The Right Has A Terrifying Second Trump Term Plan Called Project 2025

Professor Thomas Zimmer breaks down why it’s so ruthlessly dangerous.

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Many of our readers have asked us to explore the details and dangers of “Project 2025”—a right-wing plan for how to move America toward authoritarian rule under a second Trump term.

Few writers and scholars have been as clear-eyed and outspoken about this threat as Prof. Thomas Zimmer, who teaches 20th-century U.S. and international history at Georgetown University. We turned to Professor Zimmer to have him lay it out in plain terms and to help raise the alarm.

— Jay Kuo

You’ve written extensively about Project 2025. Can you explain in basic terms what that is, and what makes it different than other right-wing campaigns and projects?

Over the past few months, detailed plans have emerged on the Right for what they want to do upon getting back to power. Different factions on the Right are preparing separate plans, and there is real rivalry between them.

Among all these planning efforts, “Project 2025,” launched in April 2022 under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, stands out because it unites much of the conservative movement and the machine of think tanks as well as activist and lobbying groups behind the goal of installing a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime. As members of its Advisory Board, “Project 2025” currently lists over one hundred organizations and institutions. It’s a Who’s Who of rightwing actors – Alliance Defending Freedom, America First Legal Foundation, Center for Renewing America, Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Young America’s Foundation, Moms for Liberty, and on and on and on.

“Project 2025” is a plan to execute what amounts to a comprehensive authoritarian takeover of American government. Broadly speaking, it envisions a vast expansion of presidential power over the executive branch. Moreover, “Project 2025” seeks to dismantle certain parts of government, the administrative state, and federal agencies – while simultaneously mobilizing and weaponizing others. And finally, “Project 2025” is a promise to purge from government anyone who is not all in on the Trumpist project and replace them with loyalists and ideological conformists.

In its own words, “Project 2025” consists of four “pillars”: (I) A policy agenda spelled out in the 920-page report they published last April titled: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”; (II) a personnel database, intended to build an army of loyalists; (III) a “training effort” that currently consists of online courses they call the “Presidential Administration Academy” to get these loyalists and all political appointees ready to implement the rightwing agenda; and, finally, (IV) “a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.” This fourth “pillar” is, at this point, still distinctly vague and seems to exist only in the form of an announcement of future action.

What are some concrete examples of what the Project 2025 participants plan to do? We’ve heard talk, for example, of “Schedule F” and stripping 55,000 civil servants of their jobs to install loyalists in their place. Is this a credible threat? Would they really need to replace so many, or would simply threatening to fire people if they didn’t toe the party line suffice?

The first big focus of “Project 2025” is to expand presidential power, establish total control over the government, weaponize some parts of the executive while dismantling others – all of this crystallizes in the “Mandate for Leadership” report, their policy agenda. 

Underlying all the policy proposals is the fever dream of a great purge of government officials who are to be replaced with a vast army of loyalists. This is where “Schedule F” comes in. Shortly before the 2020 election, Donald Trump signed an executive order – Schedule F – that was rescinded by President Biden immediately upon taking office before it could do any damage. It was intended to fight the sinister “deep state,” and rightwingers are determined to execute Schedule F as soon as they get another chance. Schedule F would convert tens of thousands of career civil service positions into political appointments – starting with anyone in a policy-adjacent position or policy advisory role. The goal is to strip all these people of their civil service protections in order to make them fireable – and then fire them. No more independent experts and competent bureaucrats. 

But opening 50,000 positions only makes sense if you also have the personnel to fill them. In order to find enough “conservative warriors,” as they call them, “Project 2025” is currently building what they call the “Presidential Personnel Database” – an unprecedented headhunting operation to ensure ideological conformity. They are vetting thousands of people with the help of an online questionnaire that is designed to identify true ideological believers. “Project 2025” is looking for purity and radicalism. 

Is this a credible threat? Well, with a lot of what “Project 2025” envisions, we are in uncharted territory. And I am sure the legality of something like Schedule F would be tested in court. But in general, “Project 2025” is evidence that the American Right has concrete plans and a detailed strategy of how to take over and transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: autocratic revenge against the “woke” enemy, and the imposition of a reactionary vision for society against the will of the majority.

We’ve seen plans and platforms in the past that call for eliminating government excess and even whole departments like the Department of Education. What makes this different than what we’ve heard before from so-called “small government” activists?

It’s crucial to not fall for the “small government” rhetoric “Project 2025” employs. Let’s look at the actual policy agenda they have outlined. On one level, this is indeed a radical program to dismantle the modern state. The Right wants to deprive government of any tool that might be used to install boundaries for moneyed interests, help create a fairer pluralistic society, or tackle some of the most urgent public policy crises. You mention the Department of Education, for instance, “Should be eliminated.” Measures to tackle the climate crisis? Derided as “climate fanaticism” – just another “globalist” strategy to undermine America, just like “gender radicalism” and “promoting abortion.” 

But beyond just dismantling the state, “Project 2025” also seeks to mobilize and weaponize government in a far-reaching effort to punish and purge “woke” enemies and impose a reactionary white Christian patriarchal order on American society. Public health, for instance, is seen purely as a tool to uphold a traditionalist, conservative Christian understanding of gender, family, and motherhood. Labor Policy? A tool to create more room to legally discriminate in the workplace.  “Project 2025” openly demands, for example, that the president “Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”

Look anywhere in the “Project 2025” report, and what you’ll find is visceral disdain for any kind of pluralism and diversity channeled into a policy agenda aiming to extinguish it. “Mandate for Leadership” talks about “eliminating politicization” only to then present the whole laundry list of rightwing culture war grievances. DEI! CRT! Trans people! It is a policy agenda entirely fueled by the desire to take over government in order to make sure that it can’t act as an engine of egalitarian pluralism, and instead turn it into a tool to impose an extreme, reactionary vision on the entire country. 

Back in its early days, it felt like Heritage was just another conservative think tank. What has changed, and why is the threat so much worse now than before?

The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973 as part of an attempt to build a machinery of organizations and think tanks that could help counter what conservatives perceived as the liberal hegemony. I wouldn’t say Heritage was ever “just another conservative think tank,” as you put it. It has, for decades, been the most influential, most powerful of these rightwing think tanks – certainly the one closest to the power centers of the Right and the Republican Party. It used to be associated – and associated itself – with Reaganism, and it has rightly been regarded as conservative establishment. 

In recent years, however, Heritage has gone in a decidedly more Trumpian direction. Kevin Roberts, who took over as president at the end of 2021, has been key in this development. Roberts is not some moderate imposter who pretends to be hardcore to blend in with the MAGAs because that is the direction the wind is blowing. He is part of the Religious Right and comes out of the world of reactionary Catholicism. He is a true believer in the reactionary political project.

The trajectory of the Heritage Foundation is indicative of how much the Right, very much including the rightwing establishment, has radicalized. The rise of Trump is best understood not as the cause, but as a manifestation of this radicalization that has accelerated significantly in the twenty-first century. Modern conservatism as a political project arose in the middle decades of the twentieth century as an alliance between different strands and factions that all saw egalitarian, pluralistic democracy as the enemy. They staunchly opposed any leveling of traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, which they regarded as the natural and/or divinely ordained order. The GOP’s overriding concern since at least the 1970s, when conservatives became the dominating faction within the party, has been to preserve that “natural” order, that version of “real America.” 

But due to political, cultural, and most importantly demographic developments, the conservative political project has come under enormous pressure. As the country has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. Nothing symbolized this threat to white dominance like the election of Barack Obama. Obama’s presidency dramatically heightened the white conservative fear of demographic change that would supposedly be accompanied by a loss of political and cultural dominance. The mass protests after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 fueled this sense of being under siege even further. 

The foreword Heritage president Kevin Roberts wrote for the “Project 2025” policy agenda perfectly captures the siege mentality, self-victimization, and grievance-driven lust for revenge that are fueling the Right’s plans. The people behind them see themselves as noble defenders of “real America” against a totalitarian “woke,” “globalist” assault. “Project 2025” is their declaration of war on multiracial pluralism. There is, in this worldview, no more room for compromise, no justification for restraint: “Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.” 2024, according to Roberts, is the “last opportunity to save our republic.” 

“Institutionalizing Trumpism” appears to be the goal of Project 2025. But what does that really mean, practically speaking? And if Trump is not reelected, where would Project 2025 go from there? Does it survive?

“Institutionalizing Trumpism” in the way the Heritage Foundation understands it does not mean containing or taming it, but making it more efficient and more ruthless. It’s important to remember that when they first rose to power in 2017, Trumpworld had no concrete plans, no personnel to implement them, and very little understanding of the vast and powerful machine that is the American government. They weren’t ready, and no one understands this more clearly than the Right. They are determined not to let that happen again and eliminate all the hurdles that slowed them down – sabotaged them, as they see it – in Trump’s first presidency. All the planning efforts for 2025 start from this diagnosis.

“Project 2025” was initially not intended for Trump, specifically. It was supposed to provide the blueprint for whoever would lead the next conservative presidency. And in some ways, Trump indeed seems like a less than ideal vessel for the kinds of ambitious, comprehensive plans that are emanating on the Right. He is erratic, lazy, volatile, and he is certainly not sitting down to read extensive policy memos. In other ways, however, Trump is especially well suited to lead this kind of crusade. He isn’t restrained by norms or questions of precedent and forbearance. That is why the Right united behind him in the first place. It takes a radical leader to implement extremist plans. That’s Trump.

What happens after January 2025? Even if Trump returns to the White House, the reactionaries behind “Project 2025 are unlikely to succeed at implementing their plans in exactly the way they have outlined. But if they were to win the 2024 election, they would be much better prepared than the last time and operate under conditions that are vastly more favorable to their cause. The next rightwing regime could count on a game-changing reactionary supermajority on the Supreme Court. Moreover, this would be a very different Right from the one that came to power in 2017. 

That starts with Trump himself. The idea that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump, is massively misleading and obscures the rather drastic radicalization of the Right’s undisputed leader. Beyond Trump, the Right’s significant radicalization has found its manifestation in an almost fully Trumpified GOP. Finally, resistance to the rightwing regime – not just coming from “the Left,” but also potentially fueled by whatever skepticism still remains among Republicans – would face a level of violent threat far beyond anything the country experienced during the first Trump presidency. Americans may want to push back. But it would be far harder and far more dangerous this time.

What if Trump is defeated? It would be a disastrous mistake to assume a return to pre-Trump “normalcy”: Trump is not merely an accident, an aberration – he has exacerbated, but not caused, the anti-democratic radicalization of the Republican Party and the conservative mainstream. “Project 2025” captures a broad consensus on the Right that radical, extreme measures against what they see as a fundamentally illegitimate, “Un-American,” “woke” Left are not only justified but urgently necessary. Another presidential election loss will not return them to the democratic fold; if anything, it is bound to escalate the feeling of being under siege that is animating so much of what has been happening on the Right. 

What does the rise of Project 2025 tell us about where we are with the political right? And how do we raise the alarm without sounding like we are the crazy, conspiratorial ones?

“Project 2025” points to really significant developments and shifts on the Right. There is undoubtedly an inherent tension between two opposing principles in the vision “Project 2025” outlines. There is the proclamation to dismantle the “deep state,” but there is also the desire to use it, to mobilize and weaponize it in service of the reactionary agenda. This tension has actually always been a constitutive feature of modern conservatism.

As a political project, modern conservatism has always been defined by an alliance between, broadly speaking, two distinct factions. On the one hand, there were reactionary traditionalists and, especially from the 1970s onwards, a newly mobilized Religious Right. On the other, there were market-fundamentalist libertarian factions, staunchly opposed to the New Deal state and post-1930s liberalism. This alliance has never been static, and in recent years, the contours of a broader realignment on the Right toward an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism have emerged. The “counter-revolution” rightwingers now desire entails a strikingly open renunciation of the supposed pillars of modern conservative thought. The general sentiment that it is no longer enough to be “conservative” is being echoed everywhere on the Right, among pundits, activists, politicians, and intellectuals. People at the center of conservative politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” outright. 

Today’s leading reactionaries are not animated by a vision of “small government,” they don’t fear the authoritarian state: They want to mobilize it against their enemies. “Project 2025” channels this spirit into an agenda that appeals to both the “dismantle government” and the “mobilize the state” factions by recentering their alliance around the anti-“left” principle: a project to prevent any leveling of established discriminatory hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth. 

The Right is not a monolithic bloc. There are different factions, different camps vying for supremacy. But no matter how much they may dislike or despise each other, they hate “the Left” – and the “leftist” egalitarian, pluralist idea of America – more.

How do we raise the alarm? One of the more frustrating aspects about American politics is that if you simply trace the radicalization of the Right and the Republican Party, there is a good chance a mainstream audience will dismiss you as a leftwing conspiracy theorist or an unhinged “activist.” Donald Trump’s outrageousness notwithstanding, it is difficult to convey to people who don’t pay much attention to politics how much the power centers of conservative politics have been taken over by anti-democratic extremism. One way to deal with this problem is to get people to actually read and listen to what emanates from the Right. If you don’t believe and feel like you can’t trust my (lefty / liberal) assessment, maybe you can believe them? In this respect, “Project 2025” is really helpful – because rightwing leaders could not possibly be clearer about the reactionary vision they want to impose on the country, and the radical strategies and tactics by which they want to impose it against the will of the majority. 

There is no doubt “Project 2025” would transform America into a much nastier, much more dangerous, much more hostile place for anyone who dares to deviate from what the Right deems the “natural” order. In a very real sense, that’s what’s on the ballot in November. The election isn’t really about Biden vs. Trump; it’s a referendum on whether the effort to finally realize the promise of a truly democratic, pluralistic, multiracial society should be continued or abolished altogether. Those are the stakes.

Thomas Zimmer is a historian at Georgetown University focusing on the recent history of American democracy and the anti-democratic impulses of the American right. He explores the topic at length in his Democracy Americana Substack where he has raised the alarm about Project 2025, and co-hosts the Is This Democracy podcast.

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