Pun Salad

Project 2025, Trump’s how-to manual from the Heritage Foundation, is a plan to take the country from democracy to dictatorship in only 922 pages. Don’t believe Trump when says he doesn’t know anything about it – his own team helped write it.

The crux of the plan gives the president sweeping powers pursuant to Republicans’ theory of the “unitary executive”, allowing weaponization of the Constitution by either ignoring it or using it against perceived enemies as the President sees fit. The US Supreme Court supported this in Trump v US, the decision on presidential immunity. Trump himself claims he will “terminate” parts of the Constitution.

Trump will also be able to abolish various federal agencies that offer regular citizens safety and protection. The FDA, FTC, EPA, NOAA, CFPB and all other agencies that issue regulations that protect our air, food, water and finances will be eliminated or stripped of their abilities to issue protections that might interfere with business profits. This, too, was abetted by the Supreme Court when it overturned the precedent of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which held that Courts should give deference to agency interpretation of rules and regulations.

The MAGA fever dream of Project 2025 will eliminate or cut government programs we now enjoy, such as Medicare, ACA and Social Security, use the military against US citizens, strip us of our constitutional rights, deport or incarcerate millions, promote certain religious views, and much, much more.

Stop Project 2025! Vote for Democrats!

Three things can be said about former President Donald Trump’s approach to governing. The first is that he has never been credibly accused of being a dedicated student of public policy. For decades, he focused on real estate and self-promotion, not white papers. During his four years in office, he never gave the impression of being consumed by the philosophical principles of governing or losing sleep over issue briefs. 

Second, Trump is not a keep-your-cards-close-the-vest type. History will remember him for saying and tweeting whatever was on his mind at the moment. You never, ever had to wonder what he was thinking. And third, he was never beholden to the positions of his staff. He would ignore, contradict, or fire them. He’d hire people with conflicting views because he knew he’d always ultimately get his way. Donald Trump, for better or worse, was his own man.

This is why the media’s understanding of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has been so perplexing. Countless articles led readers to believe that his administration would pursue the priorities spelled out in the roughly 900 pages of detailed policy concepts and program minutiae. But that sounds nothing like the Donald Trump we’ve gotten to know.

The New York Times ran a guest editorial by Belle Boggs, a North Carolina author who had a bat fly in her house. It didn’t bite her, but she needed a sheriff’s deputy, a county health nurse, state animal control, the CDC, and an E.R. doctor to tell her what to do about that. Naturally, the episode led her to think of Donald Trump:

After our visit from the bat, our sheriff’s department, public health department and university hospital all functioned exactly as designed. The C.D.C., a huge federal agency that works to protect every one of us from infectious disease, food-borne illness and emerging threats like bird flu, pulled through. The C.D.C. is part of what Mr. Trump’s allies would call the administrative state and is in the cross hairs of Project 2025, which proposes breaking up the agency… I want to believe Kamala Harris is right when she says “we are not going back” to a time when every calamity leaves us on our own.

Leaving aside the problem of the ubiquitous personality who answers “Donald Trump” to every stain on the Rorschach test of life, the Boggs essay made me wonder about America’s prognosis. Early citizens packed kids in wagons and rode into forests teeming with human and animal predators. Now people reach middle age needing the federal government to tell them what to do if a bat flies past. It won’t hold […]