What I've learned about Project 2025
None of it good....
TL;DR: Look here and here. And spread the word.
On Monday, April 14, I had the tremendous good fortune to join a Zoom call about “The Reality of Project 2025” with Heather Cox Richardson and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas). Heather Cox Richardson is a historian and an essential voice for these times. Her daily “Letters from an American” will clarify current events for you in 15 minutes or so, while also providing deep analysis and historical precedent. I like to listen to her read these letters (wherever you get your podcasts) while I am folding laundry or such, and I always feel positively armed with knowledge afterwards.
Jasmine Crockett was elected to represent Texas's 30th congressional district in November 2022. She is an attorney and serves on the House Judiciary Committee, and is famously spicy in her rhetoric. On Monday night, she described Donald Trump as a “baby wanna-be Putin” and as the “criminal-in-chief.” She also said of the damage currently being inflicted on the nation that “none of this is happening in a vacuum; it’s happening to all of us, and the harm will not be limited to the ‘other.’”
—> The specific harm that we all face is Project 2025.
I’d heard about Project 2025, of course, and I kept meaning to learn more, but I was, you know, busy living my life. And now in the past three months, I’ve been busy reeling from the onslaught against democracy, the rule of law, and basic human decency that Trump’s administration has unleashed, and I just couldn’t seem to find the time (or the stomach) to sit down and read the 900-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, produced by the Heritage Foundation as Project 2025’s playbook.
But the Zoom call hosted by the national organization Red Wine & Blue has persuaded me that it is time. For one thing, Project 2025’s goals are being achieved at breathtaking speed, even though they run counter to most of the American ideals we hold dear, and even though they’ve been perfectly upfront about it all. From the Project 2025 website:
The Mandate for Leadership “offers a menu of policy suggestions to meet our country’s deepest challenges and put America back on track, including:
Secure the border, finish building the wall, and deport illegal aliens
De-weaponize the Federal Government by increasing accountability and oversight of the FBI and DOJ
Unleash American energy production to reduce energy prices
Cut the growth of government spending to reduce inflation
Make federal bureaucrats more accountable to the democratically elected President and Congress
Improve education by moving control and funding of education from DC bureaucrats directly to parents and state and local governments
Ban biological males from competing in women's sports
Um, check, check, check.
Some of us will recognize what is couched in the seemingly benign language of these stated goals, but we might also recognize that this list sounds pretty good to conservatives. Puzzling, then, that the front page of the website takes such pains to shield Donald Trump from any association with Project 2025. During the campaign, Trump said (that is, Trump lied…if his lips are moving, etc.) that he didn’t know anything about it, but the website doubles down, quoting USA Today’s Fact Check as saying, “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump.” J.D. Vance is also declared innocent of Project 2025 in the short article linked from Politifact: “No, this 2021 video does not show Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance endorsing Project 2025.”
The Heritage Foundation was right to be concerned that their boy Don could not get elected with Project 2025 around his neck. An October 2024 poll showed that 8% of Democrats supported Project 2025 (and who are those 8%, I have to wonder…), 5% of Independents supported it, and even among Republicans, only 18% supported the plan. Corrected for MAGA affiliation (26% support), only 9% of “regular” Republicans support Project 2025. That is a thunderously unpopular platform to run on, and so the Heritage Foundation sneaked it in, but somehow also right under our noses.
The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 partially in reaction to President Richard Nixon’s (that madcap hippie liberal) embrace of the “liberal consensus.” (Heather Cox Richardson provides a fantastic explanation of the liberal consensus in her November 30, 2024 letter. You will weep over the world that was and might have been still. The Powell Memo was also involved.) The foundation published the first edition of the Mandate for Leadership in 1981, and President Ronald Reagan got enthusiastically on board.
An aside: It has long been my contention that almost everything wrong with the United States right now (and for several decades) can be laid at Reagan’s feet. When I was studying for a Ph.D. in English and encountered Hamlet’s words describing his murderous uncle Claudius—"That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain”—I felt a shock of recognition. Affable, sinister, dissembling Ronald Reagan!
So today’s Project 2025 is the result of five decades of indoctrination, of gaslighting and scapegoating, of lying and cheating and redistributing wealth upward, ever upward, of voter suppression and racism and misogyny and performative false “Christianity”, and a bunch of other terrible things. And we are reaping this whirlwind right now and this fast because the ground had been so furtively and thoroughly tilled.
All of this to say: the Red Wine & Blue organization has recognized the terrible threat we are facing and has provided us with an emergency cheat sheet on the Project 2025 blueprint. It is available here. There is also a Project 2025 tracker here. When you see the scope of Project 2025, its broad outline and ideological underpinnings, a lot of the chaos of the Trump presidency will become startlingly clear and coherent. Our resistance must be immediate and overwhelming. Project 2025 is a death sentence for the America that we know.