Project 2025: A Coup by Another Name

By DON ROLLINS

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration. This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project …” -= From the Project 2025 website

As with many an empire, this nation has a long — at points blood stained — history of aiding and abetting self-serving foreign coups. Often couched in neo-manifest destiny language, whole governments have been toppled, installed or legitimized in the service of the slippery term “America’s national interests”.

But the Euro-invasion against indigenous peoples and Civil War notwithstanding, America has thus far been spared the worst of the violent rebellions it has fomented abroad. Case in point the Jan. 6th criminal assault on the capitol building threatened, but did not prevent a free transfer of power.

Crucial as that moment has proven to be for the republic, extremists post-Jan. 6th have only metastasized, not retreated, organized not fragmented. Indeed not since the Wall Street putsch of 1933 has the nation been confronted with such politically brazen, organizationally focused, financially flush efforts to eviscerate federalism.

At the center of all this hard-right activity is the generically titled but fully lethal Project 2025 - ultraconservatives’ yes-this-could-really-happen wet dream for a post-Biden, Trump 2.0 federal government. Brought forth last month mostly under the auspices of the definitive hard-right think tank, the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s stated “Four Pillars” read like a how-to for a bloodless but precision domestic coup:

1. Policy Agenda: Gut, close or populate with Republicans all first-tier departments, agencies, offices and positions (based on the most recent “Mandate for Leadership”, a recurring conservative recipe on how to accomplish all this);

2. Personnel Database: Recruit conservatives “from all walks of life” that will permeate the federal government and implement the Mandate;

3. Training: Create a “talent pool” of conservative heavy hitters that will equip incoming employees with everything they need to achieve the Mandate’s ends;

4. 180-Day Playbook: Create and adhere to a list of objectives that can be measured and accomplished in this time window to “… bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies”.

Capturing the project’s breadth in words is a challenge, but as Associated Press Washington correspondent Lisa Mascaro described it, Project 2025 is nothing short of a government-in-waiting — a faux populist megaphone message for “... recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to [Trump’s] own.”

Were such insanity to become reality the impact on the nation and world would be devastating, chaotic and a clear signal that the US is as self-obsessed as advertised. Add to the list of consequences the tens of thousands of workers either let go or demoted to menial work despite their proven competence. And imagine for a moment a government made in the image of the majority Republican party: White, straight, anti-abortion, pro-assault weapons, for book-banning and against antipoverty poverty measures.

It’s chilling what Trumpism has done to the nation, world and planet. Now it appears some of his ideological if not personal devotees are willing to bookend his living legacy with not one, but two coups.

Don Rollins is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2023

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