For Republicans, the bill is coming due for Project 2025

Former President Donald Trump speaks in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Biden's border policy on April 2, 2024. (Photo: Anna Liz Nichols)

On June 30, actress Taraji P. Henson paused her BET Awards hosting duties to warn viewers about the danger Donald Trump and Project 2025 pose to most U.S. citizens.

“They are trying to bring the draft back. Who do you think they’re going to draft first? … Our careers, our next generations to come. Did you know that it is now a crime to be homeless? Pay attention. It’s not a secret, look it up. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens,” she said.

“The Project 2025 plan is not a game,” Henson added. “Look it up!” She exhorted those who don’t or won’t vote to get out and do their civic duty.

“I’m not trying to scare us; I’m trying to inform us. We’ve got three Supreme Court seats up, you guys. We need those seats or we have no protection,” she said. “Okay, I got it out of my system. I’m talking to all the mad people that don’t want to vote. You’re going to be mad about a lot of things if you don’t vote.”

In this celebrity-driven culture, Henson did more to publicize Project 2025 than all the purposeful talking heads and their preening, pretentious colleagues. Henson has performed a vital public service for the American people because everyone needs to know what Trump has in store for us.

Black people, women of childbearing age, young adults, children, undocumented immigrants, and other marginalized communities have the most to lose if Donald Trump wins a second term, because he’s coming for us.

Blueprint

Project 2025 is a sweeping rightwing blueprint for the next Republican president, Trump or not, to run the country. Funded by The Heritage Foundation, the Koch network, and a vast and secretive dark money network, the project has recruited at least 100 far-right organizations and entities to the cause.

Trump — aided and abetted by far-right extremists, MAGA supporters, and the remnants of the Republican Party — is gearing up to reassert racial and political dominance by upending the political system, eviscerating the rule of law, and wielding unconstrained power.

Project 2025 is the cudgel they’ll use to implement this strategy. Harold Meyerson in the Prospect explains that Project 2025 is the blueprint for a conservative presidency.

“The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025,” the Project 2025 manifesto says. “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.”

Yet even as a wider swathe of Americans are learning about Project 2025, Floridians have, since 2019, been watching and living the nightmare. Gov. Ron Santis and his extremist minions have implemented the Sunshine State version of conservatives’ planned theocratic/MAGA takeover. And Florida is all the worse for it.

Carnage

DeSantis has refused to expand Medicaid; rejects science and denies the existence of the climate crisis; is in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry; bears a special hatred for diversity, equity, and inclusion; has attacked transgender people; is anti-labor; and has used the power of his office to harm undocumented immigrants.

That’s not much different from the 920-page Heritage Foundation manifesto, which outlines the intention to, among other things, privatize Medicaid; deny Medicaid to increasing numbers of Americans; dismiss more than 50,000 civil servants and replace them with loyalists; allow Trump to mobilize the military against dissent; unleash ICE to raid schools, hospitals, churches, and playgrounds to round up undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens (since he’s promised to revoke birthright citizenship); and use the 150-year-old Comstock Act to ban the shipment of abortion pills.

Thanks to Henson, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, brutal ads from The Lincoln Project, mainstream and social media influencers, and others, the word is out about this toxic stew of racial resentment and grievance, Christian nationalism, MAGA outrage, and rightwing power grab.

In interviews, rallies, and on social media leading up to the Nov. 5 election, Trump — the presumed Republican nominee — has promised to unleash political violence, crushing his enemies, routing the media, appointing a special prosecutor to pursue President Joe Biden and his family for alleged corruption, and round up as many as 20 million undocumented immigrants and hold them in vast concentration camps before deporting them.

Hubris

I always thought it strange that Trump and the rest of these cruel creatures would so boldly publicize their plans for a MAGA conservative takeover. It reeks of deep-seated hubris. They appear to have not considered the consequences of tipping their hand.

And, as what’s left of the Republican Party learned after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade, there’s a price to pay for trying to impose its Christian nationalist ideology on the rest of America. When it comes to reproductive justice, Republicans have been beaten around the head and face by voters in red, blue, and purple states, all of whom intensely reject having government functionaries tell women what to do with their bodies.

Now that the true scope of public outrage is dawning on the GOP, they have been falling over themselves trying to escape the fallout. They have lied, obfuscated, and deflected, trying desperately to assure the public that their noxious anti-abortion positions are palatable, but it’s too late.

They will pay for their folly in November.

Much like roaches that scurry away when someone turns on the light, Donald Trump — twice impeached, four times indicted, charged with 88 felonies in state and federal courts — is shuffling away as fast as his portly body can carry him, trying to distance himself from Project 2025. Why? Because he and the other power-hungry zombies see the polls showing that many of their proposals stink.

According to a recent YouGov poll, 58% of Americans oppose the Trump/conservative Republican proposal to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Meanwhile, 59% disagree with Trump/GOP cutting taxes on corporations and 56% are against repealing Obamacare.

Song and dance

Which is why in a recent Truth Social post, Trump performed his evasive song-and-dance: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Oops, too late.

As customary, Republicans think Americans are stupid, because as they weather the punishing blowback, they are attempting a rebrand of Project 2025 to Agenda 47.

Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, which is orchestrating the overhaul of federal government if a Republican wins, crowed that America is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

Incendiary comments like these, widely publicized, are just the fuel needed to mobilize the electorate to ensure that Trump the wanna-be dictator never returns to the White House.

On Nov. 5, Americans opposed to Project 2025 will have the opportunity to wage their own second American revolution and drive out the Republican enablers, insurrectionists, and liars who’re in office and replace them with lawmakers who want to govern, who care about ordinary people, and who are interested in fully embracing and advancing America’s inevitable multicultural, multi-ethnic future.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and X.