I'm so glad you posted on this. I read some decent chunks of Project 2025 when people on Reddit started losing their minds, and I noticed the same thing: a LOT of "reading between the lines" to draw conclusions that just weren't textually there. I'll note a few things though:
1. For reasons I cannot totally understand myself, I did NOT like Project 2025 and got some heeb-jeebs reading it. Some sections were setting off pings in my brain that said "danger," but I think that may be osmosis from the general hysteria around the document. I also think I've just come to assume we SHOULD read between the lines on documents like this because people lie constantly in politics and say insane partisan crap on Twitter, but that seems like a me problem and not a Project 2025 problem.
2. I was deeply alarmed by a single section of Project 2025, which was the national security section. The push to increase our war-hawk stance, especially to further develop our nuclear arsenal absolutely freaked me out.
3. I wholeheartedly think that Trump just says shit to get elected, and no one should write off the general implementation of Project 2025 policies by the Trump administration because he says he doesn't like it now. He wants power so he'll disavow the Project if he thinks it might impact his electability, but I don't believe anything he (or most) candidates say about their policy promises on the campaign trail.
I agree that Trump will say anything to get elected, and he doesn't care about fulfilling his promises as much as he cares about being SEEN to have fulfilled his promises. (Hence his obsession with finding money to build a pretty wall that shot well on TV, even if it was ineffectual, illegal, and far short of what he'd promised.) If he saw political advantage in embracing P2025 while in office, he would do it, regardless of what he said on the trail.
But the flip side of that is that, if he saw political advantage in embracing the Democratic Party Platform while in office, he would do that, too. Yet nobody accuses the Democratic Party Platform of being Trump's secret plan for his return to power.
I see no special reason to consider P2025 the Trump Administration's secret plan, because I see no special reason to believe that following it would give Trump any kind of political advantage. In fact, the ongoing attacks against it make it likely (in my mind) that it would be a political disadvantage to embrace it in office, and that Trump thinks the same. He doesn't need to be re-elected after 2024, but he yearns desperately for validation, and that's always been his character arc. I think the most likely outcome is that Trump pursues the (largely dumb) ideas in the 2024 Republican Party platform, which are generally popular. Meanwhile, various other coalitions of Republicans (including Heritage conservatives, but also NatCons, old foreign policy Blob holdovers, genuine RINOs, and a liberal sprinkling of grade-A RFK-style lunatics) will jockey for power behind Trump's back and occasionally try to sell him on an idea for long enough to get it implemented.
I am trying to read through the whole thing but I am not going to write about anything other than the DOJ because I am just sufficiently knowledgeable or professionally qualified to do so.
However I am going to write one more post to address your critique and correct some errors. And in particular to make the case that what Project 2025 recommends is exactly what Trump will do. And that as a result of the Supreme Court’s Immunity decision, his powers to subvert democracy would be even greater.
Thanks for mentioning my article. The irony is that despite my efforts to present the Harris campaign and the liberal punditry with real ammunition, they’ve ignored it. Probably because the devil is hiding in the weeds (although Joyce Vance has no excuse since she is normally real good at gardening for the truth) and this threat does not lend itself to a sound bite.
If you succeed at reading through the whole thing, I think you should get a badge or something. Or at least the world should go "PING!" and announce "Achievement unlocked!"
I still don't think P2025 creates a permission structure for Trump to violate the law, but, at the same time, I don't think Trump cares about having a permission structure and will violate it anyway, even without an assist from P2025. He is just fundamentally not someone who accepts the validity of any law besides his will. (And this is extremely dangerous!)
That doesn't mean P2025's view of departmentalism among co-equal branches is wrong. (As I said in my email, they're just parroting Lincoln!), but it DOES mean that Donald Trump is unfit to wield the awesome powers of the presidency again -- including the power to interpret law, which he doesn't really believe in.
(One problem is, I don't think Harris-Walz really believe in law, either.)
I am happy to be able to share a small nugget of good news: The Book It Program continues to exist. It never went away. https://www.bookitprogram.com/. Now, nearly all of the Pizza Huts in my area are gone, and the only one in reasonable driving distance has a dilapidated vibe which only hints at the former glory of its halcyon days (i.e. my youth), but it's there. The only downside is that I now feel guilty about bringing three kids to a pizzeria which by all appearances would be out of business were it not central to some kind of money laundering operation, ordering four personal pan pizzas, and paying for one of them and a 2-liter of 7Up.
I went looking for the place where the book says they will fire the career employees and replace them with political appointees. What the chapter on personnel management (co-authored by the previous director of the Office of Personnel Management) says is that (as in every effective large private organization) personnel decisions about these employees should be based on assessments of how effectively they do their jobs. Radical! The chapter on HHS discusses some incremental goals that mainstream pro-life organizations have long supported (some of which had been advanced by the earlier Trump administration, no doubt causing the sky to fall).
In my home state of Washington, TV ads during our open primary for governor attacked Republican candidate Dave Reichert for voting in favor of a "nationwide abortion ban" during his long congressional career. They were talking about a bill to restrict abortion after 20 weeks from fertilization, with exceptions afterward for life of the mother or rape/incest pregnancies. (20 weeks post-fertilization is 22 weeks "gestational age," which ob/gyns count from the onset of the woman's previous menstrual period; it is now the time of viability, when a child can be delivered and survive outside the womb in a well-equipped hospital.) Four comments. First, this would have banned less than 1% of abortions, making the charge 99% false. Second, we may recall that Biden in the presidential debate defended Roe by saying it only allowed abortion after viability for the life of the mother (which was false, but in any case the policy Biden thought he was defending is stricter than the one Reichert, and some congressional Democrats, supported). Third, this is a stage when medical studies, one of them conducted by a committee of the AMA in 1998, have concluded that abortion is a greater threat to the mother's life than live delivery is. Four, Gallup and other polls show that two-thirds of Americans oppose allowing abortions at this late a stage. Yep, sure makes Reichert a wacko extremist. The spokesperson in the ad, identifying herself only as an ob/gyn, was medical director of our state's Planned Parenthood affiliate. Lies, lies, lies.
Having read about the same amount of Project 2025 as you have, or perhaps a little more, there's more divergence from the truth in your representation of it as benign and unlikely to become reality than in the comedy routines and memes you're mocking. Project 2025 *will* eat your dog. Well, not *your* dog, James. You're the sort of person Trumpism likes, even if you don't wholly like it back. Your dog only gets eaten in the long run, after Trump has laid the laws flat. But it will eat *my* dog.
'He doesn't even like Project 2025!' He doesn't like that the Heritage Foundation put it to paper! The idea that its authors can be from his previous administration and slated for the next one, but that he's unlikely to pursue these tactics to accomplish the goals of his prior term because he's distancing himself from them now--it's silly. Trump certainly doesn't care about the unborn, or anything beyond what brings power, wealth, or adulation to himself personally, so when you doubt we'll get the parts of Project 2025 you think would actually help people, you might be right. But we'll definitely get the parts that concentrate power around his person and that erode the American Constitution. The alarm bells are telling more truth than you're giving them credit for.
Let's talk footnote 6. Trump's 'you won't even need to vote next time' becomes less threatening in context, you say. But that context belongs to the lies he keeps telling about how he actually won the prior election. This isn't only preparing his audience to reject a loss in the upcoming election (which is already very very bad). If you read your Hannah Arendt, you'll recognize the broader quote as a particular kind of lie: one that isn't even intended to contest a set of facts about the past, but which instead signals intentions based on what this lie could justify if true. Specifically, it's a lie designed to justify the disenfranchisement of millions of citizens. Trump won't stop the United States from having elections. Rather, like authoritarians abroad whom he admires, he'll make elections functionally impossible for opponents to win. "Fixing the cheating" means preventing certain kinds of American citizens from voting, discovering the extra votes where you need them, and otherwise getting away with election interference. This is how Trump signals his intentions, and people raising the alarms know this. Describing Trump as threatening democracy with this quote is a more than reasonable shorthand for people who haven't read about fascist rhetorical techniques, which is most people.
You mention how some takes on Project 2025 read between the lines. Reading through the lines is necessary with fascism because fascists write between the lines in patterned ways. Even without such reading, Project 2025 gives Trump the tools to reshape government around himself much more than you suggest. The document organizes itself largely around departments rather than around issues, so you find ideas in odd places that could (and would) apply across the board. For example, this gem is in the section on the Treasury:
“Treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment” (p708)
Contemporary DEI trainings will tell you that racism, sexism, and other bad things exist, that they affect certain groups more than others, and that we should be aware of this and work against it. The fundamental racism of Trumpism gives us a world upside-down, where saying that racism exists is racism. Having merely sat through an assigned training now becomes grounds for dismissal. Since you've participated in racism denialism on this blog, maybe this seems fine to you. But it most definitely roots out non-loyalists. This sort of thing is all over Project 2025. Claiming that the document merely suggests making federal jobs more performance based could only come from not having read much of it.
Project 2025 is a simultaneously precise and slippery document, with a plan sometimes coming together throughout the text rather than with one obvious page reference. Nevertheless, I also get frustrated with the way some memesters have started using full quotation marks to indicate a mocking summary, instead of, you know, *quotes.* I can't speak to every example of mocking summary you examine, so let's just speak to the first one.
You provide 'a nuclear heterosexual family is the only valid kind of family' as a bad-faith example, then show one of many pages that says that as plain as day and try to tell us it doesn't say that. On the very page you reference, subsidies for single mothers and LGBTQ+ equity are explicitly slated for repeal. Maybe scapegoating the vulnerable is so much the air you breathe in conservative language that this doesn't stand out to you? It doesn't matter if your rationale is believing the hetero nuclear family is "healthier" (a nonsensical evaluation of a kinship structure that's a world-historical blip and wildly unstable). A variety of families exist in reality, and Project 2025 repeatedly calls for removing supports for everything other than the kind you personally live in. That is a government for which only one kind of family is valid.
Trump himself doesn't care about trans people, single mothers, or really anybody one way or the other. But he *will* use the scapegoating of outgroups to build and entrench authoritarian systems. So yes, I believe he will move forward with that sort of thing, and yes, that eats my dog.
I'm so glad you posted on this. I read some decent chunks of Project 2025 when people on Reddit started losing their minds, and I noticed the same thing: a LOT of "reading between the lines" to draw conclusions that just weren't textually there. I'll note a few things though:
1. For reasons I cannot totally understand myself, I did NOT like Project 2025 and got some heeb-jeebs reading it. Some sections were setting off pings in my brain that said "danger," but I think that may be osmosis from the general hysteria around the document. I also think I've just come to assume we SHOULD read between the lines on documents like this because people lie constantly in politics and say insane partisan crap on Twitter, but that seems like a me problem and not a Project 2025 problem.
2. I was deeply alarmed by a single section of Project 2025, which was the national security section. The push to increase our war-hawk stance, especially to further develop our nuclear arsenal absolutely freaked me out.
3. I wholeheartedly think that Trump just says shit to get elected, and no one should write off the general implementation of Project 2025 policies by the Trump administration because he says he doesn't like it now. He wants power so he'll disavow the Project if he thinks it might impact his electability, but I don't believe anything he (or most) candidates say about their policy promises on the campaign trail.
I agree that Trump will say anything to get elected, and he doesn't care about fulfilling his promises as much as he cares about being SEEN to have fulfilled his promises. (Hence his obsession with finding money to build a pretty wall that shot well on TV, even if it was ineffectual, illegal, and far short of what he'd promised.) If he saw political advantage in embracing P2025 while in office, he would do it, regardless of what he said on the trail.
But the flip side of that is that, if he saw political advantage in embracing the Democratic Party Platform while in office, he would do that, too. Yet nobody accuses the Democratic Party Platform of being Trump's secret plan for his return to power.
I see no special reason to consider P2025 the Trump Administration's secret plan, because I see no special reason to believe that following it would give Trump any kind of political advantage. In fact, the ongoing attacks against it make it likely (in my mind) that it would be a political disadvantage to embrace it in office, and that Trump thinks the same. He doesn't need to be re-elected after 2024, but he yearns desperately for validation, and that's always been his character arc. I think the most likely outcome is that Trump pursues the (largely dumb) ideas in the 2024 Republican Party platform, which are generally popular. Meanwhile, various other coalitions of Republicans (including Heritage conservatives, but also NatCons, old foreign policy Blob holdovers, genuine RINOs, and a liberal sprinkling of grade-A RFK-style lunatics) will jockey for power behind Trump's back and occasionally try to sell him on an idea for long enough to get it implemented.
I am trying to read through the whole thing but I am not going to write about anything other than the DOJ because I am just sufficiently knowledgeable or professionally qualified to do so.
However I am going to write one more post to address your critique and correct some errors. And in particular to make the case that what Project 2025 recommends is exactly what Trump will do. And that as a result of the Supreme Court’s Immunity decision, his powers to subvert democracy would be even greater.
Thanks for mentioning my article. The irony is that despite my efforts to present the Harris campaign and the liberal punditry with real ammunition, they’ve ignored it. Probably because the devil is hiding in the weeds (although Joyce Vance has no excuse since she is normally real good at gardening for the truth) and this threat does not lend itself to a sound bite.
Oh well.
If you succeed at reading through the whole thing, I think you should get a badge or something. Or at least the world should go "PING!" and announce "Achievement unlocked!"
I still don't think P2025 creates a permission structure for Trump to violate the law, but, at the same time, I don't think Trump cares about having a permission structure and will violate it anyway, even without an assist from P2025. He is just fundamentally not someone who accepts the validity of any law besides his will. (And this is extremely dangerous!)
That doesn't mean P2025's view of departmentalism among co-equal branches is wrong. (As I said in my email, they're just parroting Lincoln!), but it DOES mean that Donald Trump is unfit to wield the awesome powers of the presidency again -- including the power to interpret law, which he doesn't really believe in.
(One problem is, I don't think Harris-Walz really believe in law, either.)
James,
I am happy to be able to share a small nugget of good news: The Book It Program continues to exist. It never went away. https://www.bookitprogram.com/. Now, nearly all of the Pizza Huts in my area are gone, and the only one in reasonable driving distance has a dilapidated vibe which only hints at the former glory of its halcyon days (i.e. my youth), but it's there. The only downside is that I now feel guilty about bringing three kids to a pizzeria which by all appearances would be out of business were it not central to some kind of money laundering operation, ordering four personal pan pizzas, and paying for one of them and a 2-liter of 7Up.
Also, thanks for the post!
WHAT
WHAT
WHAT?!
Well, I gotta figure out how to get in on this action.
I went looking for the place where the book says they will fire the career employees and replace them with political appointees. What the chapter on personnel management (co-authored by the previous director of the Office of Personnel Management) says is that (as in every effective large private organization) personnel decisions about these employees should be based on assessments of how effectively they do their jobs. Radical! The chapter on HHS discusses some incremental goals that mainstream pro-life organizations have long supported (some of which had been advanced by the earlier Trump administration, no doubt causing the sky to fall).
In my home state of Washington, TV ads during our open primary for governor attacked Republican candidate Dave Reichert for voting in favor of a "nationwide abortion ban" during his long congressional career. They were talking about a bill to restrict abortion after 20 weeks from fertilization, with exceptions afterward for life of the mother or rape/incest pregnancies. (20 weeks post-fertilization is 22 weeks "gestational age," which ob/gyns count from the onset of the woman's previous menstrual period; it is now the time of viability, when a child can be delivered and survive outside the womb in a well-equipped hospital.) Four comments. First, this would have banned less than 1% of abortions, making the charge 99% false. Second, we may recall that Biden in the presidential debate defended Roe by saying it only allowed abortion after viability for the life of the mother (which was false, but in any case the policy Biden thought he was defending is stricter than the one Reichert, and some congressional Democrats, supported). Third, this is a stage when medical studies, one of them conducted by a committee of the AMA in 1998, have concluded that abortion is a greater threat to the mother's life than live delivery is. Four, Gallup and other polls show that two-thirds of Americans oppose allowing abortions at this late a stage. Yep, sure makes Reichert a wacko extremist. The spokesperson in the ad, identifying herself only as an ob/gyn, was medical director of our state's Planned Parenthood affiliate. Lies, lies, lies.
Having read about the same amount of Project 2025 as you have, or perhaps a little more, there's more divergence from the truth in your representation of it as benign and unlikely to become reality than in the comedy routines and memes you're mocking. Project 2025 *will* eat your dog. Well, not *your* dog, James. You're the sort of person Trumpism likes, even if you don't wholly like it back. Your dog only gets eaten in the long run, after Trump has laid the laws flat. But it will eat *my* dog.
'He doesn't even like Project 2025!' He doesn't like that the Heritage Foundation put it to paper! The idea that its authors can be from his previous administration and slated for the next one, but that he's unlikely to pursue these tactics to accomplish the goals of his prior term because he's distancing himself from them now--it's silly. Trump certainly doesn't care about the unborn, or anything beyond what brings power, wealth, or adulation to himself personally, so when you doubt we'll get the parts of Project 2025 you think would actually help people, you might be right. But we'll definitely get the parts that concentrate power around his person and that erode the American Constitution. The alarm bells are telling more truth than you're giving them credit for.
Let's talk footnote 6. Trump's 'you won't even need to vote next time' becomes less threatening in context, you say. But that context belongs to the lies he keeps telling about how he actually won the prior election. This isn't only preparing his audience to reject a loss in the upcoming election (which is already very very bad). If you read your Hannah Arendt, you'll recognize the broader quote as a particular kind of lie: one that isn't even intended to contest a set of facts about the past, but which instead signals intentions based on what this lie could justify if true. Specifically, it's a lie designed to justify the disenfranchisement of millions of citizens. Trump won't stop the United States from having elections. Rather, like authoritarians abroad whom he admires, he'll make elections functionally impossible for opponents to win. "Fixing the cheating" means preventing certain kinds of American citizens from voting, discovering the extra votes where you need them, and otherwise getting away with election interference. This is how Trump signals his intentions, and people raising the alarms know this. Describing Trump as threatening democracy with this quote is a more than reasonable shorthand for people who haven't read about fascist rhetorical techniques, which is most people.
You mention how some takes on Project 2025 read between the lines. Reading through the lines is necessary with fascism because fascists write between the lines in patterned ways. Even without such reading, Project 2025 gives Trump the tools to reshape government around himself much more than you suggest. The document organizes itself largely around departments rather than around issues, so you find ideas in odd places that could (and would) apply across the board. For example, this gem is in the section on the Treasury:
“Treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment” (p708)
Contemporary DEI trainings will tell you that racism, sexism, and other bad things exist, that they affect certain groups more than others, and that we should be aware of this and work against it. The fundamental racism of Trumpism gives us a world upside-down, where saying that racism exists is racism. Having merely sat through an assigned training now becomes grounds for dismissal. Since you've participated in racism denialism on this blog, maybe this seems fine to you. But it most definitely roots out non-loyalists. This sort of thing is all over Project 2025. Claiming that the document merely suggests making federal jobs more performance based could only come from not having read much of it.
Project 2025 is a simultaneously precise and slippery document, with a plan sometimes coming together throughout the text rather than with one obvious page reference. Nevertheless, I also get frustrated with the way some memesters have started using full quotation marks to indicate a mocking summary, instead of, you know, *quotes.* I can't speak to every example of mocking summary you examine, so let's just speak to the first one.
You provide 'a nuclear heterosexual family is the only valid kind of family' as a bad-faith example, then show one of many pages that says that as plain as day and try to tell us it doesn't say that. On the very page you reference, subsidies for single mothers and LGBTQ+ equity are explicitly slated for repeal. Maybe scapegoating the vulnerable is so much the air you breathe in conservative language that this doesn't stand out to you? It doesn't matter if your rationale is believing the hetero nuclear family is "healthier" (a nonsensical evaluation of a kinship structure that's a world-historical blip and wildly unstable). A variety of families exist in reality, and Project 2025 repeatedly calls for removing supports for everything other than the kind you personally live in. That is a government for which only one kind of family is valid.
Trump himself doesn't care about trans people, single mothers, or really anybody one way or the other. But he *will* use the scapegoating of outgroups to build and entrench authoritarian systems. So yes, I believe he will move forward with that sort of thing, and yes, that eats my dog.