Trump’s Project 2025 Would End Freedom
Donald Trump and the GOP are running on Project 2025 — a collection of extreme policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation that specify how Trump would radically transform the federal government and jam through an extreme MAGA agenda. The policy prescriptions in Project 2025 have created the most extreme platform of any major party presidential nominee in U.S. history.
Trump’s Project 2025 would empower the wealthy, large corporations and the Christian Right. It would create both a plutocracy and a right wing Christian theocracy. Trump’s platform would transform him into an authoritarian leader with vast power to limit our freedoms and go after his political enemies.
This is a document with over 900 pages of fine print. I will acquaint you with some of the most extreme and dangerous polices.
The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would be controlled by Trump. This would empower him to keep his promises to investigate and prosecute his political enemies. The convicted felon and his allies have already put together a long list of opponents to be investigated starting with the Bidens and the Clintons.
Trump would be granted total control of the FCC to regulate speech on social media platforms and those platforms would not be allowed to discriminate against the the so-called “Conservative viewpoint.”
The radical playbook would give Trump the authority to fire civil servants and replace them with toadies. Trump tried to do this during his presidency. Former GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger on Project 2025: “Those people who put out your Social Security check, do things that we require every day.. They’re talking about replacing them with folks that have no idea what they’re doing because the people who are there have not sworn an allegiance to Trump.”
Trump’s Project 2025 would substantially damage the economy. He plans to place a 60% tariff on all imports from China, a 100% tariff on all auto imports and a 10% tariff on all other imports. This huge tax increase would cost the average family $1,700 and cause stagflation.
The Heritage Foundation plan would also increase income taxes on the poor and middle class. Millions of low- and middle-class households would likely face significantly higher taxes under this proposal.
The plan also considers a national sales tax. Sales taxes tend to be regressive and redistribute income upwards.
Here’s what Trump’s Project 2025 would mean for two families’ tax bills. A family of four with an income of $100,000 would pay $2,600 more. In contrast, a family earning $5 million would grab a $325,000 tax cut!
At the same time, Trump plans another huge deficit funded tax cut for the rich. He would cut already low corporate and capital gains taxes.
The extreme anti-labor agenda would allow employers to eviscerate overtime regulations and potentially withhold pay.
Project 2025 would phase out Biden’s SAVE plan and drastically increase student loan payments, inundating young adults with debt. Student loan payment would more than triple for many borrowers.
Trump also plans to stage the largest deportation operation in American history. He would deport 15 to 20 million undocumented workers. This would require a huge mobilization of the army and numerous internment camps.
The deportation of 15 to 20 million workers would cause inflation and devastate key parts of the economy. The construction, hospitality and agriculture industries would face huge and insoluble labor shortages.
The Heritage Foundation supports raising the age of eligibility for Social Security benefits to the age of 70. This venerable retirement security program would be privatized and turned over to Wall Street. Millions of American would be required to work longer for lower pay.
Medicare would be privatized under this plan. All senior citizens would be required to go through Medicare Advantage for their health insurance. This scheme is administered by private health insurance companies and they make money by denying care.
Pre-existing condition protections in the Affordable Care Act would be eliminated. This is a long time Republican goal. The 2017 Trump Care bill gutted these protections. It was so bad that House Republicans voted to exempt themselves from Trump Care.
The Trump plan also appears to oppose same-sex marriage and gay couples adopting children by seeking to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
A Trump Administration would ban the mailing of abortion pills under the once dormant Comstock Act of 1873. Project 2025 calls for the enforcement of criminal laws for mailing abortion pills: “[e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.”
The Trump platform would have the FDA rescind its approval of “chemical abortion drugs” such as mifepristone.
This is chilling. There would be extensive government tracking of every instance of “spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion”
Trump would pack the federal courts with more MAGA judge like Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito and Aileen Cannon.
The Republicans are already promising to deal harshly with their opponents if they win the election. RNC co-Chair Lara Trump said if “Donald Trump retakes the White House, the gloves are off, there are no holds barred here. It’ll be scorched earth.”
Trump’s potential Attorney General pick Mike Davis says their Project 2025 agenda will impose “consequences” for Americans who don’t support Trump.
The Heritage Foundation and its president, Kevin Roberts, are threatening violence if Americans don’t comply with their un-American agenda. Roberts calls Project 2025 an ongoing second American revolution and that it will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
News reports of Trump’s Project 2025 are beginning to be mentioned by the usually Trump friendly and timid “liberal” mainstream media. Trump and his henchmen understand that this agenda is deeply unpopular and they will do everything they can to run away from it. Trump even falsely claimed that he had never heard of Project 2025.
What Donald Trump doesn’t want you to know is that he gave the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation in 2022 where he said the work the foundation did (Project 2025) would be crucial to his policy goals.
“And Heritage does such an incredible job at that. This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming, that’s coming,” Trump declared.
Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official and the director of Project 2025, said last year that his group has a “great” relationship with Donald Trump, and “Trump’s very bought in with this.” Dans, who now is a senior executive of Project 2025, says that the group plans on coordinating with Trump once he establishes a transition team.
Project 2025 is a plan that has been set for the next Trump administration by people who worked for Trump at the highest levels. Six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on this playbook for a second Trump term.
Olivia Troye, a former White House adviser to Mike Pence who participated in policy discussions during Trump’s disastrous presidency, said Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 was driven by a recognition that its extreme policy ideas could hurt his election campaign.
“This is preposterous if you look at the collaborators and the authors of this plan,” when asked whether Trump’s denial was credible. “A lot of these people…served in Trump’s cabinet during his administration. There are people that I worked with. I sat in those policy meetings with them.”
Of the 38 people involved in the writing and editing of Project 2025, 31 of them were nominated to positions in Trump’s administration or transition team — meaning 81% of the document’s creators held formal roles in Trump’s presidency.
CNN found almost 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering virtually every aspect of his time in politics and as president — from low level staffers to the highest levels of his government.
Trump’s campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt was featured in one of Project 2025’s videos. A key Trump ally, Russ Vought, who contributed to Project 2025 and is drafting this final pillar, is also on the Republican National Committee’s platform writing committee.
The project’s website bills it as a “governing agenda” that would “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”
Trump’s finger prints are all over this radical agenda. We can’t let him run away from it.
“Project 2025 is a political gift from the heavens,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “Donald Trump’s political strength is that he is a Rorschach test to a lot of voters, and the Heritage Foundation did [Democrats] the favor of filling in the details of his agenda in incredibly vivid and clarifying terms.”
There are so many reasons why the stakes couldn’t be any higher in 2024. Trump is making it clear that he is not running for president — he is running for dictator. Trump has promised to prosecute anybody who opposes him and to deploy the military to arrest people who protest against him. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Like many aspiring dictators, Trump makes no secret of his authoritarian agenda.
“Staying home in the 2024 presidential election, casting a protest vote for a fringe candidate or voting for Trump all amount to the same thing: a willingness to consign American democracy to the dustbin of history and turn over the presidency to a profoundly unfit, dangerous character. Voters who chose one of these options cannot complain if a Trump second term systematically shreds their cherished values and dismantles constitutional government.” Jennifer Rubin.
If Trump wins, it’s all over for freedom. You may not be happy with a choice between Biden and Trump. However, if Trump wins, you will never get a choice of any kind in future elections.
It’s America or convicted felon Trump in 2024. Choose wisely.