What is Project 2025?

Photo: Charlie Neibergall Associated Press The 2025 Project was released in 2023, before Donald Trump was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate.

Benoit Valois-Nadeau

Posted at 4:51 p.m.

• United States

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Why are Democrats so tight-lipped about the “Project 2025” document, Trump’s roadmap that heralds the swan song of democracy made in the USA ?

— Louis Jolicoeur, reader of the Courrier des élections américaine

A vast project of ultraconservative reform of the state apparatus, Project 2025 has been widely discussed in the media and in American public opinion. The Democratic camp is trying to associate Donald Trump’s candidacy with it, while the latter wants to dissociate himself from it. But what is Project 2025 really about? ?

Originally titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 is a 922-page tome published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, an influential think tank that promotes conservative ideas in Washington. It aims to provide the next Republican president of the United States with a road map “from day one of his inauguration,” which would be as early as January 20, 2025, if Mr. Trump is re-elected.

Based on the premise that “the moral foundations” of American society are in peril, the document, with its nationalist and Christian overtones offers a specific, multi-point program for the movement to “take the reins of government” and save the United States from “disaster.”

The document’s thirty-some chapters read like a veritable radical right-wing campaign platform. It contains proposals to dismantle the Department of Education, deploy the military to the Mexican border to help combat irregular immigration, radically reduce environmental regulations, and criminalize pornography.

Project 2025 also contains numerous outright attacks on the rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community (and trans people in particular), on abortion rights, and on migrants.

Equally disturbing is the proposal to give the president-elect the ability to fire thousands of government employees deemed disloyal and replace them with supporters deemed more reliable. This politicization of the civil service would involve the reinstatement of Annex F, a decree by Donald Trump since invalidated, which allowed the president to dismiss federal employees deemed “corrupt, incompetent or useless.”

The Heritage Foundation has been producing this type of action plan for every presidential election since 1980. Its first edition was largely co-opted by the government of Ronald Reagan, who led the United States from 1981 to 1989.

Project 2025 is the ninth exercise of its kind. But it attracts more attention because of its uninhibited nature, explains Victor Bardou-Bourgeois, researcher in residence at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair and specialist in the American right.

“What has raised a lot of eyebrows is that the document clearly says that it is not enough to have a conservative agenda, but that you have to have the right people in Washington to implement it. On the side of the large conservative family, it is more assumed that the right conditions must be created so that its political program can be deployed. »

Project 2025 also relies on a strengthening of the powers of the president and a reduction in the independence of federal agencies such as the FBI, the Department of Justice or even the Environmental Protection Agency, prompting its critics to call it a threat to American democracy.

“In the United States, the executive branch is divided in two: the president and government agencies. Project 2025 essentially wants to eliminate agencies from the equation and return control of the executive branch to the president and the White House,” summarizes Mr. Bardou-Bourgeois.

A program for Donald Trump ?

Project 2025 was published in 2023, before Donald Trump was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate. However, several of its proposals resemble those advocated by Mr. Trump during his campaign, particularly those on immigration.

This is not surprising, since many members of the first Trump administration were part of the group of writers.

According to a count carried out by Le Devoir, out of a total of 34 authors identified, around fifteen of Donald Trump's collaborators participated in drafting the document. Among them are big names like Chris Miller, who briefly served as Secretary of Defense; Ben Carson, former Secretary of Housing; and Russell Vought, one of the people responsible for the current Republican Party platform.

Donald Trump, however, is trying to distance himself as much as possible from Project 2025, which is very unpopular with several segments of the electorate. He has repeatedly stated that he has no connection with its authors and does not know their ins and outs. “These are extreme proposals, seriously extreme,” he recently declared at a campaign rally. “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

“One of Donald Trump’s strengths is that he is able to read the mood well,” explains Victor Bardou-Bourgeois. “He understands that the policies proposed [by Project 2025] are extremely unpopular with large segments of the American electorate, particularly concerning abortion, justice or immigration. The Republican candidate is aware that it should not be mentioned too much, because it is not very winnerfrom an electoral perspective.”

The Heritage Foundation also distanced itself from the Republican candidate, saying it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.” Paul Dans, who led the writing of the document, recently left his position at the think tank.

That doesn't stop Democrats from using Project 2025 as an argument to undermine the Republican candidacy. Kamala Harris' campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez recently called the document “a political platform written by [Donald Trump's] allies that [Donald Trump] intends to impose on our country.”

A real threat to democracy ?

In the United States, the concentration of powers in the hands of the executive branch has been a phenomenon that has been underway since the Civil War of 1861-1865, argues Victor Bardou-Bourgeois. “Each decade brings new powers into the hands of the executive, for better or for worse. […] It is dangerous, yes, but it is not the final nail in the coffin of American democracy.”

What is more worrying, according to the researcher, is that this concentration could occur at a time when the traditional countervailing powers—the United States Congress and the American judicial system—are dysfunctional.

“Will Donald Trump, if elected, put an end to the American Republic ? I don't know,” says Victor Bardou-Bourgeois. “But what is certain is that if Project 2025 is implemented, power will be even more concentrated in the hands of the president. All this in a context where the judicial system is increasingly polarized and Congress is having difficulty functioning normally. What are supposed to be the checks and balances of the American executive branch are no longer working very well.”