Project 2025: Red Carpet to American Autocracy

Early in former President Trump’s term, he had a big idea to prevent undocumented immigrants from crossing the southern border, and it was not a wall.

“I want a big, deep moat!” He exclaimed to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson. According to Miles Taylor, Nielson’s Chief of Staff, Trump explained that he wanted this moat filled with snakes and alligators to, as Taylor put it, “eat people alive if they fell into it.”

This bizarre exchange was described by Taylor in his book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, a book I have read and highly recommend. But be warned– it is horrifying.

The snake and alligator-infested moat would be one of Trump’s many “bad idea bonfires,” and Taylor and his colleagues would find themselves repeatedly trying to extinguish them using various tactics of distraction, delay, or compromise.

In another disturbing example, according to Taylor, Trump frequently expressed confusion over why he could not simply order federal law enforcement officers to use violence against migrants or Black Lives Matter protesters. This account has been corroborated by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who quoted Trump as saying, “can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something.”

Distracting Trump from doing horrible things to people was exhausting work that would ultimately lead to Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, describing Trump in this way:

John Kelly during his time in the white house. Photo credit: Boston Globe

“He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” – former Trump Administration Chief of Staff John Kelly

Like his colleagues, Miles Taylor joined the Trump Administration as a believer—a Trump supporter willing to go to political war for this unconventional firebrand. Trump was shaking up the American political landscape in ways that engendered a fanatical following among a large swath of the conservative American electorate, and Taylor was eager to be a part of the movement.

But, like many of his colleagues, Taylor experienced on the inside a funhouse mirrored terror mansion of chaos led by an aspiring strongman with no regard for democratic principles, governing standards, or basic human decency. As a result of this experience, Taylor did something extraordinarily bold.

Photo Credit: New York Times

In 2018 he wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” The subtitle of this shocking article read: “I work for the president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

The op-ed sent President Trump into a rage as he vowed to root out the mole in his midst. The hunt was unsuccessful. Taylor revealed himself as “Anonymous” when he resigned his position in the Trump Administration more than two years later, in October 2020. For months afterward, Taylor endured relentless death threats and harassment.

One may read into Taylor’s action an act of treason. A White House insider actively working against the will of the President and Commander in Chief? And therein lies the heart of exactly why a demagogue like Donald Trump is so incredibly dangerous for the future of American democracy. It reveals that the strength of our democracy lies purely in the hearts and minds of the men and women whom we entrust to lead our nation as elected representatives.

We may have a constitution, but the reality is that it isn’t worth anything unless our elected representatives carry out their democratic duties in good faith and in alignment with constitutional principles.  Our democracy rests on a foundation, not of a document, but of a set of unwritten principles and traditions voluntarily adhered to by those who we, the people, entrust with enormous power and responsibility.

George Washington, our first president, set the standard for one of those principles—respect for the peaceful transfer of power. It is a sacred obligation that, after almost two and a half centuries, was shattered by Donald Trump’s failure to concede a lost election and his systematic attempts to unconstitutionally overturn its results to keep himself in power, including the incitement of a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This historical context brings us to the reason why Project 2025 presents a profound danger to the future of America. While the media has mainly focused on the many draconian policy ideas within the document, they are largely failing to articulate that the greater danger is that Project 2025 is a playbook for removing the guardrails from a second Trump presidency—one that he has already stated will be driven by retribution in a second term of vengeance and political targeting.

The first three words in the 930-page Project 2025 document are “We want you!!”

Published in early 2023 voluntarily by the Heritage Foundation, a long-standing conservative political think tank, Project 2025 is a call to arms. It is a recruitment tool to create a standing army-in-waiting of MAGA loyalists who will be ready, eager, and specifically trained to fill the ranks of the civil service (what Trump calls the “deep state”) to carry out the orders of the next Trump presidency without question or hesitation. These institutions harbor great powers within them that, if used against the American people at the behest of a vengeful president, can destroy our republic and our democracy as we know it from within.

The primary objective of Project 2025, therefore, is not about draconian policy ideas like abolishing the Department of Education. It is about turning the management of the traditionally non-partisan civil service into a cabal of MAGA loyalists who will act on political rather than professional directives.

The Project 2025 document explicitly states that the “next conservative president” must be willing to grab extraordinary executive powers so that he can then “hand the power back to the people” once the federal government has been overhauled to match the vision of MAGA.

This is an egregiously dangerous perspective when their favored candidate already tried once to overthrow the American government after losing an election. Do they really think that, once power is grabbed through their playbook, Trump would behave like Washington and not like Orban or Mussolini?

The authors of Project 2025 must know that Trump is no Washington, which is why the document is so sinister in nature. The logical conclusion is that the Project 2025 authors want an authoritarian Trump who will steamroll over our democracy to achieve their objectives of “making America great again” by their definition only.

After all, the current Heritage Foundation President, Kevin Roberts, recently stated on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that “we are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it.”

The main mechanism of this so-called “revolution” is the planned overhauling of the administrative state, replacing career civil servants with political loyalists. This goal is explicitly stated on pages 20 and 21 of Project 2025:

“…the new administration must fill its ranks with political appointees.”

“When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state. Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan “experts.”

This recruitment drive for loyalists is so core to the Project 2025 agenda that it is represented as one of its four main pillars, specifically stated in the document as “a personnel database.”

Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, has claimed “We are building a pipeline of conservative talent that is ready to step into key roles and implement our vision for America.”

Former head of Project 2025 Paul Dans claimed “We have a database with over 10,000 people from all walks of life entering into this, aspiring to serve. We want people who’ve been canceled, who’ve figuratively given blood for the movement. These are mums who’ve challenged school boards. These are people who’ve stood up in their companies and said, ‘Enough with [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and the whole woke agenda.’”

Many of these recruits are people who have filled out the vetting questionnaire on Project2025.org — political loyalists rather than the non-partisan experts who have traditionally filled the ranks of the civil service since the late 1800s.

The century-and-a-half long tradition of filling federal government positions with non-partisan experts is one of those unwritten foundational principles that has kept our democracy intact. Past presidents going back at least to Grover Cleveland have understood and largely adhered to the necessity of keeping political influence out of the day-to-day responsibilities of civil servants ranging from EPA environmental scientists to FBI investigators.

Project 2025’s brazen call to reverse this tradition and suggest that these career positions be qualified, not by experience and training in their field, but by a loyalty test to the MAGA movement, is dangerous. It becomes profoundly alarming if the occupant of the oval office has already stated and demonstrated anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies, and has already tried once before to overturn the will of the people.

Overhauling the civil service (i.e., “deep state”) with political loyalists would require firing and replacing tens of thousands of federal government employees. Most of these jobs typically carry over from one administration to the next. So how would the next Trump carry out this hostile takeover?

There is a plan for that, and it was already enacted once by Trump at the end of his last term. In October 2020, anticipating re-election the next month, Trump signed an executive order instituting “Schedule F,” which created a new employment category for federal employees that gives the president the authority to directly hire and fire vastly larger numbers of federal employees to the tune of many tens of thousands.

This order was immediately rescinded by President Biden upon his taking office in 2021, like putting a risen demon back into the earth. But there is no question that Trump would re-institute this order probably on day one of his presidency—one of the many “dictator-for-a-day” orders he may sign on January 21, 2025.

Trump would likely use the power of the executive order to push through an agenda that would have no chance in the legislative chambers. This possible landslide of executive orders would need to be implemented by the thousands of civil servants in the various federal agencies involved. Schedule F creates the mechanism for the next MAGA president to stuff the executive branch with loyalists who, rather than preventing the president from doing horrible things, would likely carry out his vengeful orders.

And this is where the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity comes in, supercharging this danger to alarming levels. Prior to this decision, Project 2025’s playbook for MAGA authoritarianism was still a road full of rocks and potholes. The conservative super-majority Supreme Court just paved that road over with a red carpeted conveyor belt for the first American dictator to ride into unchecked power.

Photo credit: Adam Szuscik via Unsplash

For almost two hundred and fifty years, the American people lived under the belief that no American, even the president, was above the law. The U.S. Supreme Court in Trump vs. The United States changed that overnight in what many legal scholars have called one of the most misguided and dangerous rulings in its entire history. Their ruling largely grants the U.S. president broad immunity from prosecution for anything arbitrarily deemed an “official act.”

While this ruling caused a prosecutorial delay in the January 6th-related cases against Trump (Federal and State of Georgia), it may not insulate him from conviction in those cases as federal prosecutors argue that his actions were undertaken as a candidate for office, not as president, and therefore cannot be considered “official acts” of the president. The merits of that argument, however, are untested under the new presidential immunity powers granted by the Supreme Court.

The danger, however, lies in a future President Trump who may seek to legally insulate his directives by declaring them official presidential acts. Furthermore, the Supreme Court explicitly protected the president from prosecution over any interaction between the president and the Department of Justice, opening the door wide open for targeted prosecution of political opponents or extrajudicial crackdowns on U.S. Citizens under easily fabricated emergency powers such as the Insurrection Act

The Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity arguably throws a wet blanket on any future Trump Administration insiders who may still be left trying to hold up the now rickety guardrails against his criminality if for no other reason than to protect their own skin.

Combine that with a president’s broad power of the pardon, including the preemptive pardon, and you have a wide-open path for the next (and even current) president to do almost whatever he or she wants with little fear or threat of future prosecution.

When Trump distances himself from Project 2025, he is playing a game the media is buying into by focusing on the policy proposals in the document. Trump does not care about those policy ideas. He can refute and disown them for political cover. What Trump is interested in from Project 2025 is the playbook for a power grab and its pre-vetted loyalist political army-in-waiting so that he can punish his political enemies and carry out his often horrible and immoral ideas without obstruction (i.e., “just shoot them in the legs or something.”)

Make no mistake; if Trump is re-elected, he absolutely has a clear path to dictatorship, cut wide open by the playbook that is Project 2025 and the legal cover that this conservative Supreme Court just unleashed.

Many frustrated Americans may relish the idea of a Trump dictatorship to relieve their problems and perceived grievances. For almost a decade the MAGA movement has stoked and reinforced the fear and anger of their followers. They are angry because they are told they should be. They are fearful because they are told they need to be. They are hateful because they are told it’s okay to be.

But modern history is fraught with examples of this foolishness. When democracy is undermined by a vengeful demagogue who plays on the people’s fear, anger, and hatred, it ends badly for everyone. Only a few decades ago authoritarian regimes, whether fascist or communist, in Europe and elsewhere promised grand authoritarian solutions (and retribution for trumped up grievances), but ended in the horrific destruction of whole societies, genocides, and wars of annihilation.

It would be hyperbolic to conclude with certainty that a second Trump Administration will lead us into such horrific turmoil. But it would be equally naive to assume that we can take another giant step onto that slippery slide of fascism and assume we will be able to arrest our accelerating descent towards its terrifying destinations.

Project 2025 is a playbook that gives extraordinary powers to the presidency in the foolish expectation that the president who benefits from that power would then voluntarily dilute it again. That is the dangerous plan.

The reality is that a vengeful and aging President Trump will likely use those powers, newly unhindered through the installation of an army of pre-vetted political loyalists operating under the cover of a preemptive pardon and the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, to potentially unleash an American presidential fury that could send the nation into a dark vault of political chaos and even violence.

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor was not speaking in hyperbolic terms in her rebuttal to the catastrophic presidential immunity decision when she wrote, “with fear for our democracy, I dissent.”