When “Project 2025” first gained notice, Trump said he knew nothing about it — but disagreed with much of it.
Huh? How could he disagree without knowing about it?
Well, the first thing to know about Trump is his dishonesty.
“Project 2025” is a 900-page blueprint for his next administration, produced by the right-wing Heritage Foundation together with a gang of top Trump staffers. Not expecting to win in 2016, they weren’t prepared. This time they will be. Remember when Republicans hated big bossy government? Now it’s their dream. “Project 2025” is their plan for maximally exploiting governmental power to reshape America.
We’re not talking here about the “MAGA” movement — Trump’s personality cult. Those yahoos are just patsies being used, having no clue what’s really afoot. While the MAGA slogan itself plays to some vague notion of return to a romanticized past, what the hard-asses like Project-25ers target is an America very different altogether.
Imposing their will to regiment everyone into their narrow conception of what a proper society is. No more of that live-and-let-live stuff. Instead they think they know how everybody should live. No more of that diversity crap. Particularly regarding anything relating to sex and reproduction. Obsessed about it. Abortion merely the beginning; in their sights is whatever people do that just rubs them the wrong way.
A Catholic-based movement along such lines (that J.D. Vance has been playing footsie with) calls this “post-liberalism.” Vance himself not even seeing childlessness as an acceptable choice.
You’ve also heard much about White Christian Nationalism. Yes, white is a big part of it, still the fallout of anxiety provoked by a non-white president. Plus the idea that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” When in fact our founders’ dire experience with oppressive religion gave us the First Amendment, separating church and state. Today’s Christian nationalists don’t accept that, and our Supreme Court has been ruling with them.
Religion (being false) has been ebbing in America, and these people know theirs is very much a minority view. But, imbued with self-righteousness, they’re undeterred about seeking to impose it regardless. In a radio interview, one said there should be no place in the U.S. for anyone thinking differently. When the interviewer noted being Jewish, and frightened by such rhetoric, the response was your worldview is just wrong. Implicitly, shouldn’t be tolerated. Wouldn’t be, if those people prevail.
And to prevail they, and the Trump Republican party, are now mobilizing extensively and forcefully. They will not accept losing this election, and are determined to win it, preferably by votes, but if necessary by fraud. In some states they control, notably Georgia, they’ve passed laws to weaponize challenges to legitimate votes in order to chaoticize the election. All under the lying pretense of trying to ensure legitimacy and transparency. Dishonest to the core.
All this is why Hungary’s ruler Viktor Orban is such an icon for Trump and his minions. Orban, without shame, propounded the term “illiberal democracy.” Meaning one in which citizens don’t get much choice. Orban also provides the model for achieving that, an authoritarian regime parlaying what’s actually a voting minority into control of all a society’s levers of power. Co-opting the courts, bureaucracies, news media, education system, and so forth. Even the corporate sector.
Project 2025 is the USA version.
We had a revolution in 1776. These hardline Trumpers now envision another. But revolutions aren’t always good. Advanced societies before have fallen into insanity. Germany was the very epicenter of high human culture — until 1933.