Donald Trump Is Desperately Trying To Hide His Connections To Project 2025
Source: The New Republic, Michael Caruso, CEO
Photo: Eye of the Storm/Alex Shephard
The former president continues loudly denying that he has anything to do with the plan, but more than 140 former Trump staffers worked on it and CBS News recently counted 270 proposals in the Project 2025 playbook that overlap with Trump’s past policies and current campaign promises—including mass deportations, dismantling LGBTQ rights, and gutting the Department of Education.
When introducing the plan, the Heritage Foundation proudly declared it a strategy for “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
So why is Trump trying to claim he doesn’t have anything to do with it? Because Americans have started waking up to the dangers of the right-wing plan, and they aren’t happy about it at all. According to polls from Navigator Research, only 11 percent of Americans view Project 2025 favorably, and the more people learn, the less they like it.
But what makes Project 2025 so threatening isn’t just that it’s a plan for a Trump presidency, it’s the fact that, as The Guardian notes, “it is instead a vision for conservatives for Trump and far beyond, a rightwing wishlist aimed at generational change in how the government operates and the chief executive’s role within it.”
The public has a right to be concerned. With this year’s infamous presidential immunity ruling, the Supreme Court has laid the groundwork for Trump to gut the federal government and remake American politics in his image.
The New Republic has been defending American democracy for 110 years, which means we’ve covered more than two dozen presidential elections—but this one is different from all those that came before. This is the first election where one man poses an existential threat to American democracy itself.
If you think Donald Trump and his right-wing zealots must be stopped before they enact any part of Project 2025, help look out for America’s future by helping us out today.
Project 2025 is a frontal assault on the First Amendment. The proposals run roughshod over freedom of religion—providing more funding and government access for religious organizations, outlawing pornography (however the right defines it, so hide your children’s books), and establishing Sunday as a national “God-ordained” day of rest. “In nearly all chapters,” says a report in The Guardian, “there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government.”
And, of course, under Project 2025 abortion would be effectively outlawed.
As for the federal government under Project 2025, it would look closer to something out of 1984 than the United States today. The Department of Education would be entirely dismantled. The federal Health and Human Services Department would be reconstituted as the “Department of Life.” And it lays out a strategy to use the 2030 census as a tool to “actively engage with conservative groups and voices.”
The cruelest policy put forth by Project 2025 is also one of Trump’s banner proposals—the largest deportation operation in American history. Experts project this plan would remove 5 percent of the American workforce, using the U.S. military to purge the country in a scheme that would require the use of internment camps and open the doors to raids on schools and hospitals to hunt down migrants.
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