Decoding Trump's Project 2025, Part 1

We begin a journey into the heart of darkness, namely, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, Project 2025, beginning with their plans for the bureaucracy and their weird hate for the military.

The senior staffers from Donald Trump’s administration have created a detailed blueprint for a second Trump term — Project 2025. While on the surface it may look like a boring policy document, it is in fact the most extreme and radical set of policy proposals ever put forth by a major political party in post-Civil War America.¹

Trump at a Heritage Foundation event in 2022, praising them for Project 2025 and its “detail[ed] plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

Really, it’s a boredom-fascism sandwich. Pages upon pages of snoozefest policy wonk gobbledygook — and then suddenly a proposal to imprison millions of people indefinitely without due process, or to track women’s menstrual cycles and pregnancies, or to privatize agencies that are critical for everyone’s safety, without which thousands of people would die. And even some of the extreme proposals are couched in so much officialese that it’s difficult to understand what they’re saying. But thankfully, I speak officialese, as it’s a dialect of legalese.

So it’s time for Decoding Project 2025, a probably overly comprehensive review of the 900 page document, which will probably take many of these essays to complete (though hopefully not 900 pages’ worth, or else what was I actually accomplishing?).

Filling the swamp with your own alligators

So we begin at the beginning. The Trumpers’ overall plans for the federal bureaucracy bear immediate discussion right away — because, in code, they are proposing to end the federal government as we know it.

First, some background. Since the late 1800s and early 1900s, the vast majority of federal jobs have been allocated through a civil service system based on an objective application process; though far from perfect, this was a massive innovation compared to the old system, in which government jobs turned over with each incoming administration and were allocated based largely on political loyalty, what was decried as the “spoils system.” Instead of a system of professional career public servants, the federal government was basically a full-employment act for party hacks, rife with amateurism and corruption.

The Trumpers want to bring that back. Right off the bat, they smarmily refer to the “presumed corruption” of the spoils system and say that it “appeared to be sufficient for the nation’s first century.” (71)

That not only is false revisionist history, it also betrays some far-right code. Whenever a right-winger says something was “sufficient for the nation’s first century,” it’s because they’re longing to bring it back. What was good enough for the Founders should be good enough for us — that’s the sentiment they often express. This is then used as a facile argument for getting rid of any government program they don’t like, since, of course, none of those existed at the time of the Constitutional Convention, which was held in a Philadelphia that only had a population of 40,000 at the time.

What they want to do instead is to increase, drastically, the number of political appointees (80), undoing the modernization of the federal government — and giving themselves a larger fifth column inside the federal agencies, composed of Trump loyalists, working to disassemble the government from within. This isn’t “draining the swamp,” to be clear. Trump had four years to run the government, and he made it larger and ran up the biggest four years of debt in American history. The Trumpers don’t want a smaller government; they want a Trump government that they control entirely. They don’t want to drain the swamp; they want to fill the swamp with their own alligators.

They would also ban any and all government workers’ unions, which would clear the way for them to conduct mass terminations of current government employees. As we’ll see, they propose eliminating entire agencies. And it appears likely that they will do all of this by executive order rather than taking action through Congress. One of the consistent through-lines in this document is a clear intent to circumvent Congress and to have the president take action unilaterally — including, for example, seizing complete and immediate control of government agencies without Senate confirmation of cabinet secretaries, in direct contravention of the Constitution.

The weird anti-military bent of the Trumpers, explained?

The Project 2025 section on the military has a lot of fairly predictable proposals — of course they want to end equity initiatives in the military (103), end reproductive healthcare for service members (104), and ban trans people from the military (103). And, of course, they also want to bring back the anti-vaxxers who left the military (103) rather than comply with a standard vaccine mandate of the sort that has literally been implemented since George Washington ordered the Continental Army inoculated against smallpox in 1777. Never mind that this would reward insubordination — or that it would risk the health and safety of the 2.8 million Americans in the service who did put their units and their country first.

But they go even further than that. Repeatedly throughout the section, the Trumpers insult and deride the military as being weak and unready to fight.

As politically suicidal as this sounds, it actually tracks. Donald Trump is the most anti-military president in American history. He has called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” He has insulted war heroes. He refused to meet the families of fallen service members at Dover Air Force Base, as the president traditionally does, for over two years — just because one grief-stricken father criticized him on one occasion.

But why? Why the weird antipathy to the military?

I have two theories: one personal and one political.

The personal one is that Donald Trump was ripped out of high school and shipped off to a military academy when he was a teenager, as a punishment from his father Fred Trump. I don’t think it’s far-fetched that Donald has maintained a grudge against all things military forever after. It’s a way of getting back at his father.

The political one is far more sinister, however. At every step of his administration — and especially in its waning days in January 2021 — top military officials refused to do Trump’s bidding (including shooting civilian protesters). And the military and retired military folks who were at times in Trump’s inner circle have turned into especially credible critics of Trump, including General and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, General and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, and Trump’s former chief of staff, retired General John Kelly.

At one point he even turned to Kelly and said: “You fucking generals. Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump then clarified that indeed he meant Hitler’s generals.

This is why the Trumpers have such contempt for the military, because the military has refused to bow down to Trump and to go along with his desired march toward authoritarianism. And we’ll see that even more, later in the document, when it comes to how Project 2025 would mistreat veterans.

Next time: the Department of Homeland Security, where we really get to see the Trumpers’ fascist flags fly.

1. Which is a different way of saying: the only way that this document could be more extreme or more anti-democratic would be if it also avowedly advocated for the return of slavery.