Project 2025 — introduction

The right-wing has a plan. A very detailed plan. You aren’t going to like it. But what is it, really?

It may look like Donald Trump couldn’t organize his way out of a wet paper bag, let alone organize a government (look at how well he did last time), but he doesn’t need to be able to. There’s a think tank in the U.S. that has produced a 920-page plan of policies for him or whoever replaces him.

Trump protests that he knows nothing about it and that it is “Absolutely Ridiculous And Abysmal”. This despite the fact that he once said, “They’re Going to Lay the Groundwork”, praised its “Colossal Mandate”, that he has touted many of the ideas in it himself, and has ties to many of the authors.

Actually, he probably hasn’t read it, as it is far too long for his short attention span. But he doesn’t need to have read it. Its contributors include a lot of his people. And if he goes down, the plan is ready for his replacement.

The Trump campaign says that Agenda 47 is “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do if he returns to the White House”. It’s the official 2024 Republican Party Platform. Its main points are:

1. Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion
2. Carry out the largest deportation operation in american history
3. End inflation, and make america affordable again
4. Make america the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!
5. STOP OUTSOURCING, AND TURN THE UNITED STATES INTO A MANUFACTURING SUPERPOWER
6. large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!
7. Defend our constitution, our bill of rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms
8. Prevent world war three, restore peace in europe and in the middle east, and build a great iron dome missile defense shield over our entire country — all made in america
9. End the weaponization of government against the american people
10. Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders
11. Rebuild our cities, including washington dc, making them safe, clean, and beautiful again.
12. Strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world
13. Keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency
14. Fight for and protect social security and medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age
15. Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations
16. Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children
17. Keep men out of women’s sports
18. Deport pro-hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again
19. Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship
20. Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success

Brits may be wondering what that has to do with them, but our right-wing think tanks are funded by the same billionaires, and our right-wing politicians frequently go over to America and hobnob with the same people (e.g. Liz Truss, Nigel Farage go to CPAC). And there is nothing to stop them from reading the plan and adopting the same aims, adjusted for British government.

Far from protecting freedoms, they would take them away — for example the freedom to have an abortion, and even to travel. They may protect the right to own a gun, but they want to remove or restrict many other rights, e.g. the right to unionize.

The Heritage foundation recently announced that Project 2050 has come to an end, but that’s just the first phase which ended with the publishing of the document. People are now working on producing more detailed policies and recruiting people to carry them out. Russell Vought has been caught on camera saying he’s writing a “180-Day Transition Playbook”. With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the American Accountability Foundation is researching the backgrounds, social media posts & commentary of high-ranking government employees who they think might obstruct Trump’s agenda.

Right wing groups have been preparing for years for the time when they will be able to implement their white ‘Christian’ nationalist agenda, with or without Trump. Ever since the Powell memo, billionaires have been funding them. The Federalist Society with similar views has been recruiting judges and Republicans in Congress have made sure that many of them have been appointed. Republicans in Congress have packed the Supreme Court, which is already carrying out their agenda. It is possible that Tuberville’s Senate hold on military promotions was intended to let Trump fill them in 2025. Trump plans to replace tens of thousands of federal workers with his own people. Project 2025 is already recruiting. They have even prepared job application questionnaires.

It is telling that while they rail against the ‘failure’ of government departments to bow to the will of a ‘Christian’ nationalist president and claim to want to protect the constitution, they extol the decisions of the extreme right-wingers on the Supreme Court and do not seek to rein in its rewriting of the constitution.

Ever since Citizens United v. FEC, corporations, including foreign ones, have been donating to organisations supporting the right wing agenda, e.g. Shell donating to anti-climate groups behind Project 2025 and AIPAC supporting pro-Israel candidates. Project 2025 wants the next Republican government to “ Sustain support for Israel” (94/126).

The aim seems to be to create a ‘Christian’ (ignoring Matthew 5 and 25) nationalist patriarchal state and to ensure that the patriarchs control women and workers while getting more and more rich. That is not Christianity and it is not democracy and it is not right.

The plan isn’t quite as toxic as some say, but some of the more toxic policies attributed to it have been touted by some of the same people or other Trump sycophants or prominent Republicans. Nevertheless, it has become so unpopular already, as polls show, that Project 2025’s leader Kevin Roberts postponed his own book launch until after the election — a book that J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to. The aforementioned Kevin Roberts said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” In practice they are planning for a reverse revolution, restoring a king.

So, what’s in Project 2025, or as they call it, Mandate for Leadership? Well, the overarching theme seems to be that people who share their ‘religious beliefs’ (some of which I doubt were expressed by Jesus) should be free to discriminate — restricting the freedoms of everyone else despite how much they have touted freedom.

There are several lists doing the rounds of what is said to be in the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document. Project 2025 has confirmed or denied most of them. Of those it has denied, some seem highly likely given the content of the document, or what Republican states have already done, or the known policies of the authors or of Trump.

In the following articles I will go into detail about:

• what’s in in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” or Trump’s “Agenda 47” document
• those policies that are not explicit in Project 2025 or Agenda 47 but are known to be right wing policies

Since the mandate is full of Project 2025 authors’ anti-woke opinions (“the Left’s steady stream of insanity appears to be never-ending” — p19/p52), I have not kept my own ‘woke’ opinions out of this response. But I have tried to make my response more reality-based compared to their repeated whining and falsehoods about left wing policies.

Page numbers are given in the format: page number in the original document / page number in the PDF.

My next article details what is in Project 2025 and/or Agenda 47, or known to be on the agenda of many Republicans, with sources.

TL;DR? I’ll post a simple list too, without the details or sources.