Closing Argument on Project 2025 and Trump's Kremlinization of America

Decoding Project 2025 wraps up with Part 8 -- with how he would destroy the world's largest economy, plus the big picture of how Trump and his Oligarchs would take apart America as we know it.

We’re finally at the end of Decoding Project 2025 — which has also had a parallel set of podcast episodes, with a lot of different angles of exploration — and it’s time for a closing argument of sorts. But first let’s take a look at how a second Donald Trump term would potentially destroy the US economic Colossus — especially when we read it together with the recent comments from the man likely to be Trump’s economic czar, Elon Musk.

Donald Trump’s role model - and America’s future?

Demolition derby

Certain things about the Trumpers’ plans for the economy are not surprising — and others need to be publicized much more. For example, of course they want another round of tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations — but what is less known is that the taxes for anyone making under $350,000 a year are going to increase under Trump. Trump will lower his own taxes, Elon Musk’s taxes, and Jeff Bezos’s taxes — and he’ll be raising almost everyone else’s in exchange.

Then they want to lock in those billionaires as untaxable forever: they propose a 60% supermajority for any future tax increases, to prevent future Democratic majorities from undoing Trump’s tax giveaways. This would basically be a filibuster for taxes, immunizing the Oligarchs from fair taxation forever. And then they want to have political appointees capture the IRS and dismantle it, making sure they stop going after tax cheats like (*checks notes*) Donald Trump.

And yes, of course, the Trumpers want to withdraw from international climate initiatives. That is not surprising. But what is far less well known is that Project 2025 also proposes that the US withdraw from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — pillars of the postwar order that the US created after World War II. It would represent a total abdication of American leadership, which is the ultimate goal of both Russia and China.

There is no need to defeat us militarily or economically if they can get us to dismantle ourselves — that’s the op they’re running via Trump, and it’s coming perilously close to success.

I do not know how any serious business leader or Reagan conservative could possibly vote for Trump given these positions.

But then it gets far worse: they also include a section on abolishing the Federal Reserve and moving to what they call “free banking.” Plus there’s a section on gold.

It is as though your craziest high school classmate’s Facebook posts are suddenly being enshrined as serious economic policy.

Yet if we read these together with some of the Russian disinformation that has been injected into the American information bloodstream — along with the remarks from Elon Musk, and what we know about Musk — we can see that the Trumpers’ economic plans may be crazy but are deadly serious.

Abolishing the Federal Reserve would instantly shatter US economic leadership globally, eliminating the dollar’s role as the global default currency — and plunge America into a depression. This is part of what Musk really meant when he’s recently spoken of “temporary hardship” if Trump wins and Musk is put in charge of economic policy. And it fits in perfectly with one of the major Russian disinfo ops in 2024: spreading false rumors that the US banking system is on the verge of collapse of some sort of monetary meltdown. This has been a deliberate and concerted effort of Russian operatives and assets this entire cycle.

What’s the real play here? Destroying the dollar — and moving to a world where cryptocurrencies are the primary means of exchange. This would be a massive windfall for the existing holders of crypto, like Musk, as it would boost the prices of those cryptocurrencies. It would also be a golden opportunity for hucksters like Trump — and Musk — to engage in even more elaborate and lucrative pump-and-dump schemes with crypto. And eliminating the dollar’s dominance would be an absolute dream-come-true for Russia, China, and countries like Saudi Arabia — all of whom appear to have secret ties to Musk and Trump.

The Putin playbook for America

The final analysis of Project 2025 paints a deeply dark and disturbing picture indeed. Political appointees taking over and eliminating entire agencies, mass firings of civil service employees, carving off whole agencies and functions for the benefit of Oligarchs, setting up a federal Gilead Database of women’s pregnancies nationwide, and setting up an Immigrant Gestapo to detain and deport millions and millions of immigrants, even legal immigrants and naturalized citizens.

What is the common thread here?

This combination of cronyism, far-right social policy, and ethnic cleansing is in fact the Vladimir Putin playbook — and in different variations, it’s often the playbook for authoritarians generally.

• Stack the government with people loyal only to you, and keep them loyal by giving them fiefdoms to enrich them.

• Ally with far-right social conservatives who share your top-down, authoritarian worldview, and give them what they want in order to keep them happy.

• Deport, detain, or destroy any groups that do not support you — and use them as an Other, an Enemy of the People, to rally your supporters against; pick winnable fights against these groups to give your side some victories.

This is what Project 2025 is really about. It’s not about being pro-business, or else most of its economic proposals make zero sense. It’s not about being small-government, as many of its proposals are shocking intrusions into personal freedom. It’s not even about pandering to certain groups that Trump needs in order to win elections: antagonizing women has caused Trump problems and may be about to lose him the 2024 election. The idea here is to get into power and not need to worry about elections again.

The missing element for Trump? Being able to use force against his political enemies. That appears to be Trump’s major regret from his term in office: that he didn’t quite cross the proverbial Rubicon and start shooting protestors, arresting journalists, or liquidating his enemies.¹ He’s now spoken about these things at much greater length and volume the past few years, and we need to take him seriously.

The ruthless, lawless use of violence is, of course, the other primary element of the Putin playbook — allowing him to deploy both carrots (you get a privatized government monopoly to make you into a billionaire Oligarch) and sticks (Polonium poisoning, falling out of windows, getting sent to Siberia). It is what has kept him in power even as some of the other elements of the playbook have not worked out as well (it was fine and dandy to go scorched-earth in Chechnya, or to seize smaller parts of Georgia and Ukraine, but the broader invasion of Ukraine was meant to be a cakewalk leading to a re-coronation of Putin-as-Czar and instead has turned into a bloody quagmire).²

Indeed, there is a reason why immigration is the #1 Trumper issue. It allows them to demonize Others, which rallies their base. But then by extending deportation to legal immigrants and to naturalized citizens, they could achieve their broader dream of eliminating (or at least suppressing) the parts of America that don’t support them.

The Trumpers cannot summon a majority fair and square, so they aim to manufacture a majority by any other means necessary — and they’re running out of the more subtle ones (gerrymandering, filibusters, taking advantage of the Senate and the Electoral College generally, creative purging of voter rolls, eliminating or limiting the number of polling places, giving older voting machines to areas that don’t support them, proliferating red-tape requirements for voting, making false claims of voter fraud, etc., etc.).

This is what Trump crony Roger Stone meant when he said during the 2020 recounts, “I said fuck the voting, get right to the violence.”

Violence is the unspoken word in Project 2025 — but it is heavily implied. There is no way any free people would enact the policies in so extreme a document. The only way for Project 2025 to be fully implemented is through coercion — and the nonviolent methods of coercion have not done the trick. Stone is merely ‘saying the quiet part out loud,’ as the current saying goes.³

The question is: are we listening?

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That’s it for Decoding Project 2025. Now, whether it’s implemented is up to us.

Double check your polling place at vote.org. Bring plenty of water and snacks. If you’re in line, stay in line. Leave your Harris-Walz gear at home. If they won’t let you vote, ask nicely to cast a provisional ballot — they are required to let you do so. And if you have any other issues or questions, or need to report voter intimidation or other problems, call or text 866-OUR-VOTE 866-687-8683.

See you on the other side, where hopefully we’ll be discussing a Harris victory and defending it against meritless Trump legal challenges. Fingers crossed.

1. The best example of someone Trump did use the machinery of government to single out for persecution? Michael Cohen, who suddenly found himself doing prison time for the kind of tax violations that normally draw fines — and who was thrown from house arrest back into prison for using social media and having the audacity to get a book deal.

2. Whereas Xi has been savvy enough — so far — to stick with winnable aggressions against the Uyghurs and the Tibetans, who are unable to fight back. Xi’s Ukraine would be Taiwan, and one must hope that Ukraine has served a cautionary tale for why to avoid a frontal assault on Taiwan. (And this also makes it that much more important that the US successfully defend Ukraine.)

3. Wonderfully, this meme comes from The Simpsons.