An update: Project 2025 just announced that it was going to stop creating policies, and that its director, a former Trump administration official, was leaving, The Washington Post\u2019s Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey report. Trump campaign, they report, is \u201cfurious\u201d at the way Project 2025 has linked itself to Trump and how it has been received in the media. It\u2019s not clear what that means for the initial 900-page plan, nor what it would mean for a second Trump presidency, since many of the ideas in Project 2025 are ideas Trump has endorsed and were put forward by close advisers or people who worked in his administration.<\/p>\n
If Donald Trump struggled somewhat in his first administration to move the country dramatically to the right, he\u2019ll be ready to go in a second term.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the aim behind Project 2025, a comprehensive plan by former and likely future leaders of a Trump administration to remake America in a conservative mold while dramatically expanding presidential power and allowing Trump to use it to go after his critics.<\/p>\n
The plan is gaining attention just as Trump is trying to moderate his stated positions to win the election, so he\u2019s criticized some of what\u2019s in it as \u201cabsolutely ridiculous and abysmal\u201d and insisted that neither he nor his campaign had anything to do with Project 2025.<\/p>\n
Still, what\u2019s in this document is a pretty good indicator of what a second Trump presidency could look like. Here\u2019s what Project 2025 is and how it could reshape America.<\/p>\n
The centerpiece is a 900-page plan that calls for extreme policies on nearly every aspect of Americans\u2019 lives, from mass deportations, to politicizing the federal government in a way that would give Trump control over the Justice Department, to cutting entire federal agencies, to infusing Christian nationalism into every facet of government policy by calling for a ban on pornography and promoting policies that encourage \u201cmarriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.\u201d<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t coming directly from the Trump campaign. But it should be taken seriously because of the people who wrote it, analysts say. The main organization behind the plan, the Heritage Foundation, is a revolving door for Trump officials (and Heritage is a sponsor of the Republican National Convention, which will hand him the nomination next week).<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is meant as an organized statement of the Trumpist, conservative movement, both on policy and personnel, and politics,\u201d said William Galston, head of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.<\/p>\n
A few of the highlights:<\/p>\n
Remake the federal workforce to be political: Instead of nonpartisan civil servants implementing policies on everything from health to education and climate, the executive branch would be filled with Trump loyalists. \u201cIt is necessary to ensure that departments and agencies have robust cadres of political staff,\u201d the plan says. That means nearly every decision federal agencies make could advance a political agenda \u2014 as in whether to spend money on constituencies that lean Democratic. The project calls for cutting LGBTQ health programs, for example.<\/p>\n
Cut the Education Department: Project 2025 would make extensive changes to public schooling, cutting longtime low-income and early education federal programs like Head Start, for example, and even the entire Education Department. \u201cFederal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,\u201d the plan reads.<\/p>\n
Give Trump power to investigate his opponents: Project 2025 would move the Justice Department, and all of its law enforcement arms like the FBI, directly under presidential control. It calls for a \u201ctop-to-bottom overhaul\u201d of the FBI and for the administration to go over its investigations with a fine-toothed comb to nix any the president doesn\u2019t like. This would dramatically weaken the independence of federal law enforcement agencies. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be an all-out assault on the Department of Justice and the FBI,\u201d said Galston, of Brookings. \u201cIt will mean tight White House control of the DOJ and FBI.\u201d<\/p>\n
Make reproductive care, particularly abortion pills, harder to get: It doesn\u2019t specifically call for a national abortion ban, but abortion is one of the most-discussed topics in the plan, with proposals throughout encouraging the next president \u201cto lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again.\u201d It would do this by prosecuting anyone mailing abortion pills (\u201cAbortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,\u201d the plan says). It would raise the threat of criminalizing those who provide abortion care by using the government to track miscarriage, stillbirths and abortions, and make it harder to get emergency contraceptive care covered by insurance. It would also end federal government protections for members of the military and their families to get abortion care.<\/p>\n
Crack down on even legal immigration: It would create a new \u201cborder patrol and immigration agency\u201d to resurrect Trump\u2019s border wall, build camps to detain children and families at the border, and send out the military to deport millions of people who are already in the country illegally (including dreamers) \u2014 a deportation effort so big that it could put a major dent in the U.S. economy. \u201cIllegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized,\u201d the plan says.<\/p>\n
Slash climate change protections: Project 2025 calls for getting rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, describing it as \u201cone of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.\u201d It would increase Arctic drilling and shutter the Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s climate change departments, all while making it easier to up fossil fuel production.<\/p>\n
Ban transgender people from the military and consider reinstating the draft: \u201cGender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service,\u201d it reads. The author of this part of the plan led the Defense Department at the end of Trump\u2019s presidency, and he told The Washington Post that the government should seriously consider mandatory military service.<\/p>\n
A huge part of this project is to recruit and train people on how to pull the levers of government or read the law in novel ways to carry out these dramatic changes to federal policy. There\u2019s even a place on the plan\u2019s website where you can submit your r\u00e9sum\u00e9.<\/p>\n
But there are some major hurdles to getting the big stuff done, even if Trump and Republicans win control of Washington next year. For one, Trump doesn\u2019t appear to agree with everything in it. His campaign platform barely mentions abortion, while Project 2025 zeroes in on it repeatedly.<\/p>\n
Also, some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire them at will, for example. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally iffy.<\/p>\n
Ominously, one of the project\u2019s leaders opened the door to political violence to will all of this into being: \u201cWe are in the process of the second American revolution,\u201d Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts warned recently, \u201cwhich will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not unusual for wannabe administration officials to plan for how they\u2019d govern once they get back in power. But what is unusual is how dramatic and unapologetically extreme many of these proposals are.<\/p>\n
And the Biden campaign \u2014 which is obviously struggling right now with existential questions about its nominee \u2014 sees this as an easy target to campaign on.<\/p>\n
Democrats are circulating a survey from a liberal organization that suggests talking about Project 2025 as a \u201ctakeover\u201d of American government by Trumpists resonates with voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like reading a horror novel,\u201d said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson. \u201cEach page makes you want to read the next one, but when you finish reading it, you\u2019re scared and disgusted.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s much to the frustration of the Trump campaign, which doesn\u2019t want such specific (and politically unpopular) ideas out there pegged to his campaign, as he\u2019s trying to moderate some of his positions to win the election.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes no sense to put all the crazy things you\u2019ll be attacked for down on paper while you\u2019re running,\u201d a Trump adviser told The Washington Post recently.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s fair to think of Project 2025 as a pretty good indicator of what a second Trump presidency would look like, analysts say.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like Trump is going to hand out this booklet to his Cabinet on Day One and say, \u2018Here you go,\u2019\u201d said Michael Strain, the director of economic policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. \u201cBut it reflects real goals of important people in Trump\u2019s community.\u201d<\/p>\n
A previous version of this article misspelled the name of the American Enterprise Institute\u2019s Michael Strain as Michel. The article has been corrected.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
An update: Project 2025 just announced that it was going to stop creating policies, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2209,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}