(The staff article from The ABC NEWS AUSTRALIA on 16 July 2024.)
The director of a network of conservative groups,
Paul Dans, has told Four Corners his organisation Project 2025 has prepared a
detailed “battle plan” and has the people trained and ready to execute it.
It would see the president’s power expanded like never before and allow him to target the so-called “deep state” — in Trump’s telling, the ruling class of faceless civil servants that thwarted his first term agenda.
But opponents
warn Project 2025 will put political stooges in key decision-making positions,
empower the former president to prosecute his political enemies, and set the
United States on a path to authoritarianism.
The recruits
Project 2025′s
master plan begins with stacking the civil service in the president’s favour. “We
have a database with over 10,000 people from all walks of life entering into
this, aspiring to serve,” Dans says, in an exclusive television interview.
“We want people
who’ve been cancelled, who’ve figuratively given blood for the movement. These
are mums who’ve challenged school boards. These are people who’ve stood up in
their companies and said, ‘Enough with [diversity, equity and inclusion] and
the woke agenda.’”
These potential
administration recruits will be vetted to ensure they align with the Trump
agenda. Project 2025 reviews budding applicants’ social media accounts and
probes their political philosophy, asking whether they agree or disagree with
statements such as:
The president should be able to advance his/her
agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal
officials. (Yes/No)
The federal government should recognise only two
unchanging sexes, male and female, as a matter of policy. (Yes/No)
The US has the right to select immigrants based on
country of origin. (Yes/No)
“It’s making sure that we have the right people who are going to be steeped in the battle plan,” says Dans, who served as chief of staff in the Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration.
“We want the person who keeps getting knocked down and is indefatigable. I actually think of Aussies a lot like that. They’re always popping up to the top and they have this kind of shit-eating grin on their face. That is the kind of happy warrior that we want.”
Under Project
2025′s plan, the president would appoint these “happy warriors” to senior
positions in bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal
Trade Commission.
They claim Trump’s first term agenda was frustrated by unelected officials, and want to ensure this time is different.
“What will be
left will be the grifters and the sycophants,” former Republican congressman
Charlie Dent says.
“Whatever
[Trump’s] worst impulse is of the day, they will facilitate it and will enable
it.
“They want
people who are unswervingly loyal to the Trump agenda, to his vision and to him
as a person, as well as to his and the movement’s goal of subordinating those
who don’t look or sound like them,” says former Department of Justice lawyer,
Erica Newland, who now works with the Washington-based anti-authoritarian group
Protect Democracy.
“What Donald
Trump wants are political stooges who will be loyal not to the office of the
president, but to the person of the president and whatever his dreams or whims
are.”
During his first
administration, Trump tried to replace the chief scientist at the Department of
Agriculture with his 2016 presidential campaign co-chair. His proposed USDA
chief scientist had no science background and had gained prominence as a
right-wing talk show host.
Project 2025′s
plan for the next Trump administration is laid out in a 920-page transition and
policy manifesto: “This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to
unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and
woke culture warriors.”
Project 2025 is a grouping of more than 100 leading US conservative organisations, including the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has produced policy plans for prospective Republican administrations since 1981.
The organisation
includes many senior officials like Dans who worked in Trump’s first
administration and who remain close to the former president. It is not
officially tied to the Trump campaign, and in recent weeks the former president
has sought to distance himself from Project 2025.
“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,” Trump posted on social media. It came after the Democrats
launched a campaign warning that Project 2025 presented a threat to American
democracy.
But Dans
confirmed his team has ongoing connections with the Trump campaign. “We have integration with folks on the
campaign. The reality is … we often supply ideas and ultimately we hope to
offer personnel suggestions,” Dans says.
“This is really going to be the engine room for the next administration.
Many of these folks served and will be called upon to serve again.”
Project 2025′s
manifesto is based on several pillars, including to ‘restore the family as the
centrepiece of American life’. They believe this will be achieved by removing
all gender identity terms from legislation and federal rules, pursuing
anti-abortion policies at every level of government, and banning transgender
people from the military.
The document
also supports opening up “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas” as
“they are the lifeblood of economic growth”.
But the central
principle of much of the plan is that a democratically elected president is the
American people’s proxy – that it’s the job of the thousands of unelected civil
servants to carry out Trump’s orders, without question.
Critics, including moderate Republicans, warn Trump will be empowered to do whatever he wants. “I’m afraid if Trump were to win in 2024, those types of people who would try to put some checks and restrain the worst impulses of the president won’t be there,” Charlie Dent says.
“It’s a
prescription for chaos in our democracy because, frankly, the burden of
governing in our country rests with public servants who … swear an oath to
preserve, protect, and defend that Constitution,” says former US Defense
Secretary and CIA chief Leon Panetta.
“To take a
position that you want to get rid of civil servants … and to basically put in
individuals that are part of kind of his organised effort to turn our democracy
upside down, it’s a frightening prospect.”
Dans says it will
be a “beacon of democracy. I think we’re building a city on a hill. This is one
[of] the greatest experiments in human history for advancing bounty and freedom
across the globe.”
The target
The agency at
the top of Trump’s deep state hit list is the powerful Department of Justice
(DOJ). “We will completely overhaul the corrupt Department of Injustice to
clear out all the communists who have weaponised government activities,” Trump
said in a speech in February.
The DOJ has
investigated the former president over allegations he interfered in the 2020
election, and that he illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-A-Lago
estate in Florida. Trump has been criminally charged in both cases.
For Trump
loyalists such as former presidential assistant Sebastian Gorka this reinforced
their belief the department had been captured by the “deep state”. “Of all of
these agencies and departments, the DOJ is the worst,” Gorka says.
“The DOJ is a viper’s nest of politically motivated individuals who see it as their fiefdom to serve the Democrat party and their buddies.” Despite accusing the Justice Department of being politicised, Trump has promised to tear down any independence the DOJ enjoys and to use the agency as an instrument of his will.
Speaking at his
New Jersey golf club last year, the former president vowed to appoint a special
prosecutor “to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America,
Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family.”
“I certainly
expect there could be political show trials under Donald Trump,” says Erica
Newland. “There is nothing he loves more than a reality TV show-style assertion
of power. The question is whether our institutions, those attorneys at the
Department of Justice, and our judges will be strong enough to prevent that from
happening.”
Trump has
accused many senior officials, including the then chief of the military and
reportedly his former National Security Advisor, of treason. Under the US
Constitution, a person found guilty of treason can be put to death.
That former National
Security Advisor, John Bolton, believes a second term would be a “retribution
presidency”. “I mean, he tried to put me in jail for the book that I
published,” Bolton says. “He doesn’t forget his grudges. And I think the only
consolation I have is that I’m part of a very long list.
“I think he’s
very serious when he says he wants to go after ‘enemies’ as he describes them …
basically people he’s had personal disputes with, not enemies of the United
States.” Newland is taking seriously Trump’s threats to pursue those he
perceives as political enemies. “This is really, really terrifying because the
Department of Justice holds what I think of as the most awesome domestic power
that the US government has.”
The stakes
Temidayo
Aganga-Williams believes Trump will do what he says. Williams was senior
investigative counsel on the US House Select Committee investigating the
January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
“I think he currently is an existential threat. He’s
a former president who led an armed rebellion against his own country … the
question is whether the American people are going to put him in a position of
power again to finish the job.”
The committee’s
investigation found the “central cause of January 6 was one man, former president
Donald Trump, whom many others followed”. “None of the events of January 6th
would have happened without him.”
Last year, the former president joked in an interview that if he won re-election he would be a dictator, but only on his first day in office. His critics did not see the funny side. “One of the things I learned serving on the January 6th committee is to take Trump at his word, because he does mean to do what he says,” Veteran Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren says. “He said that he intends to terminate parts of the constitution. He didn’t say which parts. But you can’t do that constitutionally. There’s no procedure for the president to obviate the constitution.”
Erica Newland views Donald Trump as “an authoritarian threat to this country. There’s a playbook that authoritarians use: they aggrandise executive authority. They politicise independent institutions. They quash dissent. They spread misinformation. They target vulnerable communities. They corrupt elections, and they stoke violence. Donald Trump has engaged in all seven of these.”
But Project 2025
director Paul Dans says Trump will save America from dictatorship. “We’re
living under kind of a tyrannical reign of Joe Biden,” Dans says, citing FBI
surveillance, “free speech police”, and COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
“That is tyranny
… we’re in the midst of a neo-Marxist revolution here in the United States, and
we have to wake up to what’s going on. At some point we have to … get to the
ramparts and help this country.”
Lofgren says the
stakes of a second Trump presidency are very high. “I’m not sure the country
will survive it, honestly,” Lofgren says. “If he really does intend to do the
things that he says, we would not have the kind of democratic republic that
we’ve enjoyed for over 200 years.”
Others share her fears. “If he’s returned to the
presidency, he’s gonna be dangerous,” Leon Panetta says. “It can literally
destroy our democracy.”
