Donald Trump claims to know nothing about Project 2025. But that appears to be one of his many, many, many lies.
In fact, “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration hadahandinProject2025,aCNNreview found” (www.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/ trump-allies-project-2025/index. html).
Authors of parts of the 900+-page playbook for a second Trump term, published by the Heritage foundation, include six of his former Cabinet secretaries, his first deputy chief of staff, and four individuals he had nominated as ambassadors, along with many other less-prominent members of his administration.
Project 2025 is a list of proposed changes advocated by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing “think tank,” to fundamentally alter this country in frightening respects.
It is, quite simply, a plan for changing this country from a democracy to a dictatorship.
Remember that Trump likes to say he’ll be a dictator “on day one”? Well, this is the blueprint to help him be one.
The plan would do away with America’s system of checks and balances, consolidating power in the executive branch, of which Trump would be the head. The Justice Dept. and agencies such as the FBI would no longer be independent from the President. Federal employees would no longer have civil-service protection but would keep their jobs only by fealty to Trump.
Far-right policy proposals, such as a total ban on abortion, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, the end of Head Start early education programs, cutting American Rescue Plan programs that have created or saved 220,000 jobs, and rolling back civil-rights protections on many fronts are parts of Project 2025’s plan (www. vanityfair.com/news/ story/how-donald-trumpwill- mold-america-in-theimage- of-a-dictatorship).
Many of the plan’s proposals “would eliminate fundamental personal freedoms while cutting the take-home pay of millions of Americans” (www. americanprogress.org/ article/project-2025-theplan- to-seize-power-bygutting- americas-systemof- checks-and-balances). A specific way that workers’ take-home-pay would be cut is by doing away with the requirement that employers pay overtime pay when employees work long hours. One goal that should scare older Americans, and those approaching retirement age, is Project 2025’s plan to raise the retirement age for Social Security.
(Although no one can deny that changes need to be made to Social Security, in order to keep it solvent for many more years, President Biden has proposed that the way to do so is by making wealthy individuals “pay their fair share” into the program, which they don’t do now, surely a more equitable plan than raising retirement age.)
Heritage Foundation’s President Kevin Roberts states that the Project 2025 plan, when implemented, will constitute a “second American Revolution,” which will be “bloodless if the left allows.”
In other words, if we all just knuckle under to whatever far-right extremists plan for this country, we can avoid being beaten up or killed by Trump’s more violent followers.
Nice try, Kevin. That’s not what Americans do. We don’t appreciate people threatening our way of life. We don’t want to live in a dictatorship.
And we don’t appreciate former President Trump’s lies about whether he knows about Project 2025. His fingerprints are all over it.