It’s almost a year since DWT first started ringing the alarm bell about the fascist blueprint for a potential Trump occupation of the White House. It was scary back then; it’s only gotten worse. So much worse that Señor T is claiming he knows nothing about it and nothing about the people behind it, even though among the chief architects are John McEntee, Trump’s director of White House personnel, Stephen Miller, a big time fascist and senior adviser, Ben Carson, Trump’s HUD Secretary and crackpot Ken Cuccinelli, deputy secretary of homeland security.
It’s just another in a long list of Trump deceptions. Robert Tait wrote that Project 2025’s 900 page document “includes calls for replacing civil servants with Trump loyalists, eliminating the education department, putting the justice department under the president’s thumb and banning the abortion pill. But although it was written by former members of Trump’s first administration, and he regularly echoes its policies in his speeches, last week Trump tried to disown the initiative. Posting on his Truth Social website, the presumptive Republican nominee claimed to ‘know nothing about Project 2025’ and have ‘no idea who is behind it.’ He added: ‘I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.’”
Olivia Troye, a former White House adviser to Mike Pence who sat in on policy sessions during Trump’s first presidency, said Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 was driven by a recognition that its deeply controversial policy prescriptions could sink his election bid.
“This is preposterous if you look at the collaborators and the authors of this plan,” she told CNN when asked whether Trump’s denial was credible. “A lot of these people…served in Trump’s cabinet during his administration. There are people that I worked with. I sat in those policy meetings with them.”
…“I think what this is telling us is that Donald Trump knows that what is written in this plan is so extreme that it is damaging to his possibility of getting elected, and that’s what he’s concerned about.”
“Exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?” said former RNC chair and current MSNBC host Michael Steele in echoing Troye’s derision.
“And how exactly don’t you know that Project 2025 director Paul Dans served as your chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and associate director Spencer Chretien served as your special assistant and associate director of presidential personnel?”
Among the plan’s more drastic proposals are to fire thousands of permanent civil servants and replace them with hired conservative Trump loyalists, dismantling the federal education department, asserting presidential power over the justice department— which is nominally independent— and a ban on the abortion pill.
…Troye said the project should be seen as a threat not just to Democrats but to moderate conservatives, too.
“If you go through and really read through this plan, this is complete overreach by the federal government on our individual liberties,” she said.
“[It talks] about law enforcement and how they’re going to use federal law enforcement in local states and local cities … with no oversight. Because there’s no oversight when they do that. They’ve learned all the lessons during the first Trump term, and that is what is frightening here. I think we need to be paying attention to this, and no amount of distancing by Donald Trump should be believed …I sat in [on] policy-making meetings with these people.”
…[Marco Rubio] dismissed the importance of comments by the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, who said in an interview with Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast last week that conservative-driven “second American revolution” will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”— viewed by many Democrats as an implied threat of political violence.
“He’s not running for president,” Rubio said. “Our candidate’s Donald Trump. I didn’t see Donald Trump say that.”
The denials appear to be undermined by close studies of the personnel involved in the document’s formulation.
Of the 38 people involved in the writing and editing of Project 2025, 31 of them were nominated to positions in Trump’s administration or transition team— meaning 81% of the document’s creators held formal roles in Trump’s presidency.
If the GOP could have once plausibly claimed to be fighting to keep the power of an overreaching government off your back and out of your life, today the MAGA party is exactly the opposite— aiming to assert control over every facet of everyone’s life, authoritarian style. The Democratic Party needs to greatly amplify the discussion of the Republicans’ war against personal liberty.
Progressives and even centrist Democrats need to make sure swing voters understand this version of the GOP is not the Ronald Reagan version and that this MAGA-dominated party embodies an authoritarian vision that intends to intrude into the most intimate aspects of our lives, dictating personal choices— from reproductive rights to whom we can love. This is a party that, under am Orwellian guise of “freedom,” strips away the very freedoms it claims to protect, imposing draconian laws that undermine individual autonomy and civil liberties. This hypocrisy calls for grassroots mobilization for a strong defense of personal liberty. Democratic candidates up and down the ticket need to confront this authoritarian onslaught head-on, advocating for the fundamental rights and freedoms that are essential to a just and equitable society. It's not just a political imperative; it's a moral one. The GOP's escalating attacks on personal freedom, from voter suppression to attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, must be met with unwavering resistance. If the Democratic Party doesn’t want to go down the drain in infamy it’s got to champion the fight for true liberty— liberty that includes the right to make decisions about one's own body, the right to marry whom one loves and the right to live free from fear of government overreach. This fight is not just for the sake of political gain but for the preservation of democracy itself against a creeping tide of fascism.
Recently Navigator Research did an extensive report on Project 2025 which shows that opposition to it among the public grows as people learn more about what’s in the plan. Even the majority of non-MAGA Republicans heavily oppose it when they see what’s in it and start thinking of the ramifications of implementing it.
The nazi reich can and will destroy everything. And the only reason they can and will is because nobody ever stopped them.
True for all nazi reichs and similar in all of human history. humankind just sucks at moving forward for the good. moving in reverse for evil is easy. perhaps that's the real cancer... humankind.
"The Democratic Party needs to greatly amplify the discussion of the Republicans’ war against personal liberty." This would be a lot easier if both parties hadn't been demonizing each other for decades. The "deplorables" and the idiots in the MAGA camp know there are two classes of people in this country because they can feel the hate and judgement from the other class towards their class. A lot of them believe abortion is murder. The rest are more interested in their right to own an automatic weapon than their right to an abortion. A lot of them feel "forced" to change the way they speak because of "new" genders they don't understand. Some of them feel gays getting married some how harm…