Project 2025: Battle Plan for Trump Dictatorship?

                       (The staff article from The ABC NEWS AUSTRALIA on 16 July 2024.)

The plan for power: He survived an assassination attempt. He’s as defiant and determined as ever. And if Donald Trump is returned to power by American voters this November he’ll have an “army” at his disposal — at least 10,000 people, recruited to help implement his controversial agenda.

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.

The manifesto

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.”