Project 2025 is Trump's blueprint to get rid of democracy and the rule of law

The presidential election still is four months away, the major parties have not officially nominated their candidates, and the first debate has yet to take place.

But preparations already are underway for a second Donald Trump presidency, and they should alarm every American, of every political persuasion, who is concerned about preserving democracy and the rule of law.

An extremist, dark-money “slime machine” is preparing a list of federal civil servants deemed disloyal to Trump, who could be reclassified, reassigned, or fired if he takes office, the Associated Press reports.

The chilling plot, a revival of the McCarthyism that traumatized a post-war America, is part of the dystopian agenda known as Project 2025.

Key to the agenda is purging the government of nonpartisan government officials sworn to uphold the Constitution and replacing them with sycophants loyal only to Trump. The entire federal government would be placed under direct presidential control. This includes the Department of Justice, which Trump has vowed to use to prosecute his political enemies.

The purge would pave the way for a Trump administration to impose a radical, repressive, and regressive regime — one that could endure long beyond Trump’s constitutionally-mandated term or even his lifetime. A vice president, Mike Pence, and officials committed to the rule of law in the departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security thwarted the attempted Trump coup in 2020 and 2021.

In a second term, there won’t be any officials who place the rule of law above Trumpism.

The agenda proposed in Project 2025 is grisly:

• Dismantling the foundations of immigration policy, tearing families apart, turning away desperate refugees, and stripping away protections for Dreamers.
• Undermining climate change mitigation, environmental justice, and the transition to clean energy.
• Eliminating racial justice initiatives and preserving advantages for white Americans, even perverting the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to "investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers" with diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
• Gutting public education, wiping out Head Start and other support for low-income students, and withdrawing federal oversight of public schools.
• Slashing health care insurance, putting 18 million Americans at risk of losing coverage entirely, killing the drug price provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and Affordable Care Act’s protections for pre-existing conditions.
• Shutting down access to safe abortions, contraception and other reproductive health care, putting women’s lives at risk.
• Deleting “sexual orientation and gender identity” from all federal rules, reinstating a transgender military ban, and limiting LGBTQ workplace discrimination protections.

Fire civil servants who stood up to Trump

As disturbing as this agenda is, the most alarming and repellent policy proposal contained within Project 2025 is the restructuring of the federal government, eliminating the kind of public servants who stopped Trump from completely disassembling the Veterans Administration, overcame his resistance to expelling Russian spies, deterred him from shooting racial justice protestors, derailed his plan to deploy the military against migrants and kick undocumented children out of schools, and deflected his suggestion to drop nuclear bombs into the eyes of hurricanes.

There will be no stopgaps, no checks and balances, no one to say no when he tries to subvert the next election.

The Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025, grew out of the mid-1970s movement to protect racially segregated schools. The first battle it waged was against a school district’s adoption of multicultural textbooks —  “n***er books,” as some opponents called them.''

The Heritage agenda is just as repellent now as it was then, which is why undermining a free democracy is key to its implementation. Heritage President Kevin D. Roberts says the "model for conservative governance" is Hungary’s authoritarian, anti-democratic leader Viktor Orbán.

“Why is Orbán their model? Because he showed them how to use elections to undermine democracy and ensure perpetual power for his team,” historian Nancy McClean said. "How? Orbán purged the civil service and refilled it with obedient loyalists. He got the Constitution altered. He completely dominates. And this is what Heritage wants to see happen in the United States."

Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.

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