PROJECT 2025

Our political landscape continues to be in flux. We are currently still preoccupied with the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13. However, we tend to have a short attention span. Now that the Republican convention has run its course, banning other unfortunate interruptions, we are bound to refocus on prominent campaign issues. Our nation has survived multiple instances of assault on prominent politicians throughout our history. President Lincoln was assassinated; so was Garfield and McKinley. Theodore Roosevelt was shot in 1912; Franklin Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt; so did Harry Truman. John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Governor and candidate George Wallace was assaulted in 1972. Gerald Ford faced two attempts within weeks in 1975. Ronald Reagan survived being shot in 1981. And the list goes on. Our proclivity for political violence seldom subsides. A recent Brookings Institution poll summarized that nearly one in four Americans currently believe that political violence is justified to "save" the U.S. Leaving this and the current history behind, we are about to refocus on strategic political campaign strategies, less violent, but still intense. While blueprints designed to entirely reconstruct our political environment may principally not appear violent, they could become so when a new administration attempts to install their components. A major such blueprint, and a controversial post election strategy is the "2025 Presidential Transition Project," a.k.a. "Project 2025." Project 2025 was designed to be a detailed blueprint for the next Republican president to usher in a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch of our government. The project was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, specifically its president Kevin Roberts, assisted by 34 authors, 277 contributors, a 54 member advisory board and more tan 100 conservative organizations. Even though former president Donald Trump denied any connection to the project, it is very much a Trump-driven operation. Many of its authors used to have significant roles in the previous Trump Administration. The project promotes a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals designed to reshape the U.S. federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican candidate win the 2024 election. Its aims are to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life; dismantling the administrative state; defending the nation's sovereignty and border; and securing God-given individual rights to live freely. The project proposes a presidential transition composed of "four pillars:" - A Policy guide for the next presidential administration - a "mandate for leadership." - A linked-in style data base of personnel which could serve in the next administration, composed of loyal conservatives from all walks of life. - Training for that pool of candidates - dubbed the "Presidential Administration Academy." Training is made up of work shops, seminars, videos and mentorship. - And, finally, a playbook of actions to be taken during the first 180 days of the administration to "bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left's devastating policies." It is essentially a blueprint for what a second Trump administration could look like, dreamed up by his allies and former aides. "The centerpiece of the entire proposal is a 900-page plan that calls for extreme policies on nearly every aspect of Americans' lives, from mass deportations to politicizing the federal government in a way that would give a president Trump control over the Justice Department, to getting rid of entire federal agencies." (Washington Post, July 12, 2024). A few examples are: Move the Justice Department and all of its law enforcement arms directly under presidential control. Make reproductive care, especially abortion pills, next to impossible to get. Reconstruct the Border Patrol and Immigration Agency - complete Trump's wall. build detention camps and send the military out to deport millions of people already in the country - including DACA dreamers. Entirely eliminate the Education Department among others. In essence, it seeks to place the entire federal government's executive branch under direct presidential control. It proposes that all Department of State employees in leadership roles should be dismissed by the end of January 2025, and be replaced by State Department leaders in "acting" roles, not requiring Senate confirmation.The project also aims to reclassify tens of thousands of federal civil service employees as political appointees in order to replace them with Trump loyalists. The list is exhaustive and runs the gamut from expanding our nuclear capacity ("the ultimate guarantor of freedom and prosperity") to ending same-sex marriage. Ultimately it proposes to make Christian Nationalism a core value of domestic policy and doing away with the separation of church and state. Democracy experts, political scholars and other commentators have described the project as dangerous and a precursor to authoritarianism. It serves us to remember that on April 7, 1933, the German government under Hitler issued the "Law for the restoration of the professional civil service," which removed Jews and anyone disloyal to the Nazi oligarchy from government jobs. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts was recently quoted as saying that: "We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be." Perhaps these newly self-appointed revolutionaries should endeavor to lower the temperature. Theo Wierdsma