Project 2025 for Dummies
Theocracy 101
A tiny bit of history, then a list, then a summary
“Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise,” also known as “Project 2025” is the Trump plan for Day One of a second term. It is a blueprint for Theocracy — if Christian Nationalism is your jam, this 900-page fascist manifesto is for you. Because it’s real, and because most Americans see it as dangerous, let’s take a stroll through the highlights.
First of all, whatever the Orange One says in public, he was part and parcel of making this document. While he denies that he knows anything about it, it was authored by his cronies at The Heritage Foundation, and he is mentioned in it over 300 times. (He has a tremendous capacity to completely forget anyone or anything that is currently in disfavor — think, E. Jean Carroll, Jeffery Epstein, or anything asked in a deposition.) Project 2025 is, as Tim Walz summarized, Orange Boy’s “game plan.”
A Little History
The first “Mandate for Leadership” was used by Reagan, beginning in 1980. We have The Heritage Foundation to thank for Reagan’s undoing of middle-class prosperity and the villainization of regulations. It’s where we got the modern version of “Trickle Down Economics.” (Have you been trickled on yet? No, me either.) Reagan took the ‘mandate’ part quite seriously because nearly two-thirds of “Mandate’s” 2,000 recommendations were adopted or attempted by the Reagan administration.
Fun fact: “Trickle Down Economics” was also known in an earlier iteration as “Horse and Sparrow Economics.” The idea was, if you overfeed a horse, there’s enough oats in manure for the sparrows. We are the sparrows.
Why the Heritage Foundation posted Mandate 2.0 on their website, frankly, is a mystery to me. Maybe their mistake was in having the hubris to publish the nine hundred pages and expect that people would rally ‘round. Maybe their mistake was to be so focused on returning to an imaginary White Fantasyland that they forgot that not everyone thinks of those as “The Good Old Days.” Whatever they were thinking, they laid out loud a plan that seeks to rob us of consent in every way possible, giving it to scared white boys who think they’re the boss of us.
A Partial List
How will I harm thee? Let me count the ways. Here are just a few of the ways that Project 2025 will change our world and punish us. Choose any one of these topics to see how America the Beautiful will get uglified.
Executive Privilege: All Hail the King!
Tens of thousands of government employees will be fired, and replaced with party loyalists. No longer will we need scientists for science positions or experienced leaders running federal departments. If you pledge loyalty to Dear Leader, that’ll be good enough. And it seems that by “Dear Leader” they mean Donald J. Trump, who is mentioned in the plan numerous times. (And, of course, should he be deemed incompetent/demented/ batshit crazy via the 25th Amendment, then we’re talking President Vance — who has even closer ties with the Heritage Foundation. Quelle surprise!!)
Body Autonomy/Reproductive Care
Abortion care would be limited, and draconian state-by-state restrictions would be upheld. The safe choice of using mifepristone would be eliminated, and there would be criminal penalties for mailing medication or equipment to people (read: doctors) who might use them to perform abortion care. The plan eliminates access to emergency abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act and would increase “abortion surveillance” to scare pregnant people who might seek abortion care. Women seeking emergency contraception via the “morning after pill” will be out of luck if they can’t pay out of pocket, because that would no longer be covered by insurance.
Without access to safe abortion care and contraception, as one Facebook meme explained, “Rapists can choose the mother of their children.”
Social Security
The plan would cut benefits and raise the retirement age. Yeah, we all want to work more years for less benefit, don’t we? Republicans have been waiting to get their hands on the social security money since Roosevelt introduced it. Here is their chance.
Healthcare
Both Medicare and Medicaid benefits would be reduced — way to take care of our oldest and most impoverished. While the ACA isn’t referenced by name, every Republican politician in DC has tried to recall and diminish healthcare availability since Obama succeeded in getting it passed. Have a preexisting condition? Tough bounce. Death and disability to the riffraff who can’t afford concierge care.
Middle Class Income
More taxes and no overtime pay. No student loan forgiveness, and forget about help with childcare or eldercare. (Two birds: when he finally gets to retire at eighty-six, let Grandpa move into your house and watch the kids. What could go wrong?)
Global Climate Change
Not only does the plan recommend nullifying the Biden executive orders addressing climate change and pull us out of the Paris Agreement, but it also suggests that we “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere” Shhhh. Let’s not talk about our upcoming demise. Too scary.
Oh, and let’s repeal regulations that curb emissions. While we’re at it, we can downsize the EPA and abolish the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which the project calls “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Forecasting hurricanes and tracking weather catastrophes will be a thing of the past. Who needs to know when a devastating storm is heading your way? More waterfront property, amiright?
Education
Free and rigorous public education is the bedrock of citizenship. But the authors of Project 2025 have other ideas. The Department of Education will be eliminated for starters. Per AmericanProgress.org, The plan suggests that we “redirect taxpayer dollars intended for K-12 public education to fund private and religious schools for the wealthy; roll back Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex; eradicate Head Start; block student debt cancellation programs and increase monthly payments for student loan borrowers; censor anti-racist curricula that teach tolerance in schools; and eliminate school nutrition programs, particularly for children experiencing food insecurity during the summer when they lack access to school meals.”
Yep, you read that right. Let’s fire teachers, stop feeding kids, and make it almost impossible to get a quality education. In fact, kids under their plan won’t need an education at all, because we’ll just put them to work for the overlords.
People of Color, LGBTQ folks, other disenfranchised people
As for our fellow citizens who are people of color, Project 2025 would eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs from throughout the federal government and in universities. (If we don’t create opportunities, we can pretend these people either don’t exist or don’t deserve to be visible in any meaningful way.)
P2025 is pretty clear that transgender people don’t deserve human rights. Any gender identity beyond biological sex is rejected, by, as Forbes pointed out, “reinstating the ban on transgender Americans serving in the military, prohibiting public school educators from referring to students by anything other than their birth name and pronouns without parental permission, and ensuring no federal funds are used to provide gender-affirming care.” It doesn’t explicitly outlaw same-sex marriage (yet), but supports “nuclear families” that include a “married mother, father, and their children,” and would restrict laws that bar discrimination on the basis of sex to exclude sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s a recipe for a “Discriminate at Will” culture that would surely be supported in the courts.
A Christian Government
In defining family as “a married mother, father, and their children” this plan suggests that definitions should “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” It references a Christian-heavy agenda by offering to pay for the religious education of children, and by opening the door for religious organizations to get more government money through Small Business Administration loans. We can do this by changing those pesky eligibility criteria! Voila! More money for our holy few.
Discussing the plans for the Department of Labor, the document suggests a communal day of rest for society because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”. In other words, let’s make the Christian worldview a federal law. Also, let’s make Sunday the Sabbath for all our citizens, except for “employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time.” I wonder how we will legally define, “sincere”? Christians to the front, so we can redefine our “God-given rights to freedom.” (Um, “Whose freedom?”) And speaking of the Sabbath, let’s make an exception for that “no overtime” thing, and pay time and a half to everyone who has to work on Sunday, mkay?
Also in the chapter on the Department of Labor, Jonathan Berry tells us that “The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family,” also claiming the Biden administration “has been hostile to people of faith.”
There are frequent references to “woke” policies, as villainous choices, and yet “woke” is not defined. I hear this underlying insistence on a Christian worldview as “Our government should be run by conservative lackeys who will pressure our citizens to exercise OUR faith as WE define it or they will have no standing.” Very Talibanesque, oui?
The forefathers were very clear about the separation of Church and State for exactly this reason. It is a distorted violation of all that they intended.
Summary:
The Heritage Foundation, which achieved monumental success with one demented president, is trying hard to achieve it again with a second. As before, they want all wealth in the hands of a few White guys, all governing done by dictator sycophants, and this time they are trying hard to kick the women to the curb.
If fascist, exclusionary oppression is your comfort zone, P2025 might be for you. If you enjoyed Hurricane Helene, and her brother Hurricane Milton, P2025 hears you! If you’ve always wanted to live under a king, now’s the time.
If, on the other hand, freedom and equality, body autonomy, and decent pay are your deal, VOTE. If you’d like children to be safe in funded public schools, and all voters to be able to cast ballots, VOTE. If you need your overtime, your healthcare, or your Social Security, VOTE. If you have, or were raised in, a family that was not a “married mother, father, and their children,” VOTE. Or even if you’d just like to see the United States become a more perfect union, VOTE!!
There is so much more that we could explore. I know this doesn’t do 900 pages of fascist planning justice, but it is a small taste to whet your appetite for voting in the 2024 election. If you are the curious type, here are a few resources you might like: Wikipedia, Forbes, Zeteo, The Kettering Foundation, The Guardian, and The Center for American Progress. Or if you are just a reading junky, and want to get every nuance, word for word, here is Project 2025 in its entirety.
** Caution. **
This is not a drill. This is a PLAN. Just at January 6, 2021 was a dress rehearsal for whatever happens this January, Project 2025 is just an early version of the push for a theocratic America. Expect that it will shape-shift a hundred times. It will be disguised and renamed, and its authors and their clones will work for generations to make it the American Reality. The Heritage Foundation has been trickling down its ideas for decades, and they will continue to spend money and energy until the last woman and person of color is properly subdued. Or until we lose our breathable atmosphere.
Whichever comes first.
