Decoding Trump's Project 2025, Part 3

We turn to Trump's plans for foreign policy and food safety, and let's just say they don't seem to involve making America safer in any way.

We’re back with another installment of Decoding Project 2025, unpacking the extremism — often masked in boring policy wonk verbiage — in Donald Trump’s plans for a second administration. Next in the document is the section on foreign policy.

Once again one detects a theme: Make America Weaker Again. They want to break apart the government into private fiefdoms that they can own as oligarchs — and they want to dismantle the institutions and obligations of the free world that America has led since 1945, winding the clock back to an era of isolationism and passivity. They want America to withdraw from leadership, withdraw from any major role on the world stage at all.

Let’s be clear about who that benefits. The last time any serious elements in American politics became enamored with isolationism, they were bankrolled and supported by Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Hitler and his cronies were desperate to keep the United States sidelined from any European wars or invasions they were about to start — because they knew that American industrial might and sheer numbers would crush German hopes of victory, just as they had in World War I. Hitler, for once, was right.

Isolationism in the 1930s benefited Hitler, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan — at the expense of the tens of millions who ultimately died in World War II.

Isolationism in the 2020s benefits Putin, Xi, and Iran and its terrorist vassals. If America completely freezes foreign aid, as Project 2025 proposes, we will lose one of our most important means of wielding influence around the world. It is especially nonsensical to see this in a document that otherwise engages in so much fear-mongering about China — as China’s Belt and Road Initiative is effectively a giant money-spending operation throughout much of the developing world, buying influence, showering nations and companies with loans and then making them dependent on China. Cutting our spending globally is exactly the wrong thing for America to be doing right now.

But the Trumpers aren’t trying to make sense. They want a weaker America, which they can control — and of course there is ample evidence that they may be getting materially supported by an array of foreign powers, just as the isolationists and Nazi apologists were a century ago. Meanwhile, they bash China because it wins them votes and campaign donations from their racist, xenophobic base.

Ukraine and the Destruction of NATO

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest victims of Trump’s Project 2025, if enacted, would be Ukraine. The blueprint proposes a complete elimination of aid to Ukraine — and tellingly, it does not include Russia on a list of America’s global enemies. And to top it all off, they also insinuate that America should withdraw from NATO:

The next Administration must end blind support for international organizations. If an international organization is effective and advances American interests, the United States should support it. If an international organization is ineffective or does not support American interests, the United States should not support it. Those that are effective will still require constant pressure from U.S. officials to ensure that they remain effective. Serious consideration should also be given to withdrawal from organizations that no longer have value, quietly undermine U.S. interests or goals, or disproportionately rely on U.S. financial contributions to survive. (191)

This is policyspeak. It’s a code. Or a dog whistle, if you will. The line “no longer have value” is a way of saying that even our most longstanding obligations are potentially on the chopping block. And the line about “disproportionately rely[ing] on U.S. financial contributions” parallels exactly with Trump’s rally speeches and debate answers blasting NATO and claiming, misleadingly, that our European allies are somehow mooching off of us (never mind that the U.S. has a far larger population, economy, and military than any other NATO country, or that our financial and military contributions to NATO have always given us a ‘first among equals’ status within the alliance).

And again, who will benefit from the U.S. leaving NATO? Russia, of course. Russia is the primary reason NATO exists: it was created as a defensive alliance in 1949 against Russian aggression and occupation of most of Eastern Europe. The disintegration of NATO has been a Kremlin dream ever since — and it is one of Vladimir Putin’s primary objectives.

Speaking of Putin, his satellite and lackey Viktor Orban comes up in this section as well. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty are U.S. communications outlets to broadcast information into totalitarian or anti-democratic regimes. They operate in Orban’s one-party dictatorship in Hungary — as well they should, in a country where opposition parties and candidates are restricted, as is the press, and the courts are controlled by the all-powerful leader.

Yet Project 2025 sides with Orban, predictably — whining that RFE and RL should not be broadcasting into Hungary and calling it a “democratically elected, pro-American” regime when it is decidedly neither of those things. And even less surprisingly, the document goes on to propose the total elimination of RFE, RL, and its sister network, Voice of America (in part because VOA also was “posting content highly critical of, and personally insulting to” Trump when he was president, because of course one of the first rules of an autocracy is you can never ever hurt the autocrat’s widdle feelings).

Again, why lead the world and defend democracy and human rights (with a radio signal rather than bullets or bombs, no less) when you can retreat, surrender, and withdraw from the world, under the pretense of “America First” when in fact it is for the direct benefit — and perhaps at the direction — of our biggest enemies and rivals.

Make America Sicker Again (from unsafe, contaminated food)

There are still other areas where Trump and Project 2025 aim to make America weaker and easier to control and conquer — while make sure they and their cronies and supporters profit.

If food safety feels like something we should no longer be dealing with in 2024, you would be correct. The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, signed into law by Teddy Roosevelt. This was on the heels of a series of national scandals regarding contaminated food (food with pathogens) and adulterated food (food that did not contain what it was supposed to contain), including the outcry over Upton Sinclair’s landmark exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, which came out in November 1905 and helped sway mainstream public opinion on the issue.

The recent outbreak of listeria traced to a Boar’s Head deli meat plant in Virginia has just claimed a 10th life — and the details of the now-shuttered plant sound almost Jungle-like in their disgusting details: insects, mold, dripping water, puddles of animal blood, and meat and fat residue on the walls and floors, at least two years old.

This is what deregulation looks like. Donald Trump lightened regulatory oversight of the meat industry during his presidency — and now Project 2025 wants to finish the job by ending the requirement that meat be federally inspected. State-level inspections would be sufficient. So that would mean that any smaller, under-resourced state agency, especially in a more conservative state, could be easily co-opted and circumvented by a cost-cutting industry player.

Yet this was exactly the problem in the case of the Boar’s Head plant. The federal government was NOT inspecting that plant — the Commonwealth of Virginia was. This was under a program called the Talmadge-Aiken Cooperative Inspection Program, from a law passed in 1962, deputizing state agencies to help the U.S. Department of Agriculture with inspections, particularly in rural areas.

It is highly questionable whether such a program needs to exist today, with a modern network of highways and cellular reception. Federal inspectors can easily inspect all of our nation’s food processing facilities, holding to a single high national standard, and reducing the likelihood of gaps in coverage that can be exploited by bad actors.

But no. Instead, the Trumpers want to go the other direction, ending any pretense of federal inspection, and just letting the states run wild.

They also want to lower the safety standards for baby formula. They are taking the baby formula shortage from the pandemic — when supply chain problems plagued much of the economy — and using it as an excuse to cut safety regulations.

So not only do we face the prospect of more seniors dying from food contaminated with deadly bacteria, we also face the prospect of babies dying from formula contaminated with deadly bacteria.

And they also want to cut aid to farmers, cut and gut SNAP benefits to make sure families and children go hungry, and then cut school lunches to make sure those same children starve at school as well as at home.

But hey, at least those hungry kids will be less likely to die of listeria infections, right?

And don’t worry, Trump also wants to destroy education in America and turn it all into one big for-profit fraudfest — basically a giant Trump University. We’ll explore that in the next installment of Decoding Project 2025.