassals beholden to Trump and Trump alone, Project 2025 is “designed to set up a series of cascading democratic failures from Washington to every locality they can reach.”

Rather, the goal is to establish conservative dominance in any individual state where that is possible, i.e., in Republican-dominated states.

Of course, there will be fierce resistance by Democratic governors and legislatures. As Nichols wrote in 2022 for The Atlantic, in such a scenario “the federal government will not be able to compel odious policies in Democratic-controlled states so much as it will just remove barriers to instituting them in the Republican-controlled states.”

“This is where we really will have “free” and “unfree” Americas, side by side. To drive from Massachusetts to Alabama—especially for women and people of color—will not be crossing the Mason-Dixon line so much as it will be like falling through the Time Tunnel and emerging in a pre-1964 America where civil rights and equal treatment before the government are a matter of the state’s forbearance,” Nichols wrote. “If an American citizen’s constitutional rights are violated, there will be no Justice Department that will intervene, no Supreme Court that will overrule.”

It’s literally impossible to overstate or exaggerate the radical that Project 2025 contemplates for this country.

As Carlos Lozada wrote for The New York Times, the document is disturbing for its policy proposals alone. Couched in tedious, inflammatory “bureaucratese” by individuals who Trump would tap to fill positions in every agency and department, the Project 2025 manifesto “calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds.”

It “elevates the role of religious beliefs in government affairs” and prescribes the wholesale gutting of nearly every government agency that exists to enforce federal civil rights and reproductive rights protections,” he wrote. “At the Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force, which the Biden administration created five months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, must be supplanted by a pro-life task force that ensures that all Health and Human Services divisions “use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.” The document also asserts that the department should be known as the ‘Department of Life.’”

Alex Woodward, wrote for the Independent that “the plan recommends abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, slashing funds for federal law enforcement agencies, and subverting agencies that regulate the airwaves and campaign financing to choke out dissent.”

Funding for research on climate change would be eliminated. Programs to promote and incentivize the use of renewable energies (including the entirety of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act) would be shut down. 

As explained by Rachel Ulatowki in The Mary Sue, “It also seeks to strip federal protections from the LGBTQ+ community, undo Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, enact a nationwide total ban on abortion, and even aims to ban a whole slate of words, such as “diversity,” “gender,” and “abortion” from the government, schools, and every existing piece of legislation.”  

Under Project 2025, Lozada noted, the Department of Homeland Security would be dismantled and replaced by a stand-alone federal immigration department.

These are just a few highlights of “Project 2025.” Its daunting length and density is designed to discourage the type of analysis that would allow the U.S. public to fully understand it, which is why so few people have even heard of it.

Fortunately, congressional Democrats are now attempting to alert Americans to Project 2025 and  exactly what is being planned for a potential second Trump term. Rep. Jared Huffman of California has organized a Stop Project 2025 Task Force to educate the U.S. public about the manifesto and to propose and implement strategies to fight it in the event of a Trump victory in November.

As Huffman’s website states:

Project 2025 is more than an idea, it's a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will. This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers.

The Navigator poll conducted in late May indicates that, when informed of just a few of its provisions, a majority of Democrats and a plurality of independents oppose Project 2025. It’s hard to imagine that these numbers wouldn’t drastically increase if the public were to become fully informed about its consequences. 

But Republicans aren’t going to bring it up, for very good reason. The last thing they want is for the U.S. public to be aware of what they intend. They’d much prefer the public remain ignorant of it, right up through Nov. 5. Because after that, no one can say they weren’t warned. Campaign Action