Decoding Trump's Project 2025, Part 4

Our journey to the heart of darkness continues with the Trumpers' plans to destroy education and the environment, turning America into one big Trump University, with extra wildfires and hurricanes.

As we continue to follow the Trumpers’ alphabetical appetite for destruction, we now turn to Project 2025’s plans to ruin education and the environment — turning both of them away from the public good and twisting them for the private gain of their billionaire donors and cronies.

The future of American education, Trump style.

Turning American education into one big Trump University

First, on education, it’s no surprise that the Trumpers want to eliminate the Department of Education; that has been a conservative wet dream for decades now. But the deeper question is why.

The answer has long been very simple: the far right wants to eliminate public schools and replace them with either church-run or for-profit schools, not only at the college level but throughout K-12 as well.

This is clear throughout Project 2025’s section on education, which aims to demolish the federal structure for college accreditation, or what they call the “federal accreditation cartel.”

Let’s unpack this, shall we? There are accreditation entities that review colleges and universities and determine whether they’re legitimate institutions of higher learning — or whether they’re more like Trump University, which was not only unaccredited but unlicensed, illegal, not allowed to call itself a university, had no real courses, no real curriculum, no real professors, no real degrees, and yet still charged students as much as $35,000 per person or more, then suddenly shut down and left students in the lurch after promising them year-long memberships and lifetime support.

The bona fide accreditors are then, in turn, given an official seal of approval by the federal government. Why? Because those who want to create and run corrupt fraudulent “colleges” can otherwise start their own “accreditation” organizations that claim to provide accreditation to the unaccredited colleges. And they do.

So when the far right starts whining about a “federal accreditation cartel,” what they really want is to be able to start scam colleges and then have scam accreditors bless the scam colleges. It’s the education equivalent of, say, a meat processing plant with no hygiene standards, or a car maker that can sell cars that inexplicably catch fire. It’s about having safety standards — about stopping predators.

The fundamental truth about Trumpism is that it’s pro-predator. Think of any kind of predatory “business” misconduct you can think of, in any industry — or, for that matter, any kind of predatory personal behavior, by men in particular — and Trump and his allies want it all to be fully legal and unregulated.

Anything goes, as long as it makes them a quick buck.

So what they really want is for predatory business operators to have a free hand to create fake schools that sell people on fake hopes and dreams of a better life for themselves, take their money, and give them a fake diploma.¹

And if the students can’t pay, that’s okay too, because Project 2025 would eliminate all the student debt forgiveness initiatives of the Biden-Harris administration and replace them with a new government-backed corporation for turning student debt into complex financial instruments — because that worked ever so well in the housing market.

Burn, baby, burn

While Trump’s education policy is a metaphorical flaming waste-heap, Trump’s energy and environmental policies are literally about flaming waste-heaps. Yet again, anything bad or predatory would be fully legal in a Donald Trump dystopia.

How absurd does this get? Project 2025 somehow manages to be in favor of smog.

The EPA adopted a goal of restoring “natural visibility” to America’s skies by 2064, which seems both laudable and deeply, deeply sad, because somehow we cannot have these nice things any sooner than that. It’s a goal that seems too conservative, too realistic, too gradualist, but because of those things, fully achievable. And yet Project 2025 thinks it should be eliminated. Apparently, to Trump and his cronies, polluters’ rights to pollute outweigh Americans’ rights to blue skies.

They also want to gut clean air and water standards overall — and they want to allow polluters to review themselves on whether they’re complying with pollution regulations. Because again, we see so many examples of successful “self-regulation” in airplane construction, meat processing, for-profit education, and finance.

This is also why we let students grade their own papers, right? No need for a pesky teacher to violate students’ rights to make their own determinations as to whether they got the right answers! If a student wants to declare that 2 + 2 = 5, well, anything less would be a violation of his First Amendment rights, right?

Meanwhile, all of the support for clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill would be completely repealed and rescinded — destroying American leadership in one of the fastest-growing industry segments in the world. They also want to remove all government support for research and development in clean and renewable energy — for next-generation battery and solar technology, for anything that could reduce dependence on fossil fuels sooner and establish American leadership in new energy technologies.

This exposes a deep hypocrisy in the right-wing mindset. Throughout Project 2025, they crow about wanting to move everything away from government and over to the private sector — and yet when it comes to energy, they want to obliterate the innovation in the private sector by cutting off critical funding for it.

They’re not pro-private sector or pro-free market. They’re in favor of the parts of the private sector that happen to bankroll their political operations. And — surprise — some of the biggest sugar daddies of the far right are polluters or developers want to be able to do whatever they want, blow whatever they want into the air we breathe, dump whatever they want into the water we drink, and never have to pay to clean any of it up.

And they want to make sure that today’s incumbent winners — such as fossil fuel companies — get to remain the winners forever, with no competition. Never mind that solar efficiency is growing exponentially now, bringing the very real promise of cheap energy that could be every bit as revolutionary as the cheap computing power that the world now has at its disposal. If not more so.

Every ounce of support for the clean energy revolution potentially hastens the day when the demand for fossil fuels will decline and fade — and nothing yields more desperation than an industry or regime on the brink of collapse.

That simple fact explains much of what is wrong with the world today — including why Russia and various countries in the Middle East are so desperate to influence politics in America and other Western powers, infiltrating elections, sowing disinformation, funding extremist political efforts, and buying politicians outright.

It’s because the fossil fuel powers know that their power is brittle and fragile. If demand for fossil fuels falls, their economies and regimes will likely fall with them.

In the meantime, they are obstructing our ability to stave off the climate crisis, to stop it from becoming irreversibly fatal. We are in a race against time, trying to defuse a bomb — and yet some of the very worst people on the planet are deliberately obstructing the bomb squad. And planting more bombs.

Just so they can continue to wallow in wealth and privilege for a little bit longer.

Now that we’re ending on that happy note, don’t worry, it gets worse. Because next time we’re going to discuss Trump’s plans for healthcare and especially for women’s health — and they’re even more terrible than you’ve been hearing.

1. And in particular they also want to destroy accreditation for law schools, so they can prop up fake fly-by-night “schools” to churn out “lawyers” to be foot soldiers in their takeover of the government. Next I’m sure they’ll say they want to end the “weaponized use of bar committees” so that lawyers can commit fraud and lie to courts and to the public as much as they want without being disbarred.