Yr Wonkette’s Summer Resolution is to help Our Beloved Readers understand more about the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” a little 920-page plan for instituting rightwing policies and dismantling most checks on presidential power if Donald Trump is reelected. The document, written with input from several leftovers from Trump’s first term, is basically a far-Right wish list designed to help the Great Man start consolidating executive power, ignoring Congress, trampling any norms or rules that limit presidential power, undoing most every law and policy put into effect during the Biden administration, and enacting the craziest rightwing fever dream policies possible.
We aren’t sure whether the many authoritarian authors remembered to list The Handmaid’s Tale in their citations, but it’s clearly an inspiration. (Here’s a good overview of Project 2025 from the BBC, and a much more detailed guide to the thing from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.)
The goal of Project 2025 is to have a roadmap for remaking government in Trump’s image starting on Day One. Even rightwing loons understand that many of Trump’s more fevered wishes were prevented from coming to fruition because they were either blocked by “team normal” — appointees who still had at least some sentimental attachment to laws and norms — or by the complete incompetence of Trump and his chosen acolytes. This time around the goal is to have no adults in the room, but also to staff up key positions with evil but smart creeps who have a knack for subverting rules, like Gestapo homunculus Stephen Miller.
The Trump campaign repeatedly says that any policy or staffing ideas that don’t come from the campaign or Trump himself are mere speculation and not official Trump plans, which mostly sounds like a bid for plausible deniability. Many proposals in Project 2025 were drafted by a bunch of Trumpers and tailored to reflect the Trumpian worldview, so even if it’s unofficial, it’s already shaping second-term plans to enable Trump’s revenge fantasies. Trump doesn’t plan, but his most fervent evil minions do.
Obviously, the best way to keep Project 2025 from ever becoming reality is to reelect Joe Biden, retake the House, and hold the Senate. (And for fuckssake vote in the down-ballot races to keep your school boards and county boards of supervisors free of MAGA stench.)
But it’s also important to not be caught with one’s trousers or other garments down, so a group of Democrats in the House on Tuesday launched a new task force to prepare to fight off Project 2025, if Trump takes power again — or for that matter, to oppose Republican bills inspired by it whatever this fall’s elections may bring. The group, sensibly named “The Stop Project 2025 Task Force,” is being led by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California), to spread awareness of what Project 2025 is and why it’s all evil and stuff.
“The stakes just couldn’t be higher,” Huffman told The Associated Press.
Huffman said the Project 2025 agenda will hit “like a Blitzkrieg” and lawmakers need to be ready.
“If we’re trying to react to it and understand it in real time, it’s too late,” he said. “We need to see it coming well in advance and prepare ourselves accordingly.”
In a statement, Huffman explained the task force won’t solely be a club for worried House Democrats, but a hub for connecting
pro-democracy Members of Congress, civil society, and affected communities to coordinate on examining, highlighting, preempting, and counteracting this rightwing plot to undermine democracy.
Other initial members of the task force include California Democratic Reps. Ted Lieu, Nanette Barragá, and Judy Chu, as well as Reps. Jamie Raskin (Maryland), Pramila Jayapal (Washington), Mark Pocan (Wisconsin), and Diana DeGette (Colorado).
The weaselbags behind Project 2025 aren’t exactly shaking in their boots, because they have an Evil Villain image to uphold, after all, as the AP notes:
Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America, scoffed at the “unserious” effort and said the left is “in a frenzy” as Project 2025 tries to wrest control of the federal bureaucracy.
“Project 2025 will not be ‘stopped,’” Roberts said in a statement. He said the Democrats fighting Project 2025 are “more than welcome to try. We will not give up and we will win.”
Roberts then presumably went back to scanning Zillow listings for submarine bases built beneath dormant volcanoes.
Yr Wonkette wishes the task force well, because the backers of Project 2025 include not only the Heritage Foundation and more righty organizations than you can shake an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at, but also, of course, nigh-limitless dark money funding.
We like the system of government we have, more or less, and certainly don’t want a dictator — not on the first day, not on any day.
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[BBC / AP / GPAHE / Rep. Jared Huffman]
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