The True Significance of Project 2025

Here's how to understand what Trump will and won't be able to accomplish.

Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, in the place he hopes to return to. (Official White House photo by Tia Dufour)

If I had told you in, say, 2012, that four years hence, Donald Trump — reality show buffoon, real estate sleazeball, serial con artist, notorious bigot and sexual predator — would become president of the United States, you might have imagined the results would be utterly apocalyptic. Yet while Trump himself turned out to be an even more corrupt and morally repellent human being than most of us understood, we managed to avoid a complete and irreparable breakdown of civilized society. Though he did terrible things, there were many days on which his most shocking impulses were thwarted and his intentions came to nought. 

To Trump and his hangers-on, that was the whole problem, one they mean to solve with extreme prejudice. Project 2025 is their plan to do so, and it’s finally breaking into popular consciousness (thanks in no small part to Taraji P. Henson). The animating idea is that with sufficient planning and the right personnel, a second Trump administration can more smoothly and efficiently translate Trump’s personal vision and the agenda of the larger right-wing movement into action and lasting change, turning America into an authoritarian paradise at last. 

But which of Trump’s monstrous goals will actually come to pass? The best way to predict is to ask this question: What are the impediments Trump would face?

Sometimes, the impediment is just his own limited attention span. He’s essentially a toddler, impulsive yet easily distracted. On most policy questions, Trump doesn’t care enough to follow through; for instance, he liked the idea of repealing Obamacare and passing an infrastructure bill, but since they required work on his part, he couldn’t bother. He could walk into the Oval Office one day and say, “You know what I don’t like? Peas. I want to end all subsidies for pea farmers,” to which his aides would say “Excellent idea sir, now have you seen what Mika said about you on ‘Morning Joe’ today?” Within half a second, he’d forget about the pea thing. 

Public opinion can be another impediment — but not always. He shies away from any cuts to Social Security or Medicare not because he’s committed to caring for America’s seniors but because he realizes how politically toxic the party’s past zeal to attack those programs is, and only the real ideological hard core of the GOP wants to take on that fight anyway. The tax cut he signed in 2017 was incredibly unpopular, but it was his party’s highest legislative priority, so he couldn’t really stand in the way. 

This push and pull between the party and Trump’s penchant for shying away from political danger is playing out now on abortion: They want to push toward a national ban, while he’s worried about the political consequences and is trying to soften the party’s rhetoric (though the new platform does not soften the commitment to outlawing abortion; in fact, it enshrines the “personhood” of zygotes, meaning all abortions for any reason would be considered murder and outlawed). But those conflicts are the exceptions.

Much more often, what we’ll see is that Trump and the party have a shared agenda, or they have an agenda he doesn’t particularly care about but is happy to see enacted. Sometimes the law might impede them, but those instances will be rare; the Supreme Court’s majority has made clear that their willingness to bend the law to ensure that conservative policy objectives come to fruition is almost without limit.

What really stands in Trump’s way

Which brings us to the biggest impediment Trump faced in the past: people. More specifically, people within the government who refused to go along with something he wanted, or slow-walked it so it would just never happen. Sometimes these were nonpartisan government employees, but often they were Trump’s own appointees, people who at critical moments decided either that what Trump was asking of them was illegal, or that it violated whatever remaining shred of conscience they possessed. 

A brief story from the days after Trump lost the 2020 election will illustrate. Amidst his frantic efforts to reverse the outcome and remain in office and gripped by insane conspiracy theories, Trump attempted to convince the Justice Department’s leadership to pressure states to reverse their results and beg the Supreme Court to do the same. Even William Barr, whom he installed as attorney general because of Barr’s enthusiasm for defending him personally, resigned in disgust. Trump then wanted to replace the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen — a Republican appointed by Trump who had served in the George W. Bush administration — with Jeffrey Clark, a figure of near-universal contempt within the department who has since been indicted in Georgia and recommended for disbarment by a disciplinary committee of the D.C. Bar.

That led to a dramatic Oval Office meeting in which Trump was told by multiple high-ranking DoJ figures that if he fired Rosen and made Clark AG, the result would be mass resignations across the department. His White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, told him it would be a “murder-suicide pact.” Trump backed off. 

That incident is just the kind of thing the Trump loyalists behind Project 2025 are determined to prevent. The project is driven by the conviction that the kind of people who would in a moment of crisis stand up for the law or the Constitution or simple morality must never be allowed to serve in a second Trump administration. If they are already in the civil service, they must be identified, fired, and replaced with Trump loyalists. If they are among the population of Republican professionals who move in and out of government with the change of administrations, they must be tested for their commitment to both Trump himself and the authoritarian project, and if they are found wanting, filtered out. 

Ignore Trump’s denials

With a sudden wave of attention on Project 2025, Trump himself and even many Republicans are insisting that it doesn’t really matter; it’s not really his plan, and he’ll do what he wants, not what others want. “Think tanks do think tank stuff. They come up with ideas, they say things,” said Marco Rubio dismissively. “I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump lied on Truth Social (in fact, it’s being spearheaded by many of his most loyal and high-ranking former aides, who are certain to staff his next administration). He claimed both to know “nothing about it” and to disagree with much of it, oblivious to the contradiction. 

The implication is that you needn’t worry about whatever you find radical or terrifying about the Project 2025 blueprint; nothing crazy will happen if he is elected again. And there are certainly deep-in-the-weeds policy goals that might or might not come to pass. The plan includes both broad objectives (shut down the Department of Education, gut all efforts to address climate change) and highly specific ones (eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, make Medicare Advantage the default enrollment option in Medicare). All the policy priorities are important to understand, but the true significance of the plan is the way it greases the skids for both the far right’s agenda and Trump’s ability to carry out whatever his heart desires without constraint. 

As the possibility of a second Trump term grows nearer, the true fascists within the party are positively vibrating with anticipation, looking forward to seizing control of the government, removing every practical and legal impediment to their wildest fantasies, and crushing their enemies in a glorious berserker rampage. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, said gleefully on a right-wing TV channel that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Rolling Stone reports that those close to Trump “universally stress that the former (and perhaps future) U.S. president and top allies are serious about following through on his extreme campaign pledges. These promises run the gamut from siccing active duty military units on not just American cities but also Mexican territory, all the way to prosecuting and potentially imprisoning Trump foes.”

Their dreams are almost limitless, and yes, they will not all come to pass. But any time you hear about a radical policy change Trump’s acolytes are proposing or an authoritarian idea he could carry out, ask this question: What stands in the way? Is it the courts, or the law, or Congress, or bureaucratic inertia, or the practical difficulty of the task, or the willingness of people in the government to violate ethical norms? And do they have the willingness and tools to overcome it? 

There will be times when the impediments to Trump and his band of authoritarians getting what they want will be significant enough to stymie them. But they are determined to make those occasions as rare as possible. That’s what Project 2025 is really about.