Photo: J. Scott Applewhite Associated Press Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer speaks at a news conference on Project 2025 on September 12 in Washington
Fabien Deglise
Published at 7:46 a.m. Updated at 12:15 p.m. Analysis
- United States
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Last August, from Arizona where he was passing through, Donald Trump was once again categorical: “We have told them, officially, legally and in every way possible that we have nothing to do with the Project 2025, he dropped in response to recurring attacks from the Democratic camp seeking to associate the Republican candidate with this ultraconservative manual “for a presidential transition.”
The 900-page document, called Project 2025, promoted by the Heritage Foundation and several former members of the first Trump administration, details reforms to the government apparatus, the legislative and judicial branches as well as the American electoral framework that could threaten the foundations of American democracy. Preparing the return of the right to Washington, it also sets out the strengthening of conservative policies that risk further harming the environment and women's rights and marginalizing diversity and minorities, according to its detractors.
A fear campaign, Donald Trump said at the time. “They [the Democrats] talk about everything they can talk about. But every single one of their statements is false.”
People directly linked to Project 2025
Barely two months before the populist returns to the White House, the distance he sought to take during his election campaign from the Project 2025 is nevertheless becoming increasingly dubious. And one only has to look at several of the appointments made to his next cabinet and his next government to be convinced of this.
To date, in fact, four members chosen by Donald Trump to be part of his new team are directly linked to the production and promotion of this document summarizing “the conservative promise” of a “clear mandate for the presidency.”
The name of Tom Homan, the next “border czar” charged with carrying out the Republican’s promise to carry out a mass expulsion of illegal immigrants, is among the many “contributors” to this vast conservative road map.
So is John Ratcliffe, the next president’s candidate for CIA director, and even Pete Hoekstra, who is preparing to become the next U.S. ambassador to Ottawa. Both participated in writing the document.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000Last Sunday, Donald Trump named Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a job that could become crucial to helping the next president deliver on his promises of retaliation against journalists and media outlets that continue to pit fact-checking against the Republican’s alternative realities. Mr. Carr, a Republican regulator who already sits on the commission, is signing an entire chapter of the 2025 Project government agency he is about to take control of. In it, he proposes a “comprehensive and serious overhaul of regulations.”
Within hours of his nomination, Carr announced his intention to “dismantle the censorship cartel,” a reference to the web giants, and to “restore free speech to ordinary Americans,” he wrote on the X network. The theme is dear to the right, which, despite the many communication tools at its disposal, likes to pose as the victim of censorship that the left would impose on it.
This week, the president-elect also toyed with the idea of appointing Russ Vought to head the White House budget office. Vought wrote a full chapter in the 900-page document on reforms to be undertaken within the American executive branch. In it, he wrote, among other things, that “the great challenge facing a conservative president is the existential necessity of aggressively using the vast powers of the executive branch to return power to the American people. To succeed in this challenge will require a rare combination of audacity and self-denial: the audacity to bend or break the bureaucracy to the will of the president and the self-denial to use the bureaucratic machinery to transfer power from Washington to American families, faith communities, local governments and states.”
Donald Trump will also bring back to the White House Stephen Miller, as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser. He runs the America First Legal Foundation, which sits on the advisory board of Project 2025.
And meanwhile, the director of the Heritage Foundation, which is behind this road map, published an essay last week that probably sums up the coming years of Trumpism. Its title ? Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America The preface is signed by… J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate and future Vice President of the United States.
“Dangerous and extreme”
“Donald Trump spent months on the campaign trail lying to voters about the clear links between his campaign and the wildly unpopular Project 2025 agenda,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Alex Floyd was quoted as saying by the Washington Post this week. “Now he’s finally showing his hand and picking a cabinet full of Project 2025 stooges to help him implement his dangerous and extreme agenda.”
In the final months of the campaign, Democrats have sought to focus voters’ attention on this playbook for radicalizing power and how this game plan for an ultraconservative regime might fit into another Trump administration.
Every day, during their national convention in Chicago last August, a chapter was detailed on stage to show its impact on democracy, on individual freedoms or on the rights of several groups in society. In the last week of their campaign, Kamala Harris ads aired in North Carolina and Georgia reminded us of the danger of implementing this plan. In vain.
On November 5, the ballot boxes returned the keys to the White House to Donald Trump and thus opened the doors of Washington to this vast conservative project.
On CNN on Tuesday, veteran political journalist Bob Woodward warned Americans about the current nominations in the run-up to a second version of Donald Trump’s presidency. “The problem is that we’re looking at this as if it were a zoo and we’re on the outside. But we have to realize that we’re in the zoo,” he said. “[Donald Trump] is going to be president for the next four years. Presidents have exceptional powers and Trump is going to use them. That’s what he did in his first term, probably not enough for his liking, and we’d better be afraid of that,” concluded the man who has covered American presidencies since Richard Nixon.