With our eyes fixed on the geopolitical fractures of the world, from Donbass to Gaza, from Sudan to Taiwan, we almost forgot that 2024 was going to open a new front, electoral this time, south of the border. With, as a bonus, the future of an entire constitutional system.
In itself, the principle of political alternation is at the heart of the vitality of democratic regimes. But this time, the prospect of the return of a Trump government to the White House has the capacity to weaken the American constitutional balance and plunge it into an unprecedented crisis. Because this time, the former president and his entourage, who were not really ready to govern – and even less to do so as they please – in 2016, are now. They have better knowledge of the workings and, above all, the resistance of the administration and have a plan to reorient the former and eviscerate the latter.
The tetany of counter-powers
The counter-powers are paralyzed and ineffective. Congress has been paralyzed for several years, but 2023 has confirmed its inertia: the number of laws adopted is at its lowest since the Great Depression. The Supreme Court, dominated by “originalists” focused on a selective reading of constitutional history, searches in the dust left by the Founding Fathers for paraconstitutional justifications for an interpretation imbued with a reductionist ideology. With dramatic consequences.
The implicit counterweights that are the political parties and their apparatuses (which traditionally had the capacity to direct or restrict the excesses of their members) are fragmented and incapable, on one side or the other, of offering a solution to the democratic crisis. Especially since a new Trump presidency will not want “adults in the room”, whether they are the leaders of the Republican Party or the (more) moderate members in the House or elsewhere.
Media practicing ethical journalism, for their part, are caught between the need to ensure their financial survival and the need to accomplish their mission. All over the world, populists have managed to convince a significant fraction of the electorates that the media belong to the game of political politics, de facto dispossessing them of their role as guardrails, condemning them to shout in an anechoic chamber.
The academic world and the expertise produced there are gradually being discredited, not due to scientific errors or unfounded research, but by repeated attacks on institutions, also sucking them into the political field, which is reminiscent of the Orban method.
Project 2025
What changes in 2024 is that the former president is no longer here to see, to make a name for himself, to launch a product. He is there because he has every reason to be there. He is mired in a number of civil and criminal lawsuits that he cannot envisage getting rid of unless he takes control of the state. He is there out of a spirit of revenge. And he has a plan, driven by stalwarts dedicated to serving in cabinet, like Stephen Miller, and based on the work of an organization like the Heritage Foundation.
This think tank, dedicated to promoting conservative ideas in the United States, embraced the first Trump presidency after mocking his candidacy in 2015. She is now the figurehead of a program established as part of a partnership with several dozen conservative groups characterized by their proximity to the former president. “Project 2025” is a plan aimed at destroying the “ deep state ”, “cultural Marxism” (in the words of the president of the Heritage Foundation) and to completely redesign the structure of the executive branch in the United States.
In this context, the actors of this plan have begun to establish a list of potential (and loyal) replacements for nearly 50,000 federal functions; what will be possible after revoking existing legal protections for federal workers — the very ones that ensure that they are not politicized and serve the common good. The plan directly attacks the financial and administrative structure of the Department of Justice and the FBI to put them in the hands of the new president, who has already announced that he will go after his “enemies”, a long list ranging from Biden family, to federal officials who opposed him, to those who, after serving him, criticized him.
The plan also envisages the outright elimination of certain departments, such as the Ministry of Education. But it is in the planned application of the Insurrection Act of 1807 (allowing the deployment of the army on American territory) that one of the most immediate risks lies, particularly when combined with the chapter of the “Project 2025” — from the pen of the sinister Stephen Miller — which foresees a purge at the top of the army. Autocratic risk is no longer a rhetorical figure, but an established plan. Think. And feasible because the democratic machine is already weakened.
The sacrificed
Among those sacrificed by “Project 2025”, we will find racial minorities, while, in its last days, the Trump presidency published a report (which remained a dead letter) allowing the evisceration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 of the notion of discriminatory impact (which makes it possible to counter employment or housing practices which negatively affect a group of protected persons, even if the rules applied are formally neutral). THE Voting Rights Act is also in the crosshairs of “Project 2025”.
And the LGBTQ+ community, which has already been on the front lines during the previous presidency, as a number of provisions directly affected the ability of trans and gay people to serve in government and as schools became an arena policy. Women whose reproductive health, and with it their bodily autonomy and economic independence, are also in immediate danger.
We will also find education, while the Republican candidate announced his desire to create a new teacher certification body concerning the teaching of racial history, which will also have the aim of promoting teaching on the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers and an exclusive binary approach. Immigrants will be found — documented and undocumented. The climate too, while “Project 2025” provides for the elimination of clean energy subsidies and the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.
And consequently, the liberal international order. NATO, international treaties. The Rings. Democracy.
Because Trump doesn’t care about any of this. And yet, all of this is essential. Who would have thought, when the new year is only a few days old, that it would already feel like we were rolling along like crazy around November 5th. Because one man, one man, decided he would have his revenge. No matter the price.