Project 2025 as Authoritarian Takeover

Project 2025 is in the news again: the appointment of Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a position he held during Trump 1.0, has confirmed what we always knew: Implementing Project 2025 will be a pillar of the Trump presidency. So I revisited my May 2024 New Republic essay, “A Permanent Counterrevolution,” which places Project 2025 in the context of Fascist governance,

“The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create, and this is what a second Trump administration would do,” I write. This ethos of creative destruction has long been espoused by extremist Steve Bannon and is now normalized by suit-wearing subversives such as Vought.

Thirsting to inflict trauma. Russ Vought speaks at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference, Orlando, Feb. 2021. Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

“Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name. It preserves Trumpism’s original radical intent in its goals to ‘[d]ismantle the administrative state’ and ‘decentralize and privatize as much as possible,’ allowing the American people to ‘live freely.’ The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule,” I contend.

I also discuss a matter dear to Vought’s heart: how to remake the civil service. “Trump’s presidency provides precedent for the many ways to drive civil servants out. By creating hostile workplaces for critics, and hiring scores of zealots and bullies—Sean Lawler, Trump’s chief of protocol, carried a horsewhip around to intimidate co-workers—Trumpism achieved a passive purge that saw over 79,000 civil servants retire or leave their jobs in his first nine months. In 2018, retired Ambassador Nancy McEldowney compared this process to a ‘hostile takeover and occupation.’ In 2024, it looks like a rehearsal for a counterrevolutionary cleanse of anyone still attached to liberal democratic ethics and norms.”

I wrote this in May, and in October an important article by ProPublica, which is doing superb investigative work, revealed private videos of Vought speaking of his desire to traumatize and malign civil servants —that is, civil servants who do not pass Project 2025’s regime-like political vetting process.

This plan to create a state of abjection and despair in our civil servants would be achieved by mass firings, by defunding some independent federal agencies, cutting off important research projects, and by making civil servants still attached to quaint democratic concepts of doing their jobs with impartiality and professionalism into yet another category of “enemy within.”

As Vought stated on one of the videos: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

Inflicting trauma by elevating fanatics and ideological zealots into positions of power is a mainstay of authoritarianism. Now it will be America’s turn to experience this destructive model of “governance.”

As I conclude in my New Republic essay: “Americans may believe that all this sounds fantastical. Yet the strongman’s special talent is to bring the unthinkable into being. People around the world and throughout history have been caught by surprise at their methods and the scale at which they operate. Bannon, [Kevin] Roberts, Stephen Miller, and other American incarnations of fascism are convinced that counterrevolution leading to autocracy is the only path to political survival for the far right, given the unpopularity of their positions (especially on abortion). This is why Vought’s Project 2025 chapter on “Taking the Reins of Government” declares that that there is an ‘existential need’ to make ‘aggressive’ use of executive power. The alternative could be defeat.”