WATCH: Project 2025: Trump’s Second Term Not-So-Secret Plan

0:00 | Hello and welcome to Project 2025, a warning. I’m Molly Jungfast, a writer, a podcaster,

0:06 | and a person you occasionally see on cable news. Today I’m talking to Thomas Zimmer,

0:11 | a historian at Georgetown University and author of the newsletter Democracy Americana, who’s done

0:16 | some of the most thorough writing there is on the implications of Project 2025. But before we start

0:23 | that conversation, let’s get you up to speed. Last year, the influential right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, unveiled Project 2025. It is a roadmap for what another Trump administration

0:35 | would look like. It instructs independent agencies or agencies that would have been independent under

0:42 | other administrations, such as the Department of Justice, to be placed under direct presidential

0:47 | control. This basically gives the president a lot more power than a president has ever had before.

0:52 | And I know right now you may be thinking that this sounds a little crazy, like something one of your

0:58 | friends who reads a little too much Facebook sends you. But the Heritage Foundation developed and then

1:04 | linked the Project 2025 mission statement right from their website. The plan is titled “Mandate

1:10 | for Leadership 2025, the Conservative Promise.” They are not trying to hide it. In fact, they go

1:16 | on television and brag about it. And what they brag about is a plan to reshape America into the

1:35 | cutting Medicare, defunding the FBI and Homeland Security, banning sexual orientation and gender

1:42 | identity education, strictly limiting contraceptives and regulating in vitro fertilization,

1:55 | raising prescription drug prices, eliminating the Department of Education, banning African American

2:01 | and gender studies at all levels of education, banning books and curriculum about slavery,

2:06 | use of the military to break up domestic protests, ending birthright citizenship, eliminating federal

2:13 | agencies like the FDA, EPA and NOAA. And despite how crazy that sounds, it’s only the tip of the

2:19 | iceberg. Now you may be thinking, the Heritage Foundation isn’t Donald Trump. It isn’t his presidential campaign or the Republican Party. But the Heritage Foundation has been the laboratory

2:29 | for many of the conservative policies of the last half century. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s

2:35 | Senator Marco Rubio from the state of Florida. And it’s good to see you and thank you to Heritage for inviting us here, giving us this opportunity and for all the scholarship that they do here

2:43 | that really serves as a guidepost for a lot of the public policy we choose to make. These policies

2:49 | are wildly unpopular and Trump has tried to cover up his ties to them, namely Russ Vought and John

2:55 | McEntee. Let’s discuss these guys. Christian nationalist Russ Vought, an author of Project 2025,

3:01 | serves as the policy director of the Republican Party platform writing committee for the RNC. You

3:07 | know, the organization that Trump’s daughter-in-law runs that pays many of his legal fees. And you may

3:12 | remember right-wing dating app entrepreneur John McEntee, who was Trump’s body man and nicknamed

3:19 | deputy president, joined Project 2025 to write the database for who the Trump administration should

3:25 | hire. And Trump’s own insiders say he will be a big part of the next Trump administration.

3:30 | But a clear sign of Trump’s tether to Project 2025 is that Trump’s name appears in the document

3:37 | 312 times. They are indeed one in the same. And if you don’t take this seriously, here’s Heritage

3:45 | Foundation president Kevin Roberts and he’s going to show you just how serious they are. We are

3:50 | going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be

3:55 | despairing. No one should be discouraged. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday

4:00 | and in spite of all of the injustice, which of course friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail. Well, that sounds threatening. We are in the

4:10 | process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.

4:15 | I’m starting to think that these people may actually be very serious about making this

4:21 | happen. Kevin Roberts also said that he saw Heritage’s role as institutionalizing Trumpism,

4:26 | adding that the Trump administration with the best of intentions simply got off to a slow start.

4:32 | Heritage and its allies in Project 2025 believe that that slow start should never be repeated.

4:39 | So now that we’ve established that Project 2025 is the plan that Trump will use to reshape America

4:46 | and that it will be even more insane than his first administration, let’s bring in the brilliant

4:51 | Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer to give us some more of the details on Project 2025. Welcome,

4:57 | Thomas, to this Project 2025 YouTube series. The reason that I decided that it was so important we

5:05 | do this was because of the interview I did with you. Some people may not know what Project 2025 is.

5:11 | So can you just give us a sort of very nuts and bolts explanation of what it is? Yes. So Project

5:18 | 2025 is the name of a massive planning operation on the right. It’s spearheaded by the Heritage

5:25 | Foundation. It was launched about two years ago in the spring of 2022, and it has brought together

5:30 | much of the right-wing machinery of think tanks and lobbying groups and political institutions

5:36 | with the goal of making sure that the next Republican presidency would be a much more effective, much more ruthless right-wing regime. I think it’s best to understand Project 2025 as the

5:48 | American Rights Declaration of War on the idea of a multiracial, pluralistic, diverse society. Project

5:54 | 2025 is a plan to execute what amounts to a comprehensive authoritarian takeover of American

6:00 | government and transform government into a machine that serves only two purposes. First, exacting

6:06 | revenge on what they call the woke leftist globalist enemy, and secondly, imposing a

6:12 | minoritarian reactionary vision of white Christian patriarchal order on society. So that’s sort of

6:18 | the very, very big picture understanding, I think, of what Project 2025 is. Can we talk a little bit

6:24 | now about the sort of like day-to-day implications of what America under Project 2025 would look like?

6:33 | For example, a lot of things during the first Trump administration that he tried to do, he

6:39 | wasn’t able to do. The Muslim ban, wanting to shut down the border, you know, stuff that, like his

6:45 | sort of big dreams, deportation squads. What would it look like now? Like, what things do you think

6:52 | he could realistically get going right away? Yeah, I mean, it’s really important to sort of

6:57 | understand that the diagnosis from which they start, from which all of these planning efforts on the right start, is that they see the first Trump administration as a failure. Like, they are

7:08 | very clear that they weren’t ready. Trump world wasn’t ready in 2017. They had no plans. They had

7:14 | no personnel to implement whatever plans they didn’t have. And they had very little understanding

7:19 | of the vast and powerful machine that is the American government. And again, no one understands

7:24 | this better than they do. And they think that they were, because they didn’t have personnel, they

7:29 | had to rely on these people, like normal lawyers and bureaucrats and like normal people, right?

7:37 | And they see, they think these people sabotaged them. And so this time, again, they feel like

7:42 | we’re going to have plans. We’re going to purge the American government from all these people who sabotaged us in the first time around. We’re going to replace them with an army of thousands of

7:53 | loyalists and ideological conformists who they are looking, actively looking for. That is part of

7:59 | Project 2025. The policy agenda is only one part of Project 2025. The overall planning operation

8:06 | goes far beyond that. Again, they’re looking for thousands of people that they can put into government into these positions. What would that amount to? I mean, look, the first thing it would

8:15 | amount to is a vastly worse government. – Because a lot of these people just, these are government

8:21 | jobs. They’re not partisan. And so you’re removing people like from the EPA, which they hate the EPA,

8:29 | but you still want to make sure water doesn’t have lead in it, right? I mean, there are certain

8:34 | small things that will be fucked up that we can’t even sort of quantify, right? – Yes. I think,

8:42 | again, this is probably the point. So maybe talk about how extreme the vision of sort of a purge

8:49 | is that they want to institute here, right? They want to come in and look, there’s about 4,000 political appointees in American government, right? And every administration, when they come in,

9:00 | they look at all these political appointments. These are people sort of at the higher end of all these departments and agencies. And every administration looks at them, and every

9:10 | administration replaces, you know, the number of fluctuates, but usually about 1,000 people or so,

9:16 | right? So every administration brings in about 1,000 people. But other than that, they let these normal people, bureaucrats, civil servants, they let them do their job, because that’s the whole

9:25 | point about the civil service is you have people who are insulated from direct political control,

9:31 | and they are experts, they know their jobs, they do their jobs, right? So sort of untouched by,

9:36 | you know, oh, there’s a new administration who are going to replace the whole personnel.

9:42 | Now, Project 2025 wants to do something entirely different. They want to come in and convert tens

9:48 | of thousands of career civil service positions into political appointments, starting with anyone,

9:55 | they say, in sort of a policy-adjacent position or a policy advisory role, but these terms really don’t mean anything. The goal is to strip all these people of their civil service protections

10:05 | in order to make them fireable and then fire them. Because, again, if you have civil service protection, you can’t just be fired for no reason. But they want to convert them into political

10:13 | appointments, fire them, and then replace them with an army of loyalists and ideological conformists.

10:19 | They’re talking about numbers, again, fluctuate, but something like 50,000 people. They want to

10:25 | come in, fire, replace by their own people. But think about who they want to bring in here.

10:30 | These would be people whose sole qualification is that they are ideologically on board with the

10:37 | Trumpist project. These wouldn’t be experts, right? These wouldn’t be people with many years,

10:42 | even decades of experience in these, again, highly specialized, highly technical jobs.

10:50 | These would just be ideological conformists. And again, this would make government so much worse.

10:56 | It would make government vastly less functional, right? Even beyond just the fact that it would

11:03 | turn government into this authoritarian revenge machine, it would just function worse, right?

11:09 | Because you have people who just have no idea what they’re doing. >> Yeah, how government works. Can you explain the four pillars?

11:16 | >> Yes, that is their own terminology, the four pillars. So in their own words, Project 2025

11:23 | consists of four pillars. One is the policy agenda. That is spelled out in this, again,

11:28 | 900 or so page report they have published. It is titled Mandate for Leadership, a Conservative

11:34 | Promise. That’s one of the four pillars. Second one is a personnel database intended to build

11:40 | an army of loyalists. That’s the second pillar. Third one is what they call a training effort

11:46 | that currently consists of like online courses. They call it the Presidential Administration

11:51 | Academy. So basically to get these loyalists who they find and all the sort of political appointees

11:57 | ready to implement the right wing agenda. That’s the third part. And then finally, the fourth pillar,

12:03 | Project 2025 vows to create what they call a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180

12:10 | days of the new administration to, quote, bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the left’s

12:16 | devastating policies. That’s the fourth pillar. Now this fourth pillar, this playbook, this sort of emergency playbook for the first six months in power, at this point is still distinctly vague,

12:27 | and seems to exist only in the form of sort of an announcement of future actions. So that has not been published yet. They’re working on this. That’s not out yet. But these are the four pillars.

12:36 | So that’s again, the policy agenda that’s of 900 page report is only one part of this much broader

12:42 | planning operation. Can you for two seconds explain sort of this first 180 days plan?

12:52 | I mean, again, we don’t know what that will be in substance, right? There’s been some interesting

12:57 | reporting in like the last week, last few days about this guy Russell Vaught, who supposedly is

13:05 | intimately involved in drafting this, maybe even the head of that operation of this sort of 180

13:11 | day playbook. Again, this is they’re keeping this under wraps. We don’t know. But it speaks to this

13:17 | broader sense of urgency that they feel, right? The sense that we don’t have much time left.

13:22 | That sort of threw out this 900 page policy report. It’s stressed everywhere. We don’t have

13:28 | much time left. This is our last chance. We need to act immediately. We need to act swiftly and

13:34 | decisively. And so that’s why in addition to outlining their overall policy agenda in this

13:40 | sort of 900 page report, they want to flank that by an also here is what we’re going to do

13:47 | immediately. And that probably means through executive orders, presentional executive orders,

13:52 | emergency measures. I mean, honestly, who knows at this point, because clearly, right, clearly,

13:58 | they do not feel constrained by norms or precedent. Clearly, one of the big regrets that they have,

14:04 | and I mean, they meaning Trump himself, but also the people behind Project 2025 is that they didn’t

14:09 | invoke the Insurrection Act in the summer of 2020 to go into these blue cities and oppress

14:16 | the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Very clearly and very openly, they say that was a mistake. That was a mistake because we were listening to these lawyers in and

14:26 | around the White House who had some qualms about legality and precedent and norm and all that good

14:31 | stuff. And they think that was a big mistake. That’s what Trump means when he says there was

14:37 | a big Time magazine piece where they had some long interviews with Trump. And it started with

14:43 | a Trump quote saying, “I was too nice the first time around.” That’s exactly how these Project

14:48 | 2025 people also feel. We were too nice. We were listening to these people who said to us,

14:53 | “You should not invoke the Insurrection Act,” which would have allowed them to send federal troops into Washington, D.C. to oppress protests. And so when they say

15:04 | 180-day playbook, like emergency measures, that’s the stuff that’s on the table here, right?

15:10 | Like how about we invoke the Insurrection Act to “restore order,” which means oppressing protests.

15:16 | It’s so incredibly scary and insane. If you want to weigh in on this, Steve Bannon,

15:24 | on Trump’s Project 2025, we mock your fear. We want you to fear there will be accountability.

15:29 | We are going to hold everyone who opposes Trump responsible. This will come with authority, the authority of Donald Trump. This is actually interesting. So Steve Bannon

15:37 | is not Project 2025, right? So he’s not involved directly in this project, nor is Trump, right?

15:44 | So it’s really important to understand there are different factions on the right, Trump and Trump

15:50 | Campaign being one of them, but there are others. And they’re all involved in some kind of planning operation. And Project 2025 is one of those. It stands out because it has united so much of the

16:00 | right-wing machinery, but there are different factions. What is interesting about these other parts, Trump himself or Bannon, referring to Project 2025, is that I think it would be a

16:12 | really big misunderstanding to look at this and say, “Oh, it’s not Trump and Trump doesn’t care

16:17 | about these big plans.” And like, “Okay, they can put out like a thousand page policy report. Who

16:23 | cares? Trump’s not going to read it.” I think that would be a big misunderstanding. These people who are involved in Project 2025, they are well-connected to other parts of the right.

16:32 | They are well-connected to the right-wing, even the most extremist fringe, some of the key actors behind Project 2025. Again, they are closely connected to Bannon. They go on Bannon’s podcast.

16:42 | They talk to him, but they’re also closely connected to the inner circle around Trump. Partly they’re even officially part of Trump Campaign efforts. So these are all connected

16:52 | efforts. They’re not all the same, and there are even rivalries between these different factions. They don’t all like each other. They will, in case Trump were to win the election. I’m sure

17:02 | they would be sort of fighting over influence and power. That’s just how that stuff goes.

17:08 | But again, this is deeply and intimately connected to all parts of the right. And the most important

17:14 | thing is they really fundamentally agree on the broad outlines of what they want to do with power.

17:20 | So even if you want to say, “Oh, this isn’t exactly the right thing that the Trump Campaign is putting

17:26 | out there,” in broad strokes, they are very much in agreement about what they want to do with power if

17:32 | they get back to the White House. Yeah. So that, I think, is really important. Not everyone is from

17:40 | the same organization, right? Like Steve Bannon is not related to the Heritage Foundation, is not.

17:45 | But all of their needs and desires align completely. Yeah. I mean, look, the one thing

17:55 | they can all agree on, regardless of how much they may despise each other on a personal level,

18:00 | and these people, they’re all pretty odious, honestly. So they’re like, “They don’t like each other necessarily.” But the one thing they can all agree on is, first of all, they hate the left more,

18:10 | regardless of how much they– and by left, they really mean any attempt at leveling discriminatory

18:18 | hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth. That’s what they call the left. So this is not a

18:24 | narrow sense of the American left and something that maybe you and I would call the left.

18:29 | Broadly, it’s like any attempt to make this into anything but a society that is defined by

18:37 | white Christian patriarchal domination. That’s the left, and they despise it, and they think it has–

18:42 | they are convinced that they are under siege by this leftist egalitarian project. They are

18:48 | convinced that the “left” has basically managed to overtake all institutions of American life,

18:54 | including the American government. They really believe this, by the way. They really believe in these conspiratorial ideas of a vast leftist communist socialist walk. It doesn’t matter. They

19:04 | just use these terms interchangeably. For them, again, anything that levels discriminatory hierarchies is just left socialist communist walk, doesn’t matter. And they really believe

19:14 | there’s this vast conspiracy that has taken over all institutions of American life. And so they’re all convinced– and when I say all, I mean all these different factions on the right, they are

19:22 | convinced that “normal conservatism” is just not enough to save their understanding of “real

19:30 | America.” And so they lust for this more radical politics and what they now openly and aggressively

19:37 | refer to as a counter-revolution. And that’s how they define their project, this is a counter-revolutionary project against the supposed leftist takeover of America.

19:46 | RISA GOLUBOFF-MARTIN So part of this authoritarian thing where the left is so dangerous that we have to do extraordinary things, right? Like this is this

19:58 | sort of weird way of thinking, this sort of right-stag fire, right? It’s an authoritarian trope, right?

20:06 | MARTIN WOLFSTAFF It’s probably the key thing to understand about the American right today is

20:12 | of the permission structure that governs conservative politics. We should really be

20:17 | asking ourselves, how are they giving themselves permission to go along with Trump, go along with,

20:23 | again, in 2016, a lot of these people who are now all in on this of Trumpian project, who are deeply

20:30 | engaged in these planning operations, they said they didn’t like Trump, they said they despise Trump, they initially even pretended to oppose Trump before falling quickly in line. So the

20:41 | question is, how are they giving themselves permission to go along with this? And how are they giving themselves permission to openly renounce supposed pillars of conservatism,

20:50 | like small government and all that stuff, you know? That they insisted we accept as sort of

20:56 | the defining features of conservatism as a political project. And now they are even rhetorically openly, aggressively throwing all that overboard and are basically saying,

21:06 | no, we need to weaponize the state, we need to weaponize government, mobilize the coercive powers of government against our enemies. And they’re giving themselves permission by basically

21:15 | saying, look, the left has already gone much further. Everything we do is only in reaction to

21:22 | a radicalized leftist, woke globalist, whatever enemy that has already started its revolutionary

21:29 | assault on America, that has already started its violent assault on America, right? That’s why every

21:35 | time you mention something about, hey, the right is really sort of openly endorsing vigilante

21:41 | violence, you get this sort of flood of people telling you that, oh, where were you in the summer

21:46 | of 2020 when these leftist barbarians burned down Portland? Like this is a, this is accepted

21:52 | dogma on the right, that the left is already engaged in this kind of project and that they are basically not only justified in responding with this kind of radicalized politics, but that it is

22:02 | deeply necessary to do that. >> That’s the thinking is that this is extraordinary measures, but these

22:07 | extraordinary measures are in fact prompted, right? >> That is precisely right. They truly believe that

22:13 | they are sort of under siege. They see themselves, all of these people, and you see this when you read Project 2025. If you even just read, they put out this 900 page policy report, and I’m not

22:24 | expecting anyone to read the whole thing. I mean, I did, but you know, it’s not fun. But there’s a

22:30 | foreword that was written by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts. It’s only about

22:36 | 15, 16 pages long. And I really, I would really like to like have everyone read this, just a

22:41 | foreword because he is so clear about this idea that he says, look, we are under siege, right? We

22:48 | are the noble defenders of real America, real sort of white Christian patriarchal America.

22:54 | And we are the defenders of this noble enterprise. We are under siege from these leftist globalist

23:00 | forces. And the only thing we’re going to be able to save America, the only version of America that

23:06 | they are willing to accept is by again, like no more talk about small government, no more

23:13 | restraint, no more compromise. It’s sort of a radical, openly, aggressively, explicitly

23:19 | radical politics is now a counter revolution is now what is needed. And he, like honestly, he could not be clearer, right? If someone thinks, hey, not sure if I want to believe this sort of,

23:29 | I don’t know, lefty liberal professor, just read what they are saying. They could not possibly be

23:34 | clearer about what it is that is animating them. >> Hi, I just want to stop for one second. The

23:39 | reason we put this on YouTube for free is because we want you to know what a second Trump term will

23:45 | look like. It would really help us if you comment, click like and send this to a friend or three.

23:51 | Thank you so much. Back to the interview. Some of the highlights in this report are they talk about

24:00 | Robert’s praises, Viktor Orban, his regime in Hungary advocates for destroying the administrative

24:07 | state and firing federal employees. Explain to us why that’s so important. >> This free,

24:14 | different, important things that you said there, right? So the first thing is this explicit love for now, right now it is Viktor Orban specifically. I mean, find yourself someone in life who loves

24:25 | you half as much as the American right loves Viktor Orban. There’s a long tradition of the

24:30 | American right sort of looking to foreign authoritarian leaders and admiring them. This

24:36 | starts in the early 20th century with the German emperor and goes all the way to Franco,

24:42 | Francisco Franco in Spain, which they just adored and loved as kind of like this is the kind of

24:48 | Catholic Christian kind of society that we want. Right now it’s Orban. And what they see in Orban

24:54 | is just, again, someone who supposedly has managed to stem the tide of leftist liberalism and sort of

25:01 | Orban himself presents himself explicitly as an illiberal democracy is what he calls Hungary,

25:07 | right? And the idea is just, oh, this is some kind of white Christian patriarchal wonderland

25:13 | where men still get to be men and all these enemies, the enemy within, you know, all the

25:19 | gay people and all the trans people and they still, they understand their place, which is they need to be quiet and don’t expect like equality and all that stuff. That’s what the

25:28 | American right sees in Hungary. And that’s what they want to transplant to over here. And again,

25:33 | what Project 2025 suggests is the way to do that is to, well, here’s of the second thing you said,

25:40 | right? Dismantle the administrative state. That’s only one half of this project. It’s really

25:46 | important to not fall for sort of the small government rhetoric. Right. That’s bullshit.

25:51 | Yeah. I mean, it’s ultimately, look, they want to dismantle some parts of government, some parts of the state. They want to rob government of any tool that could be used to

26:01 | create a fairer, more sort of egalitarian society. That needs to go. That’s out. That’s the dismantling

26:08 | part. But then there is a weaponizing part, a mobilizing part that has nothing to do with dismantling. And that goes to, again, they with a laser focus in this report, again, over 900 pages,

26:20 | they go through all the departments, all these federal agencies, many of which I’m fairly certain

26:27 | most people have probably not a clear understanding of what those actually do. But these people, they understand government as a machine. They understand what these departments

26:37 | do. And with a laser focus, they tell you, okay, here is something that we want to dismantle,

26:43 | because it could be used as a tool to create a fairer society. But here is something we’re going to mobilize and weaponize, because that we can use as our tool to impose our vision of

26:53 | society on America. So it’s really important to keep both of those things in mind, right? It’s not a project to dismantle the state. It is dismantling some parts and weaponizing, mobilizing others.

27:04 | – Right. And I think that’s a really, really good point. And when you think about birth control,

27:10 | or IVF, this project 2025 has really extensive writing about IVF. Can you talk about that

27:22 | and how that fits into this dismantling of the administrative state? – In general, the Department of Health and Human Services is an excellent example for

27:31 | how this is really about weaponizing the state and not actually dismantling. They say upfront,

27:37 | they want to turn the Department of Health and Human Services into what they call the Department of Life. And of course, they mean sort of white Christian patriarchal life.

27:45 | Specifically with abortion, right? What that means is they’re very clear about basically instituting a total abortion ban through the back door, right? So they’re saying this is a

27:54 | direct quote, HHS, that’s again, the Department of Health and Human Services, should return to being

27:59 | known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is healthcare. So no more of this kind of, you know, woke liberal abortion is healthcare stuff, that’s out, right?

28:10 | Instead, right, they want to ban medical abortions, they want to ban what they call

28:15 | mail order abortions, they want to outlaw Miffy Pristone, the FDA wouldn’t approve abortion

28:21 | medication anymore, they would outlaw the shipping of abortion medication via the Comstock Act.

28:26 | And then they want it, and this is really something that I think is quite remarkable, they want to supercharge abortion surveillance via the CDC. So the CDC as part of that,

28:36 | so Department of Health and Human Services of infrastructure. On the one hand, they hate the CDC because of COVID, right, like the CDC that was COVID restrictions, and obviously they hate that.

28:47 | But then they understand that they can use the CDC as part of the larger crusade against

28:52 | what they call abortion tourism. So these are direct quotes from the policy report. Again,

28:57 | the problem according to Project 2025 is that quote, liberal states have now become sanctuaries

29:03 | for abortion tourism. So what they want to do with the CDC is they want to collect abortion data from

29:09 | the entire country in one place in the CDC, they want to force blue states to comply with this,

29:16 | turn over that information, which for instance, right now, California, for instance, does not, right? California does not give that information to the federal government. And they want to use,

29:24 | and this is another quote, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders,

29:34 | at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. So what they’re envisioning here is a unified data bank with comprehensive

29:43 | data on every abortion in America in the hands of a patriarchal regime lusting for control over the

29:49 | bodies of women. So again, this has nothing to do with small government, right? This is an

29:55 | authoritarian vision of how you can use government to impose your understanding, in this case,

30:01 | basically a total abortion ban, even if they don’t get legislation to that effect, which they’re

30:07 | very, they understand that they might not get a legislative abortion ban, so they have other ways

30:12 | to do it. One of the things I’m hoping you could just talk for a second about when you listen to the oral arguments for the methapristone case, you hear Thomas and Alito talking about this act,

30:26 | and it’s and they say the number, they don’t say the name of it. Explain to us sort of what the,

30:32 | how the right has gotten involved in the Comstock Act. We know that Anthony Comstock was sort of

30:38 | anti-sin evangelist of the 1800s. His goal was to keep women from being polluted by male with

30:49 | things that might, you know, make them have sex or be, you know, pornography is involved in this too.

30:56 | Can you make it make sense how this has come back, this act? This is a law that’s on the book,

31:01 | and it basically outlaws the mailing or shipping of quote-unquote obscene materials. That’s what

31:06 | it does. And so they want to use it and basically define these abortion medications, right? And

31:13 | everything to do with abortion as obscene material and thereby sort of curtail, outlaw the mailing

31:22 | and shipping of these medications and materials. So again, even if you don’t have a national

31:27 | legislative abortion ban in the country, I think it’s probably important to know. I mean, about two-thirds of abortions in the United States use medication, right? And specifically

31:39 | Mephistone. And so if you outlaw the mailing and shipping of that medication, then people just

31:44 | won’t get it. Also, like hospitals and doctors won’t have it, right? And so again, in that case,

31:51 | even if you don’t get a national abortion ban through Congress, you have basically vastly

31:57 | curtail the accessibility of how, I mean, again, the majority of abortions in this country take

32:04 | place. >> Can I ask you, one of the things that I am struck by perhaps because I might be on this

32:11 | list is the revenge stuff. Weaponize the government against enemies, so-called enemies of the state.

32:18 | That would be you and I, right? >> Here’s maybe where we can sort of differentiate between Project

32:23 | 2025 in a narrow sense, which is about government more narrowly defined, and then sort of the Trump

32:30 | project more broadly, right? Project 2025 is specifically about government, government employees,

32:36 | civil servants. So right, so there’s, and then of course, I mean, the question is, once they have replaced all these people with their own loyalists, what happens then? But this isn’t like, so I’m,

32:47 | you know, I work as a private university as a professor, so I’m not on the radar for Project

32:52 | 2025 in a narrow sense. But what is true, of course, is that, I mean, it’s entirely

32:57 | animated by this idea that you have to turn government into a revenge machine, right? It’s

33:03 | explicitly, and by the way, you saw this in the right wing reactions to the Trump verdicts,

33:09 | even from people who supposedly, again, have been telling us for years that they don’t like

33:14 | Trump very much, but they hate the left more. It’s entirely about, oh, see, the left is weaponizing

33:21 | the justice system, right? The left is weaponizing the state. So what can we do other than once we

33:27 | get back to power, do the same thing? So there’s an enormous amount of projection going on here,

33:33 | but it’s also this, again, this permission structure where they say, oh, look, the left has already “politicized” the Department of Justice or the justice system more generally. So when we

33:45 | get back to power, of course, we’re going to do that, right? Of course, we’re going to politicize the Department of Justice. Of course, we’re going to use the Department of Justice to go after our

33:53 | enemies. And Trump may be slightly more explicit about this when he says, oh, yeah, clearly, like,

33:59 | we’re going to go after Joe Biden and we’re going to go after all my enemies. But Project 2025 is

34:04 | also abundantly clear. There’s not going to be anything like an autonomous Department of Justice,

34:12 | right? No more autonomy. The Department of Justice will function as a tool to enact the regime’s

34:18 | agenda. And they are very explicit about that. >> And also probably this is like one of the

34:24 | things you see in authoritarian countries like the IRS goes after Trump’s enemies.

34:30 | >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, again, like once you have the people in position in these

34:36 | commissions departments, agencies, right, who are on board with your project, there’s no one left to

34:42 | say, hey, this doesn’t seem right. This is not how we usually operate. We’re not supposed to do this.

34:48 | That’s explicitly what happened in the first Trump administration. There was a lot of that going on,

34:55 | right? There was a lot of just people, quote unquote, bureaucrats, civil servants saying,

35:01 | wait, this is not okay. I’m not on board with this. I’m just going to keep doing my job, right?

35:07 | And so again, because they weren’t ready in 2017, and they didn’t have their own people, and they also just they didn’t understand how government worked. This is a complex,

35:16 | a very complicated machine. But that has completely flipped. Like if you read this report,

35:21 | one thing you can’t say is, these are not dummies, right? These are not dumb people. This time,

35:27 | they understand government. They have a precise understanding of how this machine works. But that also means they have a precise understanding of like what parts of the machine they can

35:37 | use to their own ends. So it’s a completely different, we’re looking at a completely different ballgame compared to 2017. >> Can you just like sort of sketch out

35:47 | the worst case scenario for us? >> It’s an interesting question to think about what’s actually going to happen in like January 2025 and onwards, right? So if Trump were to win

35:59 | the election, win the Electoral College, get to power, back to power, I don’t think the right way

36:05 | to think about this is to say they will be able to implement all of these plans exactly the way

36:11 | they’ve outlined them. That’s just not how the world works, right? That’s not how that works. But I think the key takeaway for me from, again, trying to grasp sort of what’s happening here is

36:23 | that if they were to win the 2024 election, they would be much better prepared than the last time.

36:28 | And also they would operate under conditions that are vastly more favorable to their cause.

36:33 | And I think that’s really important. So I mean, I think there’s at least three sort of broader context factors that make the conditions more favorable to them. First of all, the next right

36:43 | wing regime could count on a game changing reactionary super majority on the Supreme Court.

36:49 | That was just not the case during Trump’s first presidency. Let’s remember that, right? That is a

36:54 | big deal. Second thing is, this would be a very different right of a very different Republican

37:00 | Party from the one that came to power in 2017. And all by the way, that starts with Trump himself. The idea that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump is massively misleading. It

37:10 | obscures the drastic radicalization of him as of the right’s undisputed leader. And beyond Trump,

37:17 | I mean, the right’s significant radicalization has found its manifestation in an almost fully

37:23 | Trumpified GOP. Right? So even people like, I don’t know if people even remember them. Do you remember Mitt Romney? I mean, I know you do. But Liz Cheney, people who drew the line somewhere,

37:35 | right? They drew the line at violent insurrection against the government. That’s where they drew the

37:40 | line. These people are out. They have been ostracized from the Republican Party, right? This is not the same Republican Party as the one in, I’m not saying the Republican Party in 2017

37:49 | was like a moderate political force. That’s not what I’m saying. But still, this is a difference of fully Trumpified GOP. And finally, I think resistance to the right wing regime, and not just

37:59 | coming from the left, but also from whatever skepticism still remains among Republicans,

38:05 | would face a level of violent threat far beyond anything the country experienced during the first

38:11 | Trump presidency, right? Like again, these threats of violence, they have reached a completely

38:16 | different level. Threats of violence against federal officials, threats of violence against

38:21 | federal judges, threats of violence against election officials. Like every election official

38:27 | in the country knows if they certify a Biden election victory, like they will be getting these

38:34 | massive, serious violent threats from Trump world, from MAGA world, from the right wing base.

38:41 | The general acceptance of political violence amongst people on the right has drastically risen

38:46 | over the past few years. More and more people are explicitly saying that they think political violence against the enemy is not only justified but necessary. This is a different environment

38:56 | from like 2017. And I think Americans may want to push back. Like, again, the majority of Americans

39:02 | is not on board with any of this, right? The clear majority, like numerical majority of Americans, rejects all this stuff. But I think it would be far harder and far more dangerous this time to push

39:13 | back because of, again, the kind of the rise of violent threat that we have been experiencing.

39:18 | So I think if you take all this together, this is a completely different environment. It’s just not the same. It’s just not the same game as 2017. >> It would be Russia, right?

39:28 | >> It’s not Russia, right? So I think we would be a little too casual in, I mean, Russia is really,

39:35 | really bad, right? There’s no independent media institutions in Russia left, right? People get assassinated all, like Putin openly assassinates his enemies. Think of this as like

39:45 | not a black and white functioning democracy versus Russia. Think of it as a sort of sliding scale of

39:52 | gray towards darker, darker. And I think the key thing to understand is that we as a country,

39:57 | America as a country, is significantly further down the road towards that dark place than we

40:04 | were six, seven, eight, whatever years ago. That’s sort of the thing to grapple with here, right? And that’s also sort of the thing to grapple with as we’re coming up on an election because the

40:13 | question at some point becomes, like, how long can you still sort of halt that trajectory towards

40:21 | authoritarianism through just elections, right? That’s the question that America is faced with.

40:28 | And at what point are elections just not going to be enough? That’s the situation in a place like Hungary and clearly Russia where they still have elections, right? Everyone still has elections.

40:38 | It’s almost impossible to sort of change the trajectory of the country back towards a more

40:43 | democratic, liberal kind of society. And that is sort of the trajectory that we’re on. Again,

40:50 | if Trump were to win the election, if he’s defeated, different ballgame, right? Although I think in that case, the absolute worst takeaway or assumption would be that, you know, things would

41:01 | just go back to quote unquote normal. And I don’t know, Republicans would just see the light and return to the democratic fold. >> Because we’ve now seen that that’s not happening.

41:09 | >> No, no. In fact, I think quite the opposite. Again, this whole thing, this whole operation

41:15 | is so fueled and animated by the sense of being under siege, right? By quote unquote real America

41:21 | being under siege by these quote unquote un-American leftist forces. And losing elections

41:27 | is only fueling that sentence. That’s exactly what happened after 2020. We’ve seen a significant

41:33 | radicalization after the 2020 election on the right. And I’m not talking about people who claim

41:39 | Trump won the election. That’s one subset of people, right? Who are like, no, Trump actually

41:44 | won the election. The radicalization is among people who openly sort of accept the fact that

41:51 | a clear majority of Americans voted against Trump and the Republican Party. Because they see that as

41:56 | own as proof how far these leftist un-American forces have already captured American society,

42:03 | right? And so they think that’s precisely the reason why they need to radicalize, why conservatism is no longer enough. And why the Republican Party has completely given up

42:12 | on trying to mobilize a majority, a conservative majority. That is a new thing, right? That’s not,

42:19 | like again, think back to after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012. They had this whole autopsy

42:25 | thing, right? Where explicitly the message amongst the Republican establishment was, we need to have a better outreach. We need to outreach to minorities. We can’t just do like

42:35 | white people. We need to have a broader appeal if we want to mobilize majorities. They have

42:40 | completely given up on this idea, completely given up, completely accepted the fact that they are in the minority. And that only ever more authoritarian measures can keep them in power. That’s precisely

42:52 | sort of the big shift that has happened here. >> So interesting. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. >> Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m

43:00 | sorry that we can’t have a more upbeat work. >> Thank you so much for watching this episode.

43:07 | We made this series so you can educate others in your life about the threat to American democracy that Trump’s second term would be and what Project 2025 promises. So please share this with friends.

43:19 | Click like on the video and comment so it spreads to more people on YouTube. Thanks for watching.

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