In Donald Trump, the Heritage Foundation found their perfect candidate to activate the Project 2025 manual for dismantling democracy and creating a white patriarchal plutocracy. Especially with his personal record of embracing those ideologies. Trump has never hidden his racism, misogyny, or admiration for authoritarian strongmen.
From refusing to rent to Black tenants in his properties in the 1970s,1 to taking out four full-page newspaper ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty against the Central Park Five—teenagers who were later fully exonerated by DNA evidence—Trump has consistently revealed his deeply held racist beliefs. Even after their release in 2002 and a $41 million settlement in 2014, he insisted they were guilty, calling the payout “a disgrace.” As recently as September 2024, during a presidential debate, he repeated the falsehood, leading the Exonerated Five to file a federal defamation lawsuit. 2
That pattern carried forward. Trump launched his political career on the racist “birther” lie against Barack Obama, called white supremacists in Charlottesville “very fine people,” and boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy”.3 Now, he demands “total immunity” from the law - an authoritarian fantasy that Project 2025 seeks to make real. His record doesn’t just align with their agenda; it proves he was the prototype they’d been waiting for.
Two edicts are propelling their goals of limiting protections for marginalized groups, broadly empowering institutional racial bias and stripping women of autonomy and economic independence.
Act now even it is illegal (or immoral).
Never admit you were wrong.
Two Edicts of Authoritarianism
Edict 1: Act now, even if it’s illegal.
Trump governs by blitz which aligns perfectly with Project 2025 mandates. In his first presidency, Muslim bans were rushed through without legal grounding. This time, mass deportation orders are targeting millions, many with legal status. Federal troops are being deployed into American cities against protesters. Entire agencies are gutted overnight. The speed is the strategy: break the system faster than courts can respond.
Edict 2: Never admit you were wrong.
Every lie becomes the new truth. (fascist far-right media, like Fox News and others, helps with that) The 2020 election was “stolen.” COVID numbers were “inflated.” Job reports “rigged.” Instead of correcting course, Trump doubles down, weaponizing denial to destroy public trust. Project 2025 builds this into policy: corrupt the data, politicize the agencies, erase accountability.
Staffing the Machine
We see these mandates played out in real time. This isn’t improvisation. It’s a plan, and Project 2025 isn’t just a book - it’s a personnel file and a manual. Miller, Vought, and Heritage operatives populate every corner of Trump’s administration. Their mission: purge civil servants, replace them with loyalists, and ensure no bureaucrat resists the edicts. Competence is irrelevant. Typical of Authoritarian regimes, obedience is everything.
Racist Dog Whistles Become Policy
The manual’s immigration agenda is written in the language of racial fear: “Invasion,” “chain migration,” “mass migration events.” The results are predictable - mass deportations of people of color, including those with asylum claims, Temporary Protected Status, or legal residency. 4
But when it comes to white South Africans, Trump bent the rules. In 2025, his administration granted refugee status to nearly sixty Afrikaners under a “humanitarian” exception, citing the debunked claim of “white genocide” in South Africa.5 Violence there is real—but not racially targeted, and certainly not genocide.6 Still, whiteness opened the door. Brown asylum-seekers are caged and expelled. White asylum-seekers are welcomed. That double standard isn’t just hypocrisy—it’s policy.
Patriarchy as Policy
Project 2025 is just as ruthless with women. It calls for banning abortion pills, tying welfare to marriage, defunding childcare, and reinforcing “traditional” family roles under a Christian nationalist vision.7 Women’s independence isn’t collateral damage. It’s the target, and they are doing it in record time.
The Heritage Foundation’s patriarchal goals also had a powerful head start. With Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments, the Court swung to the right and overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. That single decision stripped half the country of a constitutional right they had lived with for fifty years, and it laid the groundwork for Project 2025’s broader effort to codify women’s subordination into federal law.
Trump’s personal record fits the pattern. He has mocked women’s appearances, bragged about sexual assault, and stacked the courts with judges intent on rolling back reproductive freedom. Project 2025 doesn’t invent this worldview. It systematizes it.
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.” 8
Plutocracy as Policy
If racism and patriarchy are Project 2025’s social pillars, plutocracy is its economic foundation: a government by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 delivered nearly $2 trillion in benefits that disproportionately favored corporations and the ultra-rich, while leaving crumbs for the poor and middle class. Project 2025 doubles down, calling for further estate tax rollbacks, capital gains relief, and deregulation that funnels even more wealth upward.
At the same time, it slashes the very programs ordinary families rely on: food assistance, Medicaid, housing support, and public education. It’s a one-two punch; enrich the wealthy while starving everyone else.
Tariffs are another hidden tax. Trump has already imposed sweeping tariffs that raise prices on everyday goods, from groceries to clothing to household basics. The wealthy can absorb the increase. The working and middle class cannot.
And by eliminating renewable energy projects already underway—wind, solar, and clean grid infrastructure, Project 2025 guarantees higher energy costs, while locking the country back into dependence on fossil fuels. Families will pay more for power, while oil and gas executives cash in.
In spite of what far-right influencers and politicians label it, this is not economic populism. It’s economic extraction. A government designed to strip wealth from the many and hand it to the few. A white patriarchal plutocracy in its purest form.
Act Before It’s Too Late
Two edicts. One manual. One man. That’s all it takes to end democracy in America.
Authoritarians thrive on silence. Project 2025 is not just a blueprint on a shelf — it’s already being enforced. If this alarms you, good. It should.
Democracy won’t defend itself. But, together, we can.
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