The Silence is the Tell
Project 2025 contains no chapter on the Supreme Court. The reason is chilling.
There is no chapter on the Supreme Court in Project 2025.
I want to think about that for a minute because when I first noticed the absence, I assumed I had missed it. I went back. I ran the search. I checked the table of contents against the thirty chapters of the Mandate for Leadership (“the Mandate”), the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page blueprint for the second Trump administration, the document its director has called a “policy bible” ready to govern at noon on Inauguration Day.
Thirty chapters. The White House Office. The Executive Office of the President. Defense, State, Justice, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Education, Energy, Interior, Labor, Commerce, Treasury, Transportation, Veterans Affairs. The Environmental Protection Agency. The Export-Import Bank. A full chapter on the Federal Communications Commission. A full chapter on the Federal Election Commission. A full chapter on the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which most Americans could not place on a map.
No chapter on the Supreme Court.
This is not a small gap. The Mandate proposes to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, restructure the Department of Justice, invoke the Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion medication, fire tens of thousands of civil servants, and deploy the active-duty military at the southern border. Every one of those proposals will be litigated. Every one of them will, on a timetable the authors understood precisely, land at the Supreme Court. And the authors declined to write a single page about it.
I have been thinking about that silence for weeks. I think the authors knew exactly what it meant.
The Foreword Tells You
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, wrote the foreword to the Mandate. It is a strange document — part Reagan hagiography, part cultural war declaration, part altar call. Roberts describes the America of 2023 as besieged by “The Great Awokening,” warns that “the very moral foundations of our society are in peril,” and summons “a new generation of Americans” to rescue the republic from what he calls its “totalitarian cult.”
Near the end, he turns to Dobbs.
“Conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade,” Roberts writes. “But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.” That phrase — just the beginning — is doing more work than almost any other phrase in the volume.
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