Coming in at 900 pages long and with backing from across the right, an extreme plan to remake the US system has Donald Trump's opponents terrified.
ADVERTISEMENTHaving tried to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden with a range of undemocratic tactics, Donald Trump is now campaigning for the US presidency again and is in full authoritarian flow.
Having said last December he intends to be a dictator “on day one,” he has continued to fawn over authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orbán and Xi Jinping.
"They're all smart, tough,” he said of these leaders at a recent rally. “They love their country ... and Orbán was right: we have to have somebody that can protect us."
But as Trump’s opponents are working hard to make known, it isn’t just the ex-president’s own words that warn of a slide into full-on authoritarianism. In fact, there already exists a highly detailed and publicly available plan to dismantle the current American order and replace it with something far more extreme.
This agenda is known as Project 2025, a long-gestating effort to lay out a highly detailed and strikingly extreme agenda for a new Republican presidential administration that its backers hope will begin in January next year.
Project 2025 is a collaboration between hundreds of former Trump appointees, right-leaning thinkers and long-established conservative lobby groups. Together, they have released a 900-plus-page report, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”, that spells out in minute detail how a future conservative president could almost completely overhaul the American federal system.
It harks back specifically to the agenda produced by supporters of Ronald Reagan at the end of the 1970s, but it is dramatically more polarising in its proposals. And many of the plans it spells out have left Trump’s opponents nothing short of horrified.
'Bloodless, if...'
Project 2025 has been hatched under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, which describes itself as “the nation’s premier conservative think tank”.
While its history has seen it align itself with various mainstream Republicans who are now marginalised and even excluded from their party, the foundation has fully embraced Trumpism since he first won the presidency, and it has continued its radicalisation since he lost it in 2020.
Its current president, Kevin Roberts, is fully open about how he sees the organisation’s mission. In an interview with far-right Trump consigliere and convicted felon Steve Bannon in early July, he put it this way: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Not long afterwards, the Heritage Foundation accused the Biden administration of possessing “the means, but perhaps also the intent, to circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president” — and saying that “as things stand right now, there is a 0% chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America”.
Thus, the Heritage Foundation and the movement it helps lead view current US politics in near-apocalyptic terms, framing the moment as a critical breaking point that demands sweeping, even merciless reform from the top down. Project 2025’s flagship written output spells out what they are thinking for the world to see.
'A new age'
Proclaiming itself “the work of the entire conservative movement”, the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership is organised around what it calls “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future”.
These are to “restore the family as the centrepiece of American life and protect our children,” “dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people,” “defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats,” and “secure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls ‘the blessings of liberty.’”
While those phrases are relatively standard fare in the US conservative movement, the details that underpin them put the manifesto well outside the mainstream.
ADVERTISEMENTUnder the “family” heading, the authors insist that “in many ways, the entire point of centralising political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.”
The section’s priorities are not just to support families economically but “for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”
And this does not just mean offering tax incentives to married couples with children.
The authors broaden their manifesto to say the next right-wing president “must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors” — the mandate states that all references to sexual orientation, gender, reproductive rights and abortion should be deleted from every federal rule, regulation and piece of legislation, complaining that such terminology is "used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights".
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The section also insists that “schools serve parents, not the other way around”, rails against big tech for perpetrating “industrial-scale child abuse”, and calls for the wholesale outlawing of pornography.
“The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered,” the report says.
Most incendiary of all, it describes the demise of Roe v Wade — the Supreme Court ruling that upheld a right to abortion — as “the greatest pro-family win in a generation” and also describes the Dobbs decision that overturned it as “just the beginning,” asserting that the next president must “enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life”. Among these is the effective banning of “abortifacients,” meaning anything that may induce the abortion of a pregnancy.
While many of Project 2025’s proposals are extreme, the horror that greeted the end of Roe v Wade has not gone away.
ADVERTISEMENTThe future of reproductive rights is set to remain one of the most galvanising issues for the Democrats, and the party is already working hard to make people aware of the project’s plan to continue cracking down on abortion on every front — including by making abortion pills and emergency contraceptives as inaccessible as possible.
Tear it down
Project 2025 is also openly bent on an effort to “dismantle the administrative state,” an idea that Trump’s allies have propagated since he first became president in 2017.
Steve Bannon, the far-right agitator and former Trump adviser currently serving a prison term for contempt of Congress, declared in 2017 that the then-new administration’s central mission would be “the deconstruction of the administrative state,” essentially dramatically hacking down the size of the federal government, including by fully abolishing certain
Currently, the US president’s ability to not just circumvent but demolish the core pillars of government is constrained by Congress, the courts, the constitution, and existing law. The federal bureaucracy is also staffed not just with presidential appointees but also scores of career civil servants.
ADVERTISEMENTProject 2025’s mandate explicitly states that this model of government should be destroyed and replaced with a system that radically extends the president’s power while rolling back congressional checks and balances. In the authors’ view, this is simply a matter of restoring the correct order of things. And again, their proposal revolves around a culture war against “the great awokening”.
“The left derives its power from the institutions they control," Roberts writes in his foreword, "but those institutions are only powerful to the extent that constitutional officers surrender their own legitimate authority to them."
"A president who refuses to do so and uses his or her office to reimpose constitutional authority over federal policymaking can begin to correct decades of corruption and remove thousands of bureaucrats from the positions of public trust they have so long abused.”
Under the project’s recommendations, these bureaucrats are to be replaced with political appointees. And over the last several years, Project 2025 has been recruiting wannabe replacements who share its politics to a training programme, readying them for government.
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When the project came to broader public attention in the early summer of 2024, Trump took the unusual step of publicly distancing himself from it, even going so far as to claim he did not know what it was.
Senior members of his campaign staff have also denied having anything to do with it and even complained that its radical proposals risk drowning out their efforts to appeal to more mainstream-minded voters. In a recent interview, senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita described the project's organisers as “a pain in the ass” and said any suggestion their plans would be implemented by default was “complete and utter bullshit”.
This is despite members of the project’s author list appearing at this year’s Republican National Convention. One of them, Tom Homan, was name-checked by Trump himself. And while Trump has explicitly denied knowledge of the project, he has previously spoken at the Heritage Foundation and praised its efforts to develop a governing agenda.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have been hammering home the project’s name and its radicalism as hard as possible in recent weeks — and all the more so since Kamala Harris became the party’s presumptive nominee.
ADVERTISEMENTParty luminaries from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to Hillary Clinton have been sharing links to pieces explaining what it is, hoping to tie the Trump-Vance ticket to it as tightly as possible.
New data shows that they may be on to something.
According to progressive-leaning polling company Navigator, most Americans are now aware of the project’s existence — highly unusual for anything produced by a Washington think tank — and they are turning against it.
In this climate, Harris is invoking the agenda’s name on the stump as she rides a fresh burst of Democratic enthusiasm into her three-month-long presidential campaign.
ADVERTISEMENT“(Trump) and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class,” she said at her first campaign rally as a full-fledged candidate, rousing boos from her hyped-up audience.
“Like, we know we’ve gotta take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing?”