America Broke Something When It Gave Trump a Second Chance
The Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — popularly known as Project 2025 — was much more than a wish list of conservative policy preferences. It was much more, even, than a blueprint for a second Trump administration.
Project 2025 was, above all, a statement of values and a theory of governance. Its authors did not simply want to move national policymaking to the right. They wanted to use the authority of the executive branch to impose a new regime on the United States.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” declared Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the summer before the 2024 election. This revolution, he added, “will remain bloodless if the left allows it.” Russell Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget and was, like Roberts, a key architect of Project 2025, also spoke publicly about the need for a “radical constitutionalism” and a tribune-like president who would dismantle the New Deal state, sell the scrap and return the nation to the status quo ante of the 19th century.
Much of the disruption and destruction of the past year and change is downstream of the revolutionary orientation of Roberts, Vought and the other alumni of Project 2025 who have taken up places in and around the Trump administration. To observe the aggrandizement of power in the executive, the decimation of the federal bureaucracy, the destruction of much of the nation’s medical, scientific and public health infrastructure and the broad attack on racial and gender equality is to see the many faces of a furious effort to restructure the existing nation to match the one envisioned by these far-right ideologues.
Lincoln would know how to deal with these Republicans.
www.nytimes.com
To the extent polls can be believed, the agenda trump has forced on America, despite claiming he knew nothing of it (and hiring one of its main architects).............
'I have nothing to do with Project 2025,' Trump says
Former President Donald Trump denied any connection to Project 2025, the handbook for a new conservative government written by the Heritage Foundation and several right-wing think tanks, in his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
www.pbs.org
..........is wildly unpopular with a majority of Americans. No matter, the regime forges ahead with a plan to turn the politics of the New Deal in to the Old Deal. Gutting environmental protections and advancements in minority representation, restricting access to abortions, illegally blocking admission to asylum seekers, gerrymandering its way to power, illegally trying to repeal birthright citizenship, and using illegal means to deport immigrants.
The degree to which Americans push back against these immoral, unconstitutional, unwanted, and dangerous initiatives may define what kind of country we have for the next 50 years. If the pushback is not methodical, effective, and severe the US will become unrecognizable as the beacon of liberal democracy to the world it has been for 250 years.