As an organization committed to facilitating healthy interactions, and more specifically diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and accessibility, it is essential we speak out about Project 2025. The roadmap for the federal government during the president-elect’s second term will further erode the civil rights U.S. Americans have fought to earn, and enjoyed and expanded on for decades. If, as expected, Project 2025 is implemented under the next president, this generation and subsequent generations will have fewer rights than we do now — and far fewer rights than we had in 2016.
Since the election was called for Mr. Trump in the wee hours of the morning Wednesday, some of his key supporters, including Steve Bannon (recently released from prison) and political commentator Matt Walsh have vocalized the president-elect’s connections to the 900+-page policy proposal and feel “emboldened” to state it will dictate the administration’s agenda. The Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin Roberts congratulated Trump on his victory after the results.
Project 2025 not only calls for the explicit detention of immigrants, it also equates the act of being transgender, or “transgender ideology,” to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed, criminalizing a people solely on the basis of their identity. It demonizes single motherhood and fatherlessness.
Page 4 of the “mandate” explicitly states:
“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights, out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
If language builds reality, this paragraph alone clearly informs us of the vision outlined in Project 2025. In case there’s any doubt of the former president’s connections to the policy agenda, keep in mind that his running mate J.D.Vance wrote the forward for the companion book: Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. The New Republic obtained a preview copy of the book, although publication has been delayed until after the election. The original subtitle was Burning Down Washington to Save America. The alignment is not pure speculation or hyperbole: many of the proposals were written by Trump White House alumni. Project Director Paul Dans was an administration personnel official, and other authors include the America First Legal group helmed by Stephen Miller, architect of family separation, the Muslim ban and ending the DACA program; former White House economic advisor Peter Navarro; and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tom Homan.
The president-elect just this week announced that Homan, who previously oversaw Miller’s controversial family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, is returning to the administration as “border czar.” Homan himself appeared on 60 Minutes recently defending the practicality of the mass deportation plan, adding that families with mixed citizenship statuses can avoid separation by simply being “deported together.”
Despite the misleading headlines this fall suggesting the project “wrapped up,” work on the plan is ongoing. The only change is that Dans departed. AP News notes that the Heritage Foundation said “Project 2025’s website will remain live and the group will continue vetting resumes for its nearly 20,000-person database of potential government officials ready to execute the group’s vision for government.” While many point out that Trump is not competent enough to carry out the plans itemized in Project 2025 (based on his first administration), he now absolutely has folks in line ready to implement and execute every one of the policy proposals. That – and a Supreme Court who has granted him immunity from “official” acts he commits while in office.
Here’s a bit of what the 922-page proposal includes:
The Charles F. Kettering Foundation, an organization centered on “inclusive democracy” writes on their site that the “policy agenda for Christian nationalists” does the following:
- Expresses a special contempt for the LGBTQ+ community (103);
- Recognizes women primarily in their roles as wives or mothers;
- Recommends the elimination of the Head Start childcare program (482) Indeed, Project 2025 suggests that the new administration should “prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care” (486).
- It [also] states that children who spend undefined “significant” time in day care experience “higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect as well as poor educational and developmental outcomes.”
- Recommends banning abortion, ensuring that only pro-life government policy prevails, and outlaws the mailing of abortion-inducing medication (459);
- Portrays single motherhood as destroying families (4); and
- Identifies fatherlessness as the root of all evil, stating that fatherlessness is “one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts” (4).
The plan calls for the Department of Health and Human Services be renamed the Department of Life. It recommends the agency to take the official stance that families are made up of a married father, mother, and children. It also promises to redirect federal funds to support a “biblically based” definition of family. It calls for replacing policies related to LGBTQ+ equity with those that “support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families” and would protect adoption and foster care services that refuse to work with LGBTQ+ married couples. It states that children should be raised by their “biological” fathers and mothers because the “male-female dyad is essential to human nature.”
In addition to outlawing “transgender ideology,” it aims to cut federal funding for gender-affirming care for both children and adults, in line with Trump’s own policy proposals. The plan intends to allow more health-care workers to opt out of providing such care if they have a moral objection. Project 2025 suggests that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should “immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa).” Even worse, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has said that Trump has promised to put the CDC under his direct control.
The manifesto also proposes cutting VA benefits; deporting an estimated 500,000 Dreamers; gutting overtime and minimum wage laws; and reversing the mandate of the Minority Business Development Agency so that it redirects funds from Blacks, people of color, women, Latinos and Hispanics to whites only.
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How Can Project 2025 Succeed?
It may seem far-fetched, but in order for Project 2025 to succeed, a significant number of Constitutional Amendments and Supreme Court precedents must fall, and that is already in progress. Here’s what would need to happen:
The Constitutional Right to Privacy, Abortion and Eugenics
For many of Project 2025’s proposals to be enacted, other current policies must be dispensed with. Roe v. Wade fell with the Supreme Court’s lethal 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision. And while a family’s rights to reproductive freedom and a woman’s right to determine what happens with her body are crucial to keep in the conversation, most talking points omit the fact that Roe v. Wade was decided on Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right to privacy. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “believed that the Roe v Wade case had based the right to abortion on the wrong argument, a violation of a woman’s privacy rather than on gender equality. This, she thought, left the ruling vulnerable to targeted legal attacks by anti-abortion activists.” It turns out both ways leave the law vulnerable in light of Project 2025. The prescient justice believed that Roe should have stood on the 14th Amendment. Anyway, now that Roe has fallen, that leaves Griswold v Connecticut just as vulnerable. A reading of Project 2025 makes it plain that the right to privacy and the extreme right-wing agenda cannot coexist.
Furthermore, once “officials” get into regulating sexual identity, live births and abortions, it’s difficult not to conjure up the nation’s horrific history of eugenic forced sterilization. It’s been confirmed that some members of the coalition who composed Project 2025 are proponents of eugenics and forced sterilization. Let that sink in.
In a 2016 Fresh Air episode examining the 1927 SCOTUS decision that permitted involuntary sterilization, Buck v. Bell, Adam Cohen, author of the book Imbeciles, recounts how the case came to be, as well as its connection to restrictionist immigration policies.
“All told, as many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized during the 20th century. The victims of state-mandated sterilization included people like Buck who had been labeled “mentally deficient,” as well as those who were deaf, blind and diseased. Minorities, poor people and “promiscuous” women were often targeted.”
The Former President has already espoused the idea of eugenics, most recently and explicitly in an interview with conservative Hugh Hewitt, to which Celeste responded on LinkedIn:
“I don’t give political advice. As a journalist, my job is to report on what’s happening and get the best information I can to put the news into context.
Here’s the news: Donald Trump told Hugh Hewitt that you can tell if migrants will commit violent crime by their genes. He said: “A murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
This is not racially tinged or controversial. It’s racism. This belief is what underpins eugenics, scientific racism, a completely and thoroughly disproven pseudo-science that was touted by Nazis and slaveowners to justify genocide.
Because Donald Trump says he believes this false theory, we don’t even have to mitigate our language because we “aren’t sure if he’s actually racist or is just repeating racist statements for political gain.” He believes in a false, racist pseudoscience, which means he is openly racist. If you support him and want to vote for him, that is absolutely your choice. But he’s racist. “
Ms. Magazine published this article further examining how Project 2025 aims to monitor and curtail women’s reproductive health — it’s, in-depth, shall we say.
Griswold v. Connecticut limits the government’s authority to invade a person’s privacy in regards to marriage, family life, and procreation. In the context of policies that allow for the searching for immigrants to deport, the criminalization of transgender people (an inherent slippery slope) and increased surveillance of: abortion; live births in contrast to abortions; and corresponding demographics including the mother’s state of residence, the right to privacy—particularly that of married couples to use contraception (which actually does stand on the 14th Amendment)—is exceptionally vulnerable. The threat to Griswold was even explicitly stated by Justice Thomas after the Dobbs decision: “For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” Notably he did not include Loving, the abolition of which would make his own marriage illicit. Justice Alito at the same time stated that the right to privacy is not included in the Constitution. Conversely, there’s speculation that keeping due process intact can pave the way for “fetal personhood,” because the 14th amendment makes it unconstitutional to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” It’s essentially a different way of banning abortion that doesn’t require a “national ban.”
Additionally, Kelly Robinson, former executive director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, noted on MSNBC’s the Reidout that women would not be allowed to cross state lines for reproductive care – similar to the fugitive slave law.
On Immigration & Housing
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 organizations fighting “to protect, defend, and expand the rights of every single person in the United States,” delineates how the federal government could carry out this mass deportation plan by:
- Enabling a Nationwide Deportation Machine: Project 2025 calls for allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use “expedited removal” — a process normally only used near the border, and one that raises significant concerns about due process — against immigrants found anywhere within the country. It would enable raids in sensitive zones or “protected areas” like schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.
- Militarizing the Border; Expanding Immigrant “Detention” Centers; Eliminating Popular Relief Programs and Visa Categories including for Dreamers, Ukrainian refugees, and migrants under TPS designations; Mandating Misguided Work Verification Programs, and most importantly, Entangling Local and Federal Enforcement by expanding state and local police involvement in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, and penalizing states and localities that don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric has already had devastating consequences for the communities where it’s been directed, most notably Springfield, Ohio and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. — even though these migrants have legal status! Charleroi has not been as widely reported as Springfield, yet KKK fliers are being distributed and “Reclaim America” stickers are appearing on traffic posts. The vitriol includes one man even yelling at a small group of Haitian immigrants, saying, “Trump is coming!” As recently as two weeks ago, supporters of the former president made it clear that only one type of “American” is welcome here, when Miller, who has been training in xenophobia since he was in high school, said “America is for Americans” echoing the Nazi’s “Germany for Germans only.”
The idea put forth by Vance during the Vice Presidential candidate debate of creating housing for natural-born U.S. citizens via the mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants AND building homes on “federal lands” (which, federal lands?, Tim Walz asked), has a name, as pointed out by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, and “it’s German.” Lebensraum refers to the concept of creating “living space,” a philosophy of making the nation self-sufficient for its citizens and not those the nation finds undesirable.
The Project calls for an overall reduction in national monuments — which are on federal lands. Not only has Trump’s team called for more domestic drilling and mining, but using the land to alleviate the housing crisis again hearkens back to Lebensraum. Presidents do have the ability to alter which and how federal lands are protected, however, removing immigrants from their homes (another idea debunked by Bouie and most economists as unrealistic for eliminating the housing crisis) would violate the Fourth amendment. There are already exceptions to the protections against search and seizure that could be easily exploited even if the amendment still stands. In regards to our national monuments, housing notwithstanding, the degradation of federal lands would be most detrimental for Indigenous Americans, who would bear the brunt of the environmental and negative health outcomes related to the exploitation of resources. Yet, this could all be enacted with the steps delineated in Project 2025.
Civil Rights Under Project 2025
The Trump-Vance ticket has also made more explicit comments in regards to the erosion of civil rights.
Take, for instance, the former president’s suggestion that “one rough” hour or one violent day of policing would eradicate crime. “One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know? It will end immediately,” Trump said at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. Such an instance implies that officials would be complicit, officers would be immune, and the Department of Justice would be absent – an idea which is woven in the fabric of Project 2025. It calls for the DOJ to reject investigations into abuses by police (consent decrees) and other civil rights investigations. In the context of the Project, the former president’s speech and his running mate’s complicity, this can be read as a pogrom. It’s likely that such an instance would have specific targets, notably those who lose protection (or are not explicitly protected) under the auspices of Project 2025.
In the past few weeks Mr. Trump has made explicit references to “the enemy from within,” and has even named some of them: Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, CBS 60 Minutes, “the radical left.” At other times he leaves the audience to fill in the blanks of who in this country he says is more dangerous than Russia or China.
Unfortunately, the former president has made it VERY clear that detainment or even military action would not stop with illegal immigrants or even immigrants, but also threatens these “enemies” with such actions. The Alien Enemies Act, passed in 1798 as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, would allow him to do so. The Brennan Center points out that the authority that permits summarily detaining and deporting civilians merely on the basis of their ancestry was not repealed or amended after World War II when it was used “for interning immigrants of Japanese, German, and Italian descent.” The flaw of the law is that it targets “people on the basis of their identity, not their conduct or the threat they pose to national security.” The Brennan Center also notes that “Worse still, the language of the law is broad enough that a president might be able to wield the authority in peacetime as an end run around the requirements of criminal and immigration law.”
The ACLU’s analysis notes that:
- “the VA would prohibit the provision of gender-affirming medical care in the VA healthcare system.” According to the ACLU, this means a transgender veteran seeking care in a system that refuses to recognize this “would be unable to keep her body aligned with her identity so she can maintain her health and well-being.”
- States would be empowered to pass laws that force teachers to educate students on the benefits of slavery, or to remove all mentions of race when discussing civil rights icons like Rosa Parks. Teachers could no longer lead discussions about race in policing or in hate crimes without the risk of being fired for engaging in so-called “anti-white racism.”
Despite how they are laid-out, these are not simply standalone initiatives. Take each of those policy proposals together, and consider what right-wing groups have “accomplished” thus far combined with recent Supreme Court decisions, and many vile, outdated ideas are possible. Think: the worst of the 1920s and 1930s – not the ragtime parties and Harlem Renaissance, but the revival of Confederate ideology, forced sterilization, Jim Crow and the Great Depression.
While Project 2025 seems too extreme to be suddenly enacted, keep in mind that the former president has already attempted Schedule F (an executive order that would have stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president; civil servants are meant to be loyal to the Constitution, not the president) and has promised to sign the order on Day One of a second term. Agenda47, Trump’s official platform, while similar to Project 2025, has been posted on the former president’s website since 2022….and right-wing extremists have been chipping away at the expansion of our freedoms for years now.
In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, Jan. 6 was just a start. Vigilantes are expanding, and legalizing, their attacks, Jon D. Michaels and David L. Noll, professors of law at UCLA and Rutgers, make a chilling argument regarding said erosion. The professors are authors of “Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy,” from which this article is adapted.
Michaels and Noll argue that MAGA vigilantes should be taken seriously as more than “culture wars,” and state that Proud Boys, book banners and Moms for Liberty are already enacting white Christian nationalist policies locally across the country.
Take for instance Pennsylvania schools that enroll children of Moms for Liberty members. A court case ruled that in these schools, the government won’t be able to enforce Title IX regulations from the Biden administration that took effect in August barring discrimination based on gender identity. The ban relies on a list of schools submitted by Moms of Liberty, including those newly added to the list as a result of the groups’ solicitation for this purpose. This Philadelphia Inquirer article provides details including whether such bans can even be enacted in the state and what protections the courts have already upheld.
Even the way our poll workers and election boards are harassed and threatened is part of a widespread movement of vigilante justice. The fact that these extremists are winning local elections underscores the creep of what many euphemize as the “culture wars.”
“The net effect is the enforcement of Christian nationalist values in nearly half the states, the entrenchment of MAGA political power (including at the national level), and the enervating and dispersing of left-of-center political challengers who otherwise, with free and fair elections, would be likely to unseat right-wing incumbents.
All of this shows why it would be a mistake to see vigilantes as just waging and winning a “culture war.” Cultural victory is not the MAGA movement’s ultimate objective. That is only in service of a broader, downstream electoral strategy, one that aims to subvert true democratic equality in America.
Although some, such as Adam Serwer of the Atlantic, have said “the cruelty is the point” of the MAGA movement, we believe that the cruelty is a means to an end: further subordinating already vulnerable and marginalized individuals and communities. If successful, the American right will prevent the targets of its terrorist campaigns from making what would otherwise be powerful and effective political demands at precisely the moment when white Christians fear the loss of their dominant position in society.
Suffocating democracy is the point.”
Christian nationalism believes that the Christian Bible, as God’s infallible law, should be the basis of government and have primacy over public and private institutions. For more context, Vox’s Today Explained last month explored the ideas of some of the most influential thinkers behind the MAGA movement.
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How Plausible is Project 2025?
Although the former president previously denied his involvement with Project 2025, he says some of the quiet parts out loud. Many ‘promises’ he espouses will only be possible (or at least easier and maybe even legal) if Agenda 47 and Project 2025 are enacted. In an article for The Guardian, democracy reporter Rachel Leingang considers the plausibility of the manifesto.
“In nearly all chapters, there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government. And whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them.”
The plan also gives religious organizations more access and influence with government programs, ranging from education to the small business organization, in addition to the issues noted above.
“They wrote it all down and released it publicly, with a splashy online presence and media appearances. They also recruited tons of other conservative groups to sign on as allies. They publicly called it a plan for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Leingang professes. “In that sense, we shouldn’t think of Project 2025 as solely aimed at Trump: it is instead a vision for conservatives for Trump and far beyond, a rightwing wishlist aimed at generational change in how the government operates and the chief executive’s role within it.”
As if amassing power within the executive branch and judicial branches isn’t enough, the right wing also has plans for the 2030 census. Those of you who haven’t completely blocked out the first administration may remember Trump’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. It was blocked. But the census isn’t only about numbers of people: it’s about allocation of resources. The Heritage Foundation and their acolytes want it to be about consolidating legislative power. Leingang says “for our purposes here, it’s most relevant that census data is used to decide how to divvy up seats in the US House and make electoral maps during decennial redistricting done by states. The census can alter the balance of power in statehouses and in Congress….The project says “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”
“In 2020, lack of conservative participation was one factor in an undercount in some areas of the country, affecting representation of certain states,” the project claims, echoing a sentiment Heritage has elevated before.
The project also suggests reviewing and possibly curtailing plans to broaden the race and ethnicity categories because “there are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
In the past several weeks, the president-elect has used his bully pulpit to blatantly express what the 922-page manifesto intends to execute. If there are any doubts about the link between Mr. Trump and Project 2025, the Madison Square Garden rally served to make public the misogyny, xenophobia, racism, colorism, antisemitism, ableism and general disdain for most Americans who are not white, cisgeneder males. Project 2025 makes clear how right-wing extremism aims to reverse the gains of a vast swath of Americans over a number of decades and most explicitly since the Civil Rights movement, the Voting Rights Act and the The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act) and “reshape our federal government in order to benefit white nationalists, the rich and powerful, and religiously motivated bigots.”
In the final weeks before November 5, it came out that Bob Woodward’s recent book, War, featured statements by General Mark Milley, who served as the 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, under the 45th president. General Milley expressed that Donald Trump is “fascist to the core.” Shortly afterward, Michael Schmidt of the New York Times released a voice recording of General John F. Kelly reading the literal dictionary (aka Wikipedia) of fascist and confirming that Mr. Trump fits the definition. Kelly, who was Mr. Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, also previously underscored that Mr. Trump wanted “generals like Hitler’s.”
Based on all that we know, a second Trump administration will be vastly different from the first. The latter was more like a tech rehearsal – not even a dress rehearsal. In a dress rehearsal the show runs much like it will on opening night. All the show runners, the lighting experts, the costumes and the music is there. Tech is a little more make believe and there’s room to mess up. The upcoming premier will make Trump’s nascent attempts at deportation and obliterating the Affordable Care Act seem quaint. He had “guardrails”— people in his administration like Generals Mattis, Kelly and Milley; vice president Pence, national security expert Olivia Troye and a host of other non-partisan officials who prevented him from acting on his worst impulses. Those guardrails no longer exist. Nine years of preparation, a meticulously prepared policy plan, a rogue judicial system, right-wing lobbyists and tens of thousands of people loyal to the president (as opposed to the Constitution) all standby to implement a white supremacist Christian nationalist regime that has made all its intentions known and received a mandate from the people to carry said intentions out. THIS…is not a dress rehearsal.
In 2016, when the 45th president was elected, M. Gessen provided us rules for surviving autocracy. Prior to being forced to leave Russia, Gessen spent years organizing against Putin. The first rule: believe the autocrat. Nothing is hidden. It is all out in the open. In addition to a lifetime of history lessons, we’ve had nine years to prepare, and we now have over 900 pages that crystalize our worst fears. We have all the information we need to determine how we move forward. Our next step is to do so.
