Project 2025 should be Priority One for Democrats.
The MAGA manifesto was produced by the Heritage Foundation, dozens of right-leaning groups, and well-known conservatives who either served in the Donald Trump White House or support his bid for a new term.
In an age when truncated text messages and emojis constitute communication, Project 2025 is a conservative blueprint on a massive scale, covering everything from climate change to Medicaid to public television.
“Whether it be mask and vaccine mandates, school and business closures, efforts to keep Americans from driving gas cars or using gas stoves, or efforts to defund the police, indoctrinate schoolchildren, alter beloved books, abridge free speech, undermine the colorblind ideal, or deny the biological reality that there are only two sexes, the Left’s steady stream of insanity appears to be never-ending,” the report says.
This is a roadmap to reinvent the federal government by radically shrinking it and making it a political arm of the president — Trump, obviously.
For the record, yeah, Trump has said he had nothing to do with Project 2025’s creation.
And how could he? The report runs on for 900 pages.
But it carries unmistakable Trump touches, such as mass deportations of immigrants and politicizing the federal workforce.
Every time control of the White House changes parties, a semi-permanent government-in-exile of true believers is lingering outside the White House gates.
They have tasted power and desperately want it back.
The so-called “Mandate for Leadership” calls for abolishing the Department of Education, gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, using public funds to pay for private religious schools, dismantling civil rights protection and eliminating climate protections. Project 2025 also questions the legitimacy of public employee unions.
The report says the next U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services should reverse the Biden administration’s focus on “‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work and penalizing marriage.”
Project 2025 also calls for wholesale firings of federal civil servants, a ban on birthright citizenship, the elimination of PBS and NPR and the privatization of the National Weather Service, a lifeline for Floridians and others trying to steer clear of killer hurricanes and tornadoes.
The weather service is part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another target of Project 2025, in part because it has sounded alarms about climate change.
“Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” the report says.
You know that Project 2025 has penetrated the nation’s political consciousness when political groups start using it to raise money.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, headed by Ron Klein, a former Palm Beach County congressman and legislator, told donors Friday: “The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project is Donald Trump’s road map for the far-right to denigrate our democracy and freedoms and dismantle and weaponize arms of the U.S. government. It is not a theory — it’s more of a dark agenda, all mapped out in writing. When Trump tells you who he is and what he’ll do as president, we must believe him.”
Project 2025 paints a very frightening picture of the America that could come to pass in a second Trump term.
Despite legitimate concerns about President Joe Biden’s acuity, this subject deserves just as much attention as Biden’s terrible debate performance.
Biden was disastrous on the day of the debate in Atlanta. Project 2025 is disastrous for the whole country.
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the South Florida Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X @stevebousquet.
