To Be Equal: Donald Trump and Project 2025: Will the Future of America Be a Return to the Ugly Past?
“With Trump in the White House, social conservatives can use executive action to try to ban abortion; MAGA nationalists can end most forms of immigration, commence mass deportations and leverage civil rights laws against imagined “anti-white” discrimination; and reactionary opponents of social insurance can weaken Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And this is to say nothing of Trump’s own plans to rule as an autocrat under a court-sanctioned theory of unitary executive authority.”
—Jamelle Bouie
Project 2025, the sweeping extremist policy agenda assembled by Donald Trump’s supporters, allies, and veterans of his administration, is deeply unpopular with the American people.
As a candidate, Trump’s response was to feign ignorance. During his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he claimed he hadn’t even read it.
What he didn’t say was whether or not he supported the alarming proposals it contains, or whether he would implement them as President. In fact, at least 270 of the proposals in Project 2025 match Trump’s own past policies, previous actions, or current campaign promises.
Key to the agenda is a drastic overhaul of the federal government, purging it of conscientious civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. Trump began that process late in his last term with Executive Order 13957, also known as Schedule F.
“Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883,” Georgetown political scientist Don Moynihan wrote in the New York Times. It would be “a catastrophe for government performance” and for democracy, he said.
Trump’s term ended before he could implement Schedule F, and President Biden quickly rescinded it when he took office. Trump has vowed to reissue the order immediately and wield the power it gives him “very aggressively.” Civil servants deemed disloyal already have been compiled.
With a federal workforce who will place loyalty to Trump over loyalty to the Constitution, Trump will be free to implement a radical, extremist agenda that will obliterate racial justice initiatives and preserve advantages for white Americans.
The next Trump administration will use civil rights laws to counter the imaginary forces of “anti-white racism.” Trump has bragged that his administration banned “critical race theory”—a misnomer he and his allies have slapped on virtually any racial justice initiative—and promised to “finish the job.”
Project 2025 calls for using the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute institutions, including private employers, with diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in place.
Trump’s policies also align with Project 2025 on the issue of immigration and the border. Trump has promised to “close the border” on day one of his administration and begin “mass deportations” of the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States without authorization. Project 2025 outlines various methods for facilitating those deportations, from requiring the cooperation of local law enforcement to authorizing “tent camps” to detain migrants.
Aside from the devastating human cost of tearing families apart, mass deportations and border closures will wreak havoc on the economy. The American Immigration Council estimates the deportations would result in a 4.2% to 6.8% reduction in GDP. By comparison, GDP fell by 4.3%. during the Great Recession of 2007–2009.
Closing the southern border would cost “tens of billions of dollars per day,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has estimated.
The Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025, also created a “Mandate for Leadership” during Trump’s first term. Within two years, Trump had embraced nearly two-thirds of that agenda. With a hyper-politicized, extreme right-wing cabinet, federal workforce, and judiciary, Trump can go even further in his second term.
—November 8, 2024
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ChildWatch: Keep Rising
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way …
Many people will instantly recognize these words: they are lines from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the poem and hymn otherwise known as the beloved Black National Anthem. It’s a hymn that speaks of the long, difficult road we have already traveled—and the ongoing determination, through blood, stunted hopes, exhaustion, and tears, to keep hope anyway, keep faith, keep marching, and keep rising.
This is a moment when many people are feeling as if the dream they have of what America can and should be has been deferred yet again, while the forces that seem willing to ignore, excuse, or embrace misogyny, racism, bigotry, bullying, and cruelty may appear to be ascendant. But we have come much too far on the way already to believe the road ends here.
There are millions of people in our nation still standing up to say “this is not who we are.” There are others who understand that phrase with a special emphasis: this is not who we are. At every step since its founding, whenever America has shown it has room for exclusion and hate, there
have been people who were painfully aware that may indeed be who America is—but who never stopped believing and insisting America could and must be better. Many of us stand on the shoulders of generations of these people. They include elders and ancestors who knew they deserved dignity and the equality promised in the Constitution even if they lived and died without seeing that come to pass. They are all among the countless Americans who again and again have found ways to push America forward and closer towards its professed ideals. Many of our ancestors also knew far too well that any steps of progress might be followed by backwards retrenchment, yet they were never deterred. They kept going.
Remember what Frederick Douglass said in 1857: “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
The struggle between power for some and freedom for all will continue, but the struggle is in service of the progress. This is not a time to be silenced into submission by fear or deadly apathy. Like every generation before us, it is time to keep going. Our ancestors may have taken moments to renew and regroup, but then they kept rising. This is who we are. In one more familiar line from “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: let us march on ’til victory is won.
—November 8, 2024
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