Trump hoodwinked voters about his worst policy commitments
They signed up for Project 2025 whether they knew it or not.
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As soon as Trump won the election, Republicans immediately declared he had a mandate to do whatever he wanted. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, for example, said Trump’s win showed that “it is the Trump agenda that the American people overwhelmingly wants.”
But what, exactly, did the American people signal they wanted? With lots of help from the media, Trump spent the campaign pretending that the hyper-conservative and deeply unpopular Project 2025 agenda was not the blueprint for his second term. So it’s pretty rich now for Republicans to claim that a vote for Trump is a vote for whatever he decides he wants to do. And make no mistake — what Trump wants to do is Project 2025.
Before digging into the steps Trump is taking to force the worst of Project 2025’s personnel and policies on the country, let’s tackle that whole mandate question first.
Besides the fact that the Trump campaign deliberately obscured some of its most consequential policy goals to win votes, there’s the fact that his victory is proving far less decisive than it initially appeared. As votes have continued to be counted, Trump’s popular vote margin is going to be less than two percent, smaller than Hillary Clinton’s popular vote win in 2016 and in fact the smallest popular vote margin since 2000. Declaring you have a mandate doesn’t make it so, but it is The Republican Way going back to George W. Bush.
Back to Project 2025. Despite lying about it throughout the campaign, Trump wasted no time appointing several of the project’s authors to key positions in his new administration. Because they’ve been steeped in hypocrisy for so long, Republicans see nothing odd about Trump embracing Project 2025 after feigning a complete lack of familiarity and having called it “ridiculous and abysmal.”
Project 2025 co-author Russ Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump’s first term, got caught on tape saying the quiet part out loud during the campaign when he told undercover reporters to trust that Trump would implement a national abortion ban if he returned to power, despite his public statements to the contrary. But far from being rapped on the knuckles for linking Trump to a stance he ostensibly opposed, Vought has been rewarded by getting his old OMB job back.
Besides being one of Trump’s abortion-whisperers, Vought is going to be instrumental in executing Trump’s plan to strip federal workers of job protections and replace them with hard-right partisans who see their only job as executing Trump’s wishes. Vought won’t stop there, though. He’s said we’re living in a “post-constitutional” time, which for Vought apparently means that Trump gets to turn the military on protestors and to cut spending whether Congress agrees or not.
If this sounds to you a lot like an imperial presidency, of deforming the whole of the federal government to make it solely a weapon to implement Trump’s desires, you’re not wrong. And Vought is by no means alone in being one of the Project 2025 denizens who Trump is ushering into high-level government positions.
Trump’s pick for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. In it, Carr proposes that the FCC regulate big technology companies like Apple, Meta, and Google so that what Carr called the “censorship cartel” can be dismantled. Carr also backs Trump’s plan to penalize broadcast networks for “bias,” having already raised the specter of killing a Paramount-Skydance merger over Trump’s nonsense conspiracy theory about 60 Minutes deceptively editing an interview with Kamala Harris.
You can expect Carr’s vision of free speech to look a lot like what X/Twitter looks like under Trump pal Elon Musk: protection of hate speech and suppression of viewpoints critical of Trump.
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For as unhappy as Carr is with most big tech companies, he’s wildly enthusiastic about Musk’s broadband company, Starlink. Carr’s ascension, besides showing that Trump’s opposition to Project 2025 was always a farce, also shows conservatives dispensing with any pretense that they are the party of small government. This is a vision of far more regulation instead of less and of an agency that actively puts its hand on the scale for viewpoints favoring Trump.
One of the bleakest picks from the Project 2025 barrel has got to be Tom Homan, who Trump has tapped to be his “border czar.”
Homan, a Project 2025 contributor and author, was the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. He’s one of the people most responsible for Trump’s family separation policy, where minor children were forcibly separated from their parents at the border. In case you were wondering if Homan feels any regret for that brutal policy, he showed up at last year’s Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) to complain that he was “sick and tired” of hearing about family separation and that “I’m still being sued over that, so come get me. I don’t give a shit.” (Watch below.)
Homan has also tipped his hand that he’s on board with deporting children who are actually already citizens, saying recently that “families can be deported together” when parents are undocumented.
Dismantling the administrative state
Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 isn’t limited to ensuring its authors have a place in his administration. He’s also actively adopting some of its worst policies.
Despite the fact that public schools are chronically underfunded, Project 2025 calls for closing the Department of Education. (Trump also regularly called for this on the campaign trail.) This would be especially bad news for special needs students. Nonetheless, Sen. Mike Rounds is already touting legislation he plans to introduce shortly after Republicans take control of Congress to end the department and let the states fend for themselves. (Watch Rounds offer empty reassurances to parents of special needs students during a CNBC interview last Friday.)
Trump is similarly all in on Project 2025’s vision of essentially gutting the accreditation of colleges and universities. Rather than strengthening higher education, Trump’s plan is to create something called “American Academy,” an online school that will be funded by the administration’s taxation of and litigation against existing colleges and universities. He’s then vowed to force the federal government and contractors to recognize these made-up degrees.
You can also expect the Trump administration to gut Medicaid in exactly the fashion that Project 2025 outlines. Republicans in Congress are fully on board with shifting Medicaid funding to block grants (this is their model for education funding too). Treating this as a mere change in funding disguises how bad it is, though. Block grants are deliberately fashioned not to keep pace with actual costs. Right now, federal Medicaid funding is percentage-based, so states have a fixed amount of their costs covered no matter how much they spend. But once the block grant money is gone, there’s no more money. You can also expect work requirements for people on Medicaid, which Project 2025 pushes for.
Except for the family separation policy, which is easily understood as a brutal mechanism to tear children away from their parents, the remainder of the Project 2025 policies Trump and the Republican Party back will be easier to legislatively enact because they deal with things that are arcane and sometimes difficult to understand. Civil service protections, block grants, and broadband regulations are not the stuff of riveting stump speeches. Combine that with the media's willingness to paper over much of what Trump and Vance said on the campaign trail, and it’s easy to see why voters may not have a clear picture of Trump’s policy priorities. But these changes will be vast and dramatically alter the country for the worse.
If nothing but these few Project 2025 goals were achieved, we’d have a radically partisan and unstable federal workforce, media regulation driven by which companies show the most allegiance to Trump, public schools that are more starved of funding than ever, decreased oversight of colleges and universities, and Medicaid that would be harder to obtain and keep. Trump has no mandate for these things because he not only didn’t campaign on them but he denied any link with Project 2025 at all. But because of the trifecta voters gave Republicans, they are likely to happen nonetheless.
Democrats spent months trying to highlight the links between Project 2025 and Trump, only to have both sides of that equation and some mainstream media outlets insist it was fearmongering to make those connections. It wasn’t, and it isn’t. Project 2025 was always the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and these appointments are just the beginning.
That’s it for today
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Exceptional article. Thanks for showing folks how Project 2025 will affect them in straightforward terms.
I keep seeing articles about choosing people that are loyal to trump. I thought we're supposed to be loyal to the Constitution. But I guess in Vought's "post-constitutional" America , we're back to a trumpian monarchy. I'd like to remind everyone that in 2026, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Maybe we'll need to write a new declaration and separate from a king again.