It’s Later Than You Think!
How Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 echoes a century-old authoritarian blueprint
Is it mere coincidence that the radical agenda to upend the American republic carries the name Project 2025 — the hundredth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf? Or was that date chosen as a grim celebration?
I doubt it’s just the date. More likely, it’s the fading of our national memory — of the horrors of Nazism and the steep price Americans paid to help end it — that makes such a project seem thinkable again. My father and all my uncles served in World War II. They would have been astonished to see how many of those hard-earned lessons have already faded away.
Project 2025’s ambition — centralizing power in one man and dismantling the Republic’s order — draws on ideas that first rose to power in Europe a century ago. And the tactics look disturbingly familiar: the big lie, the manufactured emergency, the cult of the leader.
The big lie still works
Hitler described it bluntly in 1925:
“…in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility… the broad masses of a nation are more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature… they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…”
Donald Trump never plowed through the 700-plus pages of Mein Kampf, but his first wife, Ivana, is reported to have told her lawyer that he kept Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, in a cabinet by the bed and “read from it from time to time.” Whether by study or instinct, Trump absorbed the lesson.
His notorious boast in 2016 — “I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter” — rests on the same principle: a brazen falsehood or outrageous act, once planted, lingers even when disproven. That’s the big lie at work.
Project 2025: the authoritarian wish-list
The blueprint now being advanced by Trump’s ally Russell Vought proposes what one New York Times profile called “a president with dramatically expanded authority.” Vought’s surname — pronounced “Vote” — is an irony not lost on critics who warn that his plan would shrink the power of actual voters while magnifying the president’s.
Well before the 2024 election, voters sensed danger. An NBC poll found that only 4 percent of all voters — and just 9 percent of self-described MAGA voters — viewed Project 2025 favorably, making it “the least popular of all the subjects tested.” Yet after the election Trump dropped the pretense of distance and now hails Vought as the man “of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”
From Versailles to Mar-a-Lago
Trump’s dream of pageantry and personal rule has precedents older than fascism. Louis XIV of France — the Sun King who declared “L’État, c’est moi” — built Versailles as a stage on which the nobility performed their obedience.
The United States, founded in revolt against monarchy, now faces a president who once told his cabinet, “I have the right to do anything I want to do — I’m the president of the United States.” The televised spectacle of cabinet secretaries competing in flattery would have looked right at home in Louis’s court. So would the gold-leaf ballrooms Trump ordered built on the White House grounds.
The philosopher of emergencies
A more direct twentieth-century influence on today’s right is Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist who handed Hitler the rationale for dictatorship. Schmitt argued that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” — that a leader may suspend the constitution during a “state of exception” and rule without law.
As historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, many Trump allies — including Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire patron Peter Thiel — are open admirers of Schmitt. In 2024 Vance accused Democrats of acting as if “there’s no law, there’s just power” — even as his own movement advanced Schmitt’s creed.
The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States, effectively granting the president sweeping immunity, further eroded constitutional guardrails. When Trump says, “I have the right to do anything I want,” he isn’t exaggerating. He means it.
Democracy versus “uniformity”
Schmitt dismissed the American notion of pluralism. Real democracy, he wrote, required the “elimination of heterogeneity.” To his admirers, that means diversity, equity, and inclusion — DEI — are not virtues to expand but obstacles to be crushed. In their place they exalt UIE: Uniformity, Inequality, Exclusion — an inversion of Jefferson’s promise that “all men are created equal.”
A nation on the edge
Abraham Lincoln, addressing Congress in December 1862 as he prepared to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, warned:
“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth… The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
Today’s crisis isn’t civil war but a slow constitutional unravelling under cover of legality and propaganda. The question is whether enough members of the party that still bears Lincoln’s name will resist the pull of authoritarianism — and whether citizens will insist that they do.
It’s later than you think
A century ago, the world underestimated the danger until it was too late. Project 2025 is not just another partisan platform; it is a methodical attempt to hollow out checks and balances, silence dissent, and replace the rule of law with the rule of one man.
Complacency is complicity. The alarm has been ringing for years. If we mean to preserve self-government, the time for half-measures and wishful thinking is over.
In the 1920s and 1930s people all over Europe and inside Germany we’re saying about Hitler and his speeches: “It can’t happen here.” But it still did!
It is later than you think.
Author’s Note:
This article draws heavily on the historical analysis of Robert S. McElvaine’s “Project 2025 Is an Heir to Project 1925” (Lincoln Square Media, Oct 6 2025).
“My New Order” is the title of a book collecting speeches by Adolf Hitler and edited by Raoul De Roussy de Sales, which outlines Nazi Germany’s vision for a pan-German racial state and dominance over Europe. The term “New Order” (German: Neuordnung) itself refers to the Nazi plan for German-occupied Europe, encompassing a proposed racial state, German colonization of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust.
The book contains speeches and parts of speeches by Adolf Hitler, providing commentary on Nazi Germany’s goals and vision. It aimed to present a readable and instructive collection of Hitler’s words, focusing on the Nazi concepts for structuring Europe and the world.
The “New Order” was a Nazi concept for a pan-German racial state, designed to benefit an “Aryan-Nordic master race”. This included the planned colonization of Central and Eastern Europe, the extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (such as Poles and Russians), and the ongoing Holocaust of Jews and other targeted groups. The planning for the Neuordnung began before World War II, with Hitler proclaiming the “European New Order” in a speech on January 30, 1941.
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