Trump’s Authoritarian Campaign: A Closer Look at Project 2025

Having attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden through various undemocratic maneuvers, Donald Trump is now back on the campaign trail for the U.S. presidency, embracing an increasingly authoritarian tone. Last December, he made headlines by declaring his intention to be a dictator “on day one,” and he has continued to express admiration for authoritarian figures such as Viktor Orbán and Xi Jinping. “They’re all smart, tough,” he remarked at a recent rally. “They love their country… and Orbán was right: we have to have somebody that can protect us.”

However, it is not just Trump’s own rhetoric that raises alarms about a potential drift towards authoritarianism. There exists a meticulously detailed and publicly accessible blueprint aimed at dismantling the current American political order in favor of something considerably more extreme. This agenda is known as Project 2025, a long-standing initiative designed to outline a radical plan for a future Republican presidential administration, which its proponents hope will commence in January 2024.

The Blueprint Behind Project 2025

Project 2025 is a collaboration involving hundreds of former Trump appointees, conservative thinkers, and long-established right-wing lobbying groups. They have collectively produced a comprehensive 900-plus-page document titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”, detailing how a future conservative president could fundamentally reshape the American federal system. This manifesto draws inspiration from the agenda crafted by supporters of Ronald Reagan at the close of the 1970s but goes much further in its polarizing proposals. Many of its contents have left Trump’s critics profoundly unsettled.

Project 2025 has been developed under the aegis of the Heritage Foundation, which proudly declares itself as “the nation’s premier conservative think tank.” Historically, the foundation has aligned itself with various mainstream Republicans who have since become marginalized or even excluded from their party. Nevertheless, the Heritage Foundation has fully embraced Trumpism since his initial victory in 2016, further radicalizing its stance after his loss in 2020.

Kevin Roberts, the current president of the Heritage Foundation, is explicit about the organization’s mission. In an interview with far-right figure Steve Bannon earlier this year, he asserted, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

A Frightening Vision for the Future

In the wake of these declarations, the Heritage Foundation accused the Biden administration of possessing “the means, but perhaps also the intent, to circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president,” claiming, “as things stand right now, there is a 0% chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America.” This perspective frames the current political landscape in near-apocalyptic terms, viewing it as a pivotal moment that necessitates sweeping and, at times, ruthless reforms from the top down. The flagship document of Project 2025 outlines these radical thoughts for all to see.

Four Pillars of Change

The Mandate for Leadership, touted as “the work of the entire conservative movement,” is structured around what it refers to as “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future.” These fronts include:

• Restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life and protecting children.
• Dismantling the administrative state and returning self-governance to the American people.
• Defending national sovereignty, borders, and resources against global threats.
• Securing God-given individual rights to live freely, as enshrined in the Constitution.

While these phrases might seem typical within conservative circles, the specifics that support them venture far outside the mainstream. Under the section focused on “family,” the authors contend that “in many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.”

The document prioritizes not only economic support for families but also mandates that policymakers elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top concern, even suggesting the use of government power—such as through the tax code—to restore the American family. This goes beyond merely providing tax incentives to married couples with children.

Moreover, the authors demand that the next right-wing president “must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.” The mandate states that all references to sexual orientation, gender, reproductive rights, and abortion should be expunged from every federal rule, regulation, and piece of legislation, arguing that such language deprives Americans of their First Amendment rights.

The manifesto further asserts that “schools serve parents, not the other way around,” condemns big tech for engaging in “industrial-scale child abuse,” and calls for a total ban on pornography. The report boldly declares, “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classified as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

Perhaps most incendiary of all, the document heralds the fall of Roe v. Wade—the Supreme Court ruling that upheld abortion rights—as “the greatest pro-family win in a generation.” It asserts that the Dobbs decision that overturned it is “just the beginning,” declaring that the next president must enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will endorse while utilizing existing federal powers to safeguard innocent life. This includes effectively banning “abortifacients,” which refers to any substance that may induce abortion.

A War on Bureaucracy

While many of Project 2025’s proposals are extreme, the backlash following the end of Roe v. Wade has not dissipated. The future of reproductive rights is poised to remain a galvanizing issue for Democrats, who are actively working to illuminate the project’s intentions to tighten restrictions on abortion from every angle, including limiting access to abortion pills and emergency contraceptives.

Project 2025 is also openly committed to “dismantling the administrative state,” an idea that Trump’s allies have been promoting since his first term in office began in 2017. In 2017, Steve Bannon proclaimed that the administration’s primary mission would be “the deconstruction of the administrative state,” which involves significantly reducing the size of the federal government, including the complete abolition of certain agencies.

Currently, the U.S. president’s capacity to circumvent or dismantle the fundamental structures of government is largely restricted by Congress, the courts, the Constitution, and existing laws. Furthermore, the federal bureaucracy is filled not only with presidential appointees but also with numerous career civil servants. Project 2025’s mandate explicitly calls for this model of governance to be obliterated and replaced with a system that drastically enhances presidential authority while eroding congressional checks and balances.

The authors argue that this is merely a restoration of the correct order of governance, framing their proposals as a necessary culture war against what they term “the great awokening.” In the words of Roberts, “The left derives its power from the institutions they control, but those institutions are only powerful to the extent that constitutional officers surrender their own legitimate authority to them.”

A president who refuses to capitulate and utilizes their office to reestablish constitutional authority over federal policymaking can begin to rectify decades of corruption and remove thousands of bureaucrats who have long abused their positions of public trust, according to the manifesto.

Public Response and Political Implications

As Project 2025 gained wider recognition in the summer of 2024, Trump took the unexpected step of publicly distancing himself from the initiative, even claiming ignorance of its existence. Senior members of his campaign team have also disavowed any connection to the project, arguing that its radical proposals could alienate more moderate voters. Recently, senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita described the project’s organizers as “a pain in the ass,” dismissing any suggestion that their proposals would be implemented by default as “complete and utter bullshit.”

Despite these denials, members of the project’s author list have made appearances at this year’s Republican National Convention, with Trump himself mentioning one of them, Tom Homan, by name. Although Trump has explicitly stated he is unaware of the project, he has previously praised the Heritage Foundation, commending its role in formulating a governing agenda.

The Democrats have seized on the project’s name and its extremist proposals, amplifying awareness of it in recent weeks, especially after Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee. Prominent party figures, from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to Hillary Clinton, have shared links to articles explaining Project 2025, aiming to tightly associate the Trump-Vance ticket with its agenda.

New polling data indicates that they may be onto something significant. According to the progressive-leaning polling organization Navigator, awareness of Project 2025 among the American public is unusually high for a Washington think tank initiative, and sentiment is shifting against it.

In this charged political climate, Harris is invoking the project’s name during her campaign events, capitalizing on a renewed wave of Democratic enthusiasm. “(Trump) and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class,” she proclaimed at her inaugural rally as a full-fledged candidate, eliciting boos from her energized audience. “Like, we know we’ve gotta take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing?”