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Why are Democrats so tight-lipped about “Project 2025,” Trump’s roadmap that heralds the swan song of made-in-USA democracy?
A vast ultraconservative reform project of the state apparatus, Project 2025 has been widely discussed in the media and in American public opinion. The Democratic camp is trying to associate Donald Trump’s candidacy with it, while the latter wants to dissociate himself from it. But what is Project 2025 really?
First titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative PromiseProject 2025 is a 922-page tome published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, an influential think tank that promotes conservative ideas in Washington. It aims to provide the next Republican president of the United States with a road map “from day one of taking office,” which would be as early as January 20, 2025, if Mr. Trump is re-elected.
Based on the premise that “the moral foundations” of American society are in peril, the document, with its nationalist and Christian overtones, offers a specific, multi-point program for the movement to “take over the government” and save the United States from “disaster.”
The document’s thirty-odd chapters read like a veritable radical right-wing election platform. It contains proposals for dismantling the Department of Education, deploying the military to the Mexican border to help combat illegal immigration, radically reducing environmental regulations and criminalizing pornography.
Project 2025 also contains numerous attacks on the rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community (and trans people in particular), on the right to abortion, and on migrants.
Equally worrisome is the proposal to give the president-elect the power to fire thousands of disloyal government workers and replace them with more trusted supporters. This politicization of the civil service would involve reinstating Schedule F, a Trump executive order that has since been struck down, which allowed the president to fire federal employees deemed “corrupt, incompetent, or useless.”
The Heritage Foundation has produced this type of action plan for every presidential election since 1980. Its first edition was largely adopted by the government of Ronald Reagan, who led the United States from 1981 to 1989.
Project 2025 is the ninth exercise of its kind. But it attracts more attention because of its uninhibited nature, explains Victor Bardou-Bourgeois, researcher in residence at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair and specialist in the American right.
“What has raised a lot of eyebrows is that the document clearly states that it is not enough to have a conservative program, but that you have to have the right people in Washington to implement it. On the side of the great conservative family, it is more assumed that you have to establish the right conditions so that its political program can be deployed.”
Project 2025 also calls for strengthening the powers of the president and reducing the independence of federal agencies such as the FBI, the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, leading its detractors to describe it as a threat to American democracy.
“In the United States, the executive branch is divided into two: the president and government agencies. Project 2025 essentially wants to eliminate the agencies from the equation and return control of the executive branch to the president and the White House,” Bardou-Bourgeois summarizes.
A program for Donald Trump?
The 2025 Project was released in 2023, before Donald Trump was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate. Still, many of its proposals resemble those advocated by Mr. Trump on the campaign trail, particularly those on immigration.
Not surprisingly, since many members of the first Trump administration are part of the drafting group.
According to a count carried out by The Dutyout of a total of 34 authors listed, around fifteen of Donald Trump’s collaborators are said to have participated in the drafting of the document. Among them are big names such as Chris Miller, who was briefly Secretary of Defense, Ben Carson, former Secretary of Housing, or Russell Vought, one of the people responsible for the current Republican Party electoral platform.
Donald Trump, however, is trying to distance himself as much as possible from Project 2025, which is very unpopular with several segments of the electorate. He has repeatedly claimed to have no connection with its authors and to not know its ins and outs. “These are extreme proposals, seriously extreme,” he said recently at a campaign rally. “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”
“One of Donald Trump’s strengths is that he is able to read the mood well,” explains Victor Bardou-Bourgeois. “He understands that the policies proposed [par le Projet 2025] are extremely unpopular with large sections of the American electorate, particularly concerning abortion, justice or immigration. The Republican candidate is aware that this should not be mentioned too much, because it is not very winner from an electoral point of view.”
The Heritage Foundation also distanced itself from the Republican candidate, saying it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.” Paul Dans, who led the writing of the document, recently left his role at the think tank.
That doesn’t stop Democrats from using Project 2025 as an argument to undermine the Republican candidacy. Recently, Kamala Harris’ campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, called the document “a policy platform written by allies [de Donald Trump] that [ce dernier] intends to impose on our country.”
A real threat to democracy?
In the United States, the concentration of powers in the hands of the executive branch has been a phenomenon that has been underway since the Civil War of 1861-1865, argues Victor Bardou-Bourgeois. “Each decade brings new powers into the hands of the executive branch, for better or for worse. […] It’s dangerous, yes, but it’s not the final nail in the coffin of American democracy.”
More worrying, the researcher said, is that this concentration could come at a time when traditional checks and balances — the U.S. Congress and the U.S. judiciary — are dysfunctional.
“Will Donald Trump, if elected, put an end to the American Republic? I don’t know,” says Victor Bardou-Bourgeois. “But what is certain is that if Project 2025 is implemented, power will be even more concentrated in the hands of the president. All this in a context where the judicial system is increasingly polarized and Congress is having difficulty functioning normally. What are supposed to be the checks and balances of the American executive branch are no longer working very well.”