Trump and Project 2025

Our task remains educating, agitating, and organizing for a democratic constitution, writes Luke Pickrell

Several months ago, inspired by a comment about the supposed dangers of critiquing the Constitution, I wrote a short article about the Convention of States Action (COSA) and its plan to “persuade GOP-controlled state legislatures to call a constitution convention where far-right conservative values will become the law of the land.” I doubt many people have heard about COSA. Many more, I imagine, have heard about Project 2025 (P25), also known as the Presidential Transition Project. Here, I’ll describe P25 and argue that we must continue critiquing the Constitution no matter what conservative (or liberal) think tanks have up their sleeves.

“The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.” So reads the first sentence of P25’s website. To “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left,” P25 aims to implement a project based on four pillars: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook. Combined under a Trump presidency, the pillars will “pave the way for an effective conservative administration.” The potential benefits of this, according to P25, include a more streamlined government, reduced bureaucracy, and a stronger focus on conservative values.

The first pillar, a policy agenda, aims to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” The policy agenda is compiled in a 900-page book, Mandate for Leadership. The book begins with a warning: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” The essence of P25 is presented in the Mandate for Leadership. Recommendations include cuts to various Federal agencies, including the State Department and Department of Education, expanding Executive powers, reducing environmental regulation, and broad tax cuts. Other proposals include criminalizing pornography, removing legal protection for discrimination based on sexual orientation and identity, and rejecting abortion as healthcare. Overall, the policy wish list would see an expansion of Executive powers, a move decried by opponents as violating the Constitution’s principle of checks and balances. The fourth pillar, a 180-day playbook, comes out of Mandate for Leadership’s “comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency.”

The second pillar, personnel, begins with a chuckle-inducing line: “Want to be considered for positions in a presidential Administration? Submit your resume today to be included in the personnel database.” Little more is said besides, “With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.” The third pillar, training, is all about the Presidential Administration Academy, a “ one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” Anyone interested in serving the next conservative president is encouraged to apply to the Academy to learn from a veritable “Who’s Who of the conservative movement.” Several certificate programs are offered, including Conservative Government 101 and Prepared to Serve. 

P25 is produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank founded in the early 1970s. Ronald Reagan drew many of his policies from the foundation’s Mandate for Leadership — a policy series put out every four years since 1981, of which P25 is the latest iteration. Washington D.C. think tanks like Heritage constantly create policy wish lists for future governments. The liberal Center for American Progress, for example, was called Obama’s “ideas factory” during his presidency.

The Heritage Foundation’s wish list has its fair share of critics. Googling “Project 2025” turns up dozens of headlines, including “Project 2025 is a threat to democracy,” “Project 2025 poses threat to democracy,” “A primer on the chilling far-right Project 2025 plan for 2nd Trump presidency,” and “GOP's 'Project 2025' Plan May See the Rise of Dictator Trump.” Opponents claim that if implemented by a Trump presidency, P25 would affect every aspect of American life, create a corrupt and incompetent government, and turn our democracy into an authoritarian and fascist country. “Trump is a more than worthy subject of concern for anyone hoping for democracy in 2025,” writes David Dayen: “Last time he was president, he actively resisted the peaceful transfer of power, a hallmark of despots the world over. To the extent he and his authoritarian-friendly advisers learned anything from the first term, it was how to neutralize obstacles to expanding power. His musing about being a ‘dictator on day one’ is really not loose talk. The plans emanating from Team Trump to destroy the civil service, hire government lawyers to rubber-stamp unconstitutional actions and prosecute personal enemies, and even deploy troops on American soil are truly alarming.”

However, unlike almost every other commentator on P25 or the possibility of a second Trump presidency, Dayen asks a straightforward question: “Exactly what part of democracy are we trying to save? Is it our democratic legislature, gerrymandered and malapportioned beyond recognition, with supermajority thresholds that deny rule even by that corrupted majority? Is it our democratic presidency, which Trump legally took over after losing the popular vote in 2016, and George W. Bush in the same fashion 16 years earlier? Is it our democratic judiciary, morphed into a super-legislature and habitually twisting the Constitution to advantage those with power, money, and influence? Are we worried about a democracy that can be so easily purchased, where corporate lobbyists either win whatever they want on Capitol Hill, or win by regulatory change or international trade treaty whatever they don’t? Has this government, where the most important modification of our democracy’s original sin, the second-class citizenship of Black people, is now being steadily reversed by state legislatures and the courts, earned our support? Is there despair over losing something that has produced unequal opportunity, unequal justice, and the conversion of economic power into political power? Where can we find this democracy we need to fight to preserve?”

In Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt lay out a persuasive case for why opponents of Trump (and thereby P25) should also be opponents of the Constitution. The Constitution empowers minoritarian and conversation politics. Take the Right to Contraception Act, which died in the Senate after failing to garner the 60 votes necessary to defeat a veto. As Levitsky and Ziblatt explain, America is one of only a few countries that “retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber, and it is one of an even smaller number of democracies in which a powerful upper chamber is severely malapportioned due to the ‘equal representation of unequal states’ (only Argentina and Brazil are worse). Most importantly, it is the world’s only democracy with both a strong, malapportioned Senate and a legislative minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities.”

The malapportioned Senate, in which each state gets two representatives regardless of population, allows a minority of the population to stop laws supported by the majority. In 2022, a minority in the Senate blocked the highly regarded Voting Rights Act. A 2014 bill to raise the minimum wage, supported by two-thirds of Americans, died in the Senate, while a popular 2013 universal background check bill was filibustered to death by 45 senators representing only 38 percent of the population.

The Constitution had allowed the Republican Party to dominate American politics despite representing the views of a minority of the population. Most obviously, Trump only became President in 2016 because of the Electoral College. A 1969 drive to abolish the Electoral College (a move that continues to hold support by a 2:1 margin) “seemed unstoppable” until it ran into the Senate. “Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000,” propose Levitsky and Ziblatt: “The Democrats would have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the U.S. Senate and all but one presidential election during her adult lifetime. And yet she would have lived most of her adult life under Republican presidents, a Republican-controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees. How much faith should she have in our democracy?”

So, yet again, Americans find themselves in a constitutional bind: Reality tells us the Constitution won’t save us from Trump, but nearly a century of “creedal constitutionalism” (to use Aziz Rana’s phrase) scolds us to think otherwise. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, almost all of P25’s critics praise the Constitution as the nation’s saving grace. In so doing, they act like someone who, drinking from a poison chalice and dying a slow death, praises the liquid’s vitalzing qualities. A Trump presidency would be bad, especially with the Heritage Foundation’s wish list of policy proposals. Yet, as Dayen writes, “We don’t deserve to live as political Houdini figures trying constantly to work our way out of shackles imposed on us by our own system of government.”

What about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, who continue to advertise themselves as defenders of democracy? Says Dayen, “If a political movement is going to style itself as the savior of democracy, it should also speak plainly about the myriad deficiencies in our democracy, and what it would actually take to fix them.” In other words, if the Democrats supported democracy, they would champion the cause for a democratic constitution.

We shouldn’t hold our breath. As Lenin wrote in “Political Agitation and the Class Point of View,” “The party of the proletariat must learn to catch every liberal just at the moment when he is prepared to move forward an inch and make him move forward a yard. If he is obdurate, we will go forward without him and over him.” Our project remains educating, agitating, and organizing for a democratic constitution regardless of Trump, Biden, or Project 2025.