Donald Trump and his people have lately been trying to put as much distance between the former president and Project 2025 as they can without launching him into space.
The Trump team has been really desperate about this ever since the Democrats started tying Project 2025 to Orange Julius at every opportunity. And no wonder. Polls generally show that many, many, many of the proposals in Project 2025 are about as popular with the public as liver cancer. Conservatives can’t embrace nearly all of the document if they want to win the upcoming elections, even if they agree wholeheartedly with the ideas therein.
It was already a difficult battle for Trump to reach escape velocity on this one, since literally hundreds of his former administration staffers have worked on Project 2025 and have publicly and privately bragged about it. But he has tried! He denounced the project on his personal Nazi social media site. Someone pressured the head of Project 2025, Paul Dans, to resign in a neat little piece of staged drama that in no way actually changes anything about the plans to deploy it if Trump wins.
And if that wasn’t enough, Trump’s campaign managers also put out a statement threatening anyone who claimed to be working on policy for a new Trump administration that they might wake up one morning to find a new hole torn in an anatomical location where no hole had been previously located.
But of course Project 2025 has not vanished, simply gone underground. And on Monday, Reuters reported that former director of the Office of Management and Budget/galactically brown-nosed Trump lickspittle Russell Vought is working on a super-secret plan to implement the project in the first six months of a new Trump administration:
A chief architect of Project 2025 — the controversial conservative blueprint to remake the federal government — Vought is likely to be appointed to a high-ranking post in a second Trump administration. And he’s been drafting a so-far secret “180-Day Transition Playbook” to speed the plan’s implementation to avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that dogged Trump’s first term.
Oh boy, remember that first week of Trump’s term, in 2017? Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon jerry-rigging a xenophobic executive order keeping brown people out of America while Sean Spicer screamed at reporters about crowd sizes? Well, like Skynet, Trump’s people learned at a geometric rate. And what they learned was that they better be ready to hit the ground running on Inauguration Day, before Congress or the judiciary or activist groups know what hit them.
We already know that Project 2025 called for executing all federal death row inmates in the first 180 days of a new administration, which would require a pace of one execution every four days or so. Lord knows what other craziness is in Vought’s plan, or if Vought is aware that he shares a last name with the evil corporation in The Boys, a factoid he would probably embrace.
“A very determined warrior is how I would see Russ,” said a former Trump administration official who worked with Vought in the White House and requested anonymity to speak candidly about him. “I don’t think he thinks about whether or not he likes Donald Trump as a person. I think he likes what Donald Trump represents in terms of the political forces he’s able to harness.”
See, Donald? Nobody likes you!
So yeah, Project 2025 is about as dead as any other part of the project to bring fascism to America. Which is to say, not remotely dead at all.
OPEN THREAD.
[Reuters]
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