More on what Project 2025 will destroy

I'm not about to let up on this, and you shouldn't either!

With Trump, there is always something new to distract. Like tonight.

“I am much better looking than her.” That doesn’t even work in a high school election. Trump, the buffoon, would almost be funny if this wasn’t so serious.

With Trump, it’s easy to let today’s bright shiny thing distract from the issues that are most important; in fact, he banks on it. So, we won’t let him distract us.

We’ll keep our attention on Project 2025. It’s so important that it’s one of the few times Trump has backed down. For a man who usually doubles down and keeps going, no matter how unpopular (family separation at the border), crazy (insisting he never had sex with Stormy Daniels), or dangerous (aligning with strongmen like Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán) his takes are, Trump’s reversal on Project 2025 is remarkable. As Americans learned more about it, the crescendo of anti-Trump sentiment over it led Trump to try to distance himself.

We’ve discussed Trump’s strong ties to the Heritage Foundation and the Project previously. A hidden camera recording made by British journalists that was released this week has one of the Project’s co-authors, Russell Vought, bragging that the group was secretly drafting “the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating ‘shadow’ agencies. He claimed that Trump has ‘blessed’ his organization and ‘he’s very supportive of what we do.’” Vought complained that the Republican Party “was too focused on ‘religious liberty’ instead of ‘Christian nation-ism.’” (Our deep dive with Christian nationalism expert Amanda Tyler is here.)

You wouldn’t expect to see people wasting money and staff time on a massive project if it’s just a fantasy, not the real thing. Not only is the Project 2025 plan, all 900+ pages of it, there for anyone to read, Vought said he was preparing for Trump’s next administration with “a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.” That sounds like they’re all in.

ProPublica, the same nonprofit journalism enterprise that uncovered Justice Thomas’ and Alito’s extracurricular activities with billionaires, reported last week that secret training videos for implementing Project 2025 have been created. They wrote that the 23 videos, containing more than 14 hours of content, were validated by a person with access to them.

Just some of the contents of the videos include:

• Coaching future Trump political appointees on avoiding compliance with Freedom of Information Act disclosure requirements to prevent the release of embarrassing details.

• Taking steps to ensure conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.”

• Downplaying the seriousness of climate change as a movement that is a ploy to “control people.” A former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Trump administration says on camera: “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

• The same former staffer calls gender fluidity “evil.”

ProPublica reported that based on their review of the videos, “29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration, or on his 2024 reelection campaign.”

JD Vance wrote the introduction to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ new book. Vance is promoting Heritage’s proposed war to protect “conservative” values. Roberts is the guy who said that the coming revolution would be "bloodless if the left allows it to be.” That’s the man the Republican nominee to be vice president of the United States wrote a foreword for.

Vance’s support guarantees continuity for the policies espoused in Project 2025 if Trump wins in November: “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

We’ve discussed some of the specifics of Project 2025 over the past months here in the newsletter, and we understand its authors are serious when they say their goal is to provide “both a governing agenda and [a process to get] the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.” That agenda is bad news for Americans who want to continue living in a democracy. The document itself is so comprehensive, so voluminous, that there is always something new hidden in its depths for us to discuss.

For instance, Project 2025 targets the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Taken straight from Project 2025 at page 664.

NOAA’s website bills it as “a science-based federal agency within the Department of Commerce with regulatory, operational, and information service responsibilities with a presence in every state and our territories.” That doesn’t sound like something that should be dismantled. But NOAA oversees the National Weather Service, so Project 2025 is on the attack against it because they claim it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and, as such, a threat to “future U.S. prosperity … It should be broken up and downsized.” Project 2025 says that each of NOAA’s functions “could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.” If you rely on NOAA for warnings about tornadoes or hurricanes this is particularly alarming. The office that tracks hurricanes is singled out as a home of “climate alarmism” on page 676.

We all rely on the science that is essential to prepare for the weather. The authors of Project 2025 are so worried about the truth behind climate change, that they’re willing to compromise our safety to deny it. In fact, they come right out and say it: appointees have to agree with the Trump administration’s aims here—denying science and climate change—if they want a job in the agency. They must be “wholly in sync” which “particular attention” paid to who gets appointed. This chapter was written by Thomas Gilman, a former Chrysler CEO. Gilman served as Trump’s chief financial officer and assistant secretary in the Commerce Department from 2019 to 2021.

It won’t be business as usual if Trump wins. The combination of devastatingly bad policy shifts and the immediate preparedness to implement them following the inauguration laid out in Project 2025 represent strong reasons to reject a new Trump presidency. Even Trump himself was smart enough to figure that out, hence his efforts to claim he knows nothing about the work being done on his behalf by his current and former associates.

So, make sure that you’re registered to vote and in active status, and help the people around you do the same; it’s a great time to start making plans to vote together and to celebrate your role in protecting democracy together. Voting should be joyous.

In July, Donald Trump told his “beautiful Christians” they wouldn’t “have to” vote anymore if he won because he will have fixed everything. If any of your friends or family are hesitant about committing to vote this fall, make sure they understand that if they don’t, if it’s up to Donald Trump, they may never have that option again.

We’re in this together,

Joyce