A second Trump term would be more dangerous than the first — in part because of something called Project 2025, a plan to extend Trump’s grip into every part of your life.
Trump’s gross incompetence in his first term wasn’t all bad. It kept some of his most extreme goals out of reach. That’s why his inner circle, including more than 20 officials from his first term, have written a step-by-step playbook to make a second term brutally efficient.
At nearly a thousand pages, it’s longer than most Stephen King novels, and a lot scarier. The Associated Press wasn’t kidding when they called it “a plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision,”
Project 2025 is a road map to ban abortion, give greedy corporate oligarchs everything they want, and strip Americans of our most basic freedoms — all without needing any support from Congress.
There’s more to it than I can get into, but here are three things I want you to know.
#1 How would Project 2025 work?
Every nonpartisan government agency would be turned into an arm of the MAGA agenda.
Some of the worst things Trump reportedly tried to do as president — like having the military shoot protesters or seize voting machines to overturn the election — were only stopped because sensible leaders in the military or the professional civil service refused to go along with it.
In a second term, there would be no sensible leaders in the military or professional civil service because Trump would fire anyone more loyal to the Constitution than to him.
Trump started the process in October 2020 with an executive order that would have let him fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA henchmen. I’m talking about traditionally non-political positions, like scientists at scientific agencies and accountants at the IRS.
Trump could not act on the executive order then because he lost the election. If he wins now, he’s pledged to pick up where he left off and go further…
TRUMP: …making every executive branch employee fireable by the President of the United States.
#2 Project 2025 is about controlling Americans’ lives & bodies
Restricting abortion is such a big part of Project 2025 that the word “abortion” appears 198 times in the plan.
Trump largely made good on his campaign promise to ban abortion.
Thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court justices, 1 in 3 American women of childbearing age live in states with abortion bans. Project 2025 would make that even worse, without needing new laws from Congress.
Page 458 of the playbook calls for a MAGA-controlled FDA to reject medical science and reverse approval of the medications used in 63% of all abortions, effectively banning them.
Page 455 plans “abortion surveillance” and the creation of a registry that could put people who cross state lines to get an abortion at risk of prosecution.
Another way around Congress is to enforce arcane laws that are still technically on the books. Page 562 plans for a MAGA-controlled Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act of 1873, which bans the mailing of “anything designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” This could be used to block the shipment of any medications or medical instruments needed for abortions.
But Project 2025’s control of American families goes even further. It plans for government agencies to define life as beginning at conception — a position at odds with the process used for in vitro fertilization.
Page 451 declares that “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” thereby stigmatizing single parents, same-sex couples, unmarried coparents, and childless couples.
Project 2025 even takes a stand against adoption, declaring on p. 489 that “all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”
#3 Project 2025 would turn America into a police state.
Maybe you live in a blue city or state, where you think plans like arresting teachers and librarians over banned books (which is on p. 5) could never happen. Well, guess again.
Trump has said one of the big things he’d do differently in a second term is override mayors and governors to take over local law enforcement.
Page 553 lays out how to do this, and even plans for Trump’s Justice Department to prosecute district attorneys he disagrees with.
Immigration enforcement is to be conducted like a war, with the military deployed within the U.S., and millions of undocumented immigrants rounded up and placed into newly constructed holding camps. This is outlined starting on p. 139.
Members of the Project 2025 team also reportedly told the Washington Post about plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against anti-Trump protests.
There is much more to Project 2025. There are more than a hundred pages of anti-environmental policies that would help Trump make good on what he reportedly promised to do for oil executives if they contribute a billion dollars to his reelection. It would make drilling and mining a top national priority while killing clean energy projects, barring the EPA from regulating carbon emissions, and replacing all government climate scientists with climate deniers.
There are even cartoonishly cruel plans like slaughtering wild horses. Yes, that’s really in there on p. 528.
I thought I understood the stakes of this election, but reading this plan… Well, it gave me chills. If Trump gets the chance to put this plan into place, he will. The country it would turn America into would be hard for any of us to recognize.
Read it on Robert Reich’s blog.
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