Project 2025: Taking on the Constitution

Another Saturday night in America. I remember when Saturdays were our nights off. That’s not the case right now. These developments are urgent, and it’s more important than ever that we continue to pay attention. If you aren’t already a subscriber, please consider becoming one. Your paid subscriptions help me devote the time and resources necessary to write the newsletter.

ICE rounded up parents and kids, including some American citizens, and herded them, some naked and zip-tied, into the streets, around 1 a.m. in Chicago last Tuesday. Today, there is video from Portland and Colorado showing what appears to be ICE agents attacking and tear-gassing peaceful protestors. In Chicago, agents appear to attack a man who is not threatening them, leg-sweeping him to the ground, something agents are trained not to do because it has the potential to be debilitating. The violence is condoned, in fact directed, by the Department of Homeland Security, the agency ICE is a part of.

DHS’s Twitter feed is replete with posts claiming “more arrests of anarchists” despite the absence of any evidence of anarchy. Anyone who is looking is seeing American citizens protesting overreach by the government. It is love of country, not anarchy. DHS retweeted a post that said, “Federal agents aren’t tolerating rioting outside the ICE facility and are making prompt arrests of the far-left extremists who gathered outside to besiege the building.”

Apparently, having ICE on the streets isn’t enough for Trump, who is demanding that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker use the National Guard for law enforcement. If he won’t, Trump says he’ll federalize troops. Governor Pritzker tweeted, “I want to be clear: there is no need for military troops on the ground in the State of Illinois.”

Tonight, a federal judge in Oregon who was appointed by Donald Trump during his first term in office ruled he could not federalize the National Guard in that state. It’s a 14-day temporary injunction, but the Judge ruled the state of Oregon had shown it had a strong chance of success on the merits, would suffer irreparable injury in the absence of an injunction, and that the balance of equities and public interest were in its favor.

The administration argued, as it did in California when it deployed Guard troops and has elsewhere in multiple contexts that no court can “second guess” the president’s decisions. Judge Karin Immergut wrote that although the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the California National Guard case, held that a president’s decisions are entitled to “a great level of deference,” that “is not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground” before rejecting the administration’s claim that it was necessary to federalize the Oregon Guard to protect ICE facilities. This insistence on the courts’ ability to engage in judicial review of presidential decision-making is essential to preserving the balance of the Constitution created between the three branches of government.

“The President’s own statements regarding the deployment of federalized National Guardsmen further support that his determination was not ‘conceived in good faith’ or ‘in the face of the emergency and directly related to the quelling of the disorder or the prevention of its continuance,” the Judge wrote in an opinion that is very narrowly tailored to discuss the facts and the law in this case without straying from them. “Despite the ‘minimal activity’ outside the Portland ICE facility in the days preceding September 27, 2025 ... President Trump directed Secretary Hegseth ‘to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.’”

Judge Immergut concludes, with one of the most powerful judicial condemnations we’ve seen yet of the administration’s transparent excuses for sending the military against Americans, that: “this country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs. ‘That tradition has deep roots in our history and found early expression, for example, in … the constitutional provisions for civilian control of the military’ ... This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.”

But Stephen Miller still blames it all on a “growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country.” There is absolutely no evidence that movement exists.

Trump’s use of military force continues outside of the country as well. On Friday, he conducted the fourth strike on a boat in the Caribbean, claiming drug traffickers were on it. Four people on board were killed.

The government shutdown is no closer to an end. Trump is using the shutdown, which he provoked by refusing to negotiate with Democrats, to shut down entire government offices, like DOJ’s Community Relations Service, which we discussed last night, while threatening to fire government employees. If he does that, it will leave him with vacancies he can fill with loyalists.

Friday night, the largest federal employees union sued the Department of Education, accusing it of violating the First Amendment by placing partisan language into the out-of-office emails that are automatically sent from accounts of non-essential employees for as long as they are furloughed.

We studied Project 2025 together here at Civil Discourse, from the earliest moment it was made available publicly on the Heritage Foundation’s website. Much of what this administration is doing will sound familiar to those with even passing familiarity with that plan, which Trump disavowed during the campaign.

As the details of the plan came to light during the campaign and the public was repelled, Trump distanced himself from it. But we discussed why he couldn’t be believed when he said it wasn’t his plan, and of course, now, he is embracing it. All of the developments we are seeing signal that Project 2025 is in full swing.

Trump is touting the work of Russ Vought, one of the primary architects of Project 2025, while his shutdown reorganization of government is underway. Project 2025 never disappeared. Vought has been implementing it since day one of this administration. (If you’ve got time to go back and read one of our earlier posts, this is a good one.)

In addition to vowing to fire federal employees during the shutdown—expect lawsuits if this happens, as it’s strictly illegal—Vought is also behind cutting infrastructure funds for blue states including the Green New Deal. It’s partisan politics, not government, and Trump is behind it: “Republicans must use this opportunity of Democrat forced closure to clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud. Billions of Dollars can be saved. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he wrote on Truth Social.

Project 2025 was always the plan. Now they’re using the shutdown to push harder and cast blame on Democrats for anything that goes wrong. They told us they would do this before the election. This was always the 2.0 plan for America.

Friday night, Trump’s pinned tweet showed him cackling with a Trump 2028 hat prominently placed on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Believe them when they tell you who they are.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

About my book: Giving Up Is Unforgivable is a countermovement to Project 2025. It advocates for the thinking citizens’ approach to civic engagement, so we can combat the second Trump administration and restore American democracy.