It Ain't Just Trump. A Ruthless, Anti-Democratic Network Has His Back
Trump's 1st-week blitz followed a script sketched out by well-organized seditious groups that have prepped for this moment for years. They're now more in control of the government than Trump himself.
It ain’t just Trump. That’s the scariest part of what’s happening now in the U.S. Donald Trump is just the face of a government takeover that’s been planned for and worked on by hard-right political extremists since the 1970s.
How was Trump — the architect of multiple bankruptcies and business failures, and often described as having the disordered mind of a child — able to do so much so effectively in so little time?
It was easy. He followed a script crafted by the Heritage Foundation and other highly organized seditious groups whose goal is nothing less than a radical reengineering of our national identity at the expense of economic fairness, our civil liberties and the democratic process.
The administration has “leaked” to the media that its goal in offering eight months of severance pay and benefits to civil servants who quit is an effort to end work-from-home practices and save the government $100 billion, but the reality is more insidious. It creates openings to install thousands of ideologically aligned loyalists into government jobs, a move the Heritage Foundation has aggressively pursued since 2014.
That’s when the foundation, annoyed by the success of the Obama Administration, began constructing a database of thousands of hard-right candidates who they felt sure — based on their questionnaires — wouldn’t hinder the actions of any Republican administration if given government jobs, no matter how illegal or inappropriate those actions may be.
U.S. presidents are responsible for appointing about 4,000 individuals to various positions within the government, with about 1,000 requiring Senate confirmation. But the process can be slow and cumbersome, with Trump’s efforts the last time he won the job particularly protracted given his lack of political experience.
The administration has said it expects 5% to 10% of the 2 million federal employees to take the buyout offer, suggesting that as many as 200,000 nonpartisan staffers will be gone. And soon, we may see Trump reinstate “executive order 13957,” a key move called for in Project 2025.
Signed by Trump in 2020 and rescinded by Joe Biden, the order sought to create new rules for hiring designed to strip about 50,000 career nonpartisan public servants of their job protections. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan expertise needed to protect the health of Americans, along with our environment, could be the baby thrown out with the bath water.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, has said in the past he plans to gut the 18,000-employee FDA, which ensures the safety of food, drugs and medical devices, and to replace hundreds of employees at the National Institutes of Health, stripping away years of scientific and medical expertise in the process. After the election, Kennedy told NBC News that entire departments at the FDA “have to go.”
How dangerous does that sound to you? Kennedy wasn’t pressed to address that in his first confirmation hearing on Wednesday, likely drawing smiles from the extreme far-right ideologues in the shadows who believe his anti-vaxxer views and fascination with junk science won’t be enough to keep him from being approved by the MAGA Republicans now in control of the Senate..
Ironically, Trump’s disordered political philosophies caused the Heritage Foundation to initially oppose his candidacy. But his lack of a moral or ethical compass, lust for personal validation and ability to weaponize racism, gender anxiety and parental fears about sex, with a dash of reckless libertarian economics sprinkled in, eventually made him their ideal frontman, their ideal shill really, to help these anti-democratic groups maneuver their way into power.
The Heritage Foundation, the publisher of Project 2025, cloaks itself in think-tank respectability. But in fact, it’s a powerful political force that pushes a radical, anti-democratic agenda that prioritizes corporate interests, executive power, religious fundamentalism and extreme deregulation.
It has more more than 200,000 individual, foundation and corporate supporters, a staff of almost 200, revenues in excess of $100 million as of 2023, and a huge, multistory office complex in the nation’s capitol. And it’s supported in its effort to enshrine U.S. authoritarianism by more than 100 plugged-in conservative organizations that make up its advisory board.
Before Trump won, the Heritage Foundation was already the most broadly supported public policy research institute in the country. With Trump’s win, it is on its way to becoming the premier political force in the U.S. with no single force with similar abilities existing on the other side of our political equation.
One worrisome result of all this — though certainly not the only such consequence —will be the lack of nonpartisan lawyers who can stop illegal actions by Trump and his handlers. Instead, they will be defended, running out court challenges that could take years. The text of “Executive Order 13957” specifically included attorney supervisors who would be subject to dismissal or intimidation.
The Heritage Foundation initiated Project 2025 in 2022, after Joe Biden’s first year in office, to prepare for a potential turnaround with a conservative administration no matter who led it, by developing a comprehensive policy agenda and assembling a database of vetted personnel to implement it.
It supports weaponizing the Department of Justice for political purposes, ending the independence of independent agencies, replacing expert civil servants with political loyalists, circumventing Congress’ power to decide how to spend federal funds, weakening the independent media and news reporting, using the Insurrection Act against Americans to stifle dissent, and neutralizing the Senate’s role of confirming executive branch nominees.
And it’s the blueprint Trump is holding fast to, despite his annoyance at it becoming publicized during the campaign.
That’s a lot of dangerous stuff, right? But sadly, the dark forces that are driving the Trump administration have already taken a pretty big step in that direction, and will continue to push their extreme views forward, whether we like it or not. What do you think?
I think you’re right. Progressives need to organize in a similar fashion and come up with their own blueprint to combat the extreme ideology contained in the Project 2025 document. Who is up to the task?