Editorial: Project 2025 offers a chilling preview of Trump's autocratic plans for a second term

While Donald Trump did lasting damage during his first term in office, the method to his madness was often scattershot. But a more devious and systemic plan awaits if Trump wins a second term.

It’s all spelled out in Project 2025, a detailed blueprint to strip away freedoms and turn the federal government into a Christian nationalist autocracy. If Trump wins, the 920-page proposal will be used to guide the new administration by taking direct aim at civil liberties, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the separation of church and state.

The plan starts by replacing many of the more than two million federal career civil service employees with Trump loyalists. Think climate change deniers running the Environmental Protection Agency, oil lobbyists controlling the U.S. Department of the Interior, and anti-vaccine proponents in charge of the Food and Drug Administration.

Project 2025 proposes closing entire agencies and remaking the rules to fit far-right views and fringe conspiracies. Under the plan, the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice would act “as a team.” Trump would have total control over federal investigations, eliminating the department’s independence and clearing the way for him to go after perceived enemies and protect loyal friends.

Trump has threatened to imprison President Joe Biden and others if he is reelected. Project 2025 even provides an example of how Trump could carry out this campaign. It calls for prosecuting Pennsylvania’s top election official for her role in overseeing the 2020 election that Trump continues to falsely claim was stolen.

Despite lacking any evidence of wrongdoing, the plan states that former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” by the Justice Department for her guidance on provisional ballots during the 2020 election.

Project 2025 would dismantle other federal agencies that protect citizens, including the FBI, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It also calls for closing the U.S. Departments of Education and Commerce.

However, the plan is not about reducing the size of government bureaucracy or making it more efficient. In fact, there is a reference to the need for a “vast expansion” of political appointees to replace the career civil servants and experts.

Nor is the plan designed to depoliticize the federal government. Instead, it would infuse extreme MAGA views into government policy. Here’s one example: Any research “conducted with taxpayer dollars” would be required to “serve the national interest” in line “with conservative principles.”

A portion of Project 2025 pushes an antiabortion agenda even though polls show that the majority of Americans support reproductive rights. That starts by renaming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the Department of Life.

The plan would withhold federal money from states that don’t report abortion data, including the number of abortions and when the procedure took place, and seek to ban drugs used in medication abortions.

Project 2025 would also upend fundamental freedoms by prohibiting same-sex marriage and eliminating protections for LGBTQ people. The plan even calls for outlawing pornography and jailing creators and distributors of pornographic content.

Under Project 2025, efforts to combat climate change would essentially stop. The plan calls for boosting oil, gas, and coal production while ending efforts to promote wind and solar energy. It would also do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it promotes climate change alarm awareness, which Trump calls a hoax.

The proposal would put millions of Americans at risk while increasing health-care costs and reducing help for the most vulnerable. For example, it calls for undoing policies designed to increase access to affordable housing. It would also roll back efforts to lower prescription drug costs, reduce access to Medicare, and end the popular Head Start program that provides social and educational services for children under 5.

Other dubious provisions include privatizing the National Weather Service, the main agency that warns the public about hurricanes and other dangerous storms.

The plan backs Trump’s reckless war on immigration. It calls for rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants — a complex proposal that would be enormously expensive, take years to implement, and hurt the economy.

Overall, Project 2025 would upend the rule of law, destabilize democracy, exacerbate climate change, increase poverty, undermine national security, jeopardize healthcare, hurt farmers, increase inequality, weaken education, and benefit the very rich.

The plan is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, the influential think tank that morphed from Ronald Reagan’s conservatism to an extreme MAGA agenda.

After the public became aware of the extreme proposals, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

But, as is often the case, he was less than truthful.

More than 30 former Trump administration officials helped draft Project 2025, which was released last year. In 2022, Trump gave a keynote address at the Heritage Foundation where he praised the organization and said it would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

Trump flew to the event on a private jet with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by Roberts, who has called for a second American Revolution that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Project 2025 is bigger than Trump. He is just a vessel for the far-right to do away with checks and balances within the government to impose their extreme views on the country. Trump is callous enough to carry out the effort.

Under Project 2025, if Trump wins, everyone else loses.

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