The Blueprint for Permanent Power
How Trump and Project 2025 are engineering the end of American democracy
In action and deeds, Donald Trump has given evidence that he intends to stay in power beyond his four-year term. With guidance from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, he is implementing a blueprint to dismantle democracy and replace it with permanent autocratic rule. 1
That blueprint is not new; it is the product of more than four decades of Heritage’s work to concentrate executive authority and erode constitutional checks, now being put into motion at breathtaking speed. 2
For the first time in American history, a president is openly governing from a playbook intended not to preserve elections, but to end them.
Political scientists identify several types of authoritarian regimes. Each has distinct methods of control and characteristic lifespans. Some are short and unstable, while others endure for decades. Understanding these patterns helps place Trump’s form of authoritarianism in context.
Trump’s regime is best understood as a personalist-hybrid authoritarian system, with seeds of a single-party state planted through Republican adoption of Project 2025. 3
Trump’s Personalist-Hybrid Authoritarianism (“The Trump Form”)
Trump’s governing style already exhibits every hallmark of authoritarian consolidation. This hybrid system blends personal rule with single-party ambition. Trump stands at the center, but Project 2025 ensures the machinery of authoritarian control will outlive him. What begins as one man’s power grab hardens into a system designed to endure.
Elections as Façade. The ritual of voting remains, but the substance is gutted. At a Turning Point Action event in July 2024, Trump told an audience of Christian voters:
“If you vote for me this November, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll fix it so good, you’ll never have to vote again.” 4
This is not hyperbole. It was a statement of intent. Elections under Trump are not contests of power - they are loyalty ceremonies, with voter suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and captured election boards ensuring outcomes before a single ballot is cast. 5
Rule of Law Retreats. Independent courts, inspectors general, and watchdogs are gutted or stacked with loyalists. Judges hostile to constitutional limits are fast-tracked, while career professionals in independent agencies such as DOJ, EPA, BLS, etc. are purged. Institutions that once served the law are remade to serve him.
Total Executive Control of Agencies. Project 2025’s “unitary executive” theory makes every agency - from DOJ and DOD, to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -answer directly to the president. This is not normal presidential power; it erases every safeguard meant to keep power in check. The state itself becomes an extension of one man’s will. 6
Weaponizing Power Against Enemies. Trump has openly promised “retribution.” His critics face legal peril while his allies enjoy immunity. Law firms are pressured to abandon cases against him, universities threatened with funding cuts, and journalists intimidated with direct attacks. The justice system, once neutral is a sword and shield for the ruler.
Cultural and Educational Control. From banning DEI to seizing influence over the Kennedy Center, Trump has reshaped symbols of culture and identity to reflect his dominance. By rewriting history and redefining national belonging, he transforms democracy itself into a mark of disloyalty.
Extending Fear into Private Life. Law firms, universities, and cultural institutions are coerced into compliance. Authoritarian regimes endure, not only by controlling the state, but by forcing every private actor, from banks to schools, to calculate survival in terms of loyalty.
Seizing Cities and the Capital: Authoritarian Milestones
Authoritarian regimes often consolidate power by seizing symbolic and strategic cities. Once institutions are hollowed out and fear extends into private life, the next step is territorial consolidation. Power is not only about agencies and laws—it is about space. Seizing cities signals that resistance is futile.
Trump’s use of federalized forces against Los Angeles and Washington D.C. follows this historic pattern. And when the nation’s capital itself is brought under military or executive control, the ruler gains more than a stronghold: he gains a personal fiefdom, a stage from which to project absolute dominance. In the eyes of citizens and the world, control of the capital becomes a proxy for control of the entire nation.
Federal occupation of U.S. cities. Trump deployed militarized federal officers against protestors and communities, framing it as “crime control.'‘ This mirrors tactics abroad, where rulers stage urban takeovers to display absolute power. 7
Control of the nation’s capital. Federalizing Washington D.C.’s police, as proposed in Project 2025, is more than policy. It is a structural guarantee of one-party dominance. In world history, regimes that control their capitals militarily almost never lost power without outside force.8 For Trump, turning Washington into his personal fiefdom would be both a symbol and a mechanism of controlling the entire nation.
Why This Time Is Different
Project 2025’s rapid rise isn’t accidental. It is the culmination of Heritage Foundation’s four decades of institutional planning. From the Reagan era’s Mandate for Leadership to today’s sweeping plan, Heritage has engineered a path for the executive branch to dominate Congress, the courts, and even culture.9
Trump is not improvising. He is governing from a script long prepared for him.
What makes this moment unprecedented is not only Trump’s willingness to use the playbook—it is the Republican Party’s decision to govern by it, even beyond Trump himself. By adopting Project 2025 as its de facto platform, the GOP is laying the foundation for a single-party authoritarian regime that could endure whether or not Trump remains in power.
The Warning
Authoritarian regimes do not fade quickly. On average, they last decades. When they seize capitals and dismantle independent institutions, they last even longer. Trump’s embrace of Project 2025, backed by a party apparatus intent on one-party rule, signals that America is on the brink - not of a passing crisis, but of a structural transformation.
The blueprint is written. The speed is accelerating. And unless it is stopped, the United States will not simply drift into authoritarianism; it will be locked inside it, with Washington transformed into Trump’s personal fiefdom and the nation governed as his permanent stronghold.
Learn more about Project 2025 in my May 19 SubStack article - Project 2025: A Manual for the Unmaking of American Democracy
Footnotes:
Very interesting. How does personal life, e.g., family life, become affected by Extending Fear into Private Life? I will probably be gone long before this is all over, but I fear for my nieces and their children.