Originally by Drew Goins at www.washingtonpost.com
In short, it’s a playbook for dramatically overhauling the federal government should Republicans win control. Technically, it comes from the Heritage Foundation and not the GOP presidential campaign, which allows Trump to claim he knows no more than the average confused Googler. “Don’t fall for it,” Catherine Rampell writes. Project 2025 and the MAGA machine are inextricable, with hundreds of Trump officials taking part in the planning.
The planning of what? Let’s take a look:
- Project 2025 would steeply reduce Medicaid funding and remove medication abortion drugs from the market.
- It would shutter LGBTQ+ health programs and have the government declare that heterosexual couples are the superior family structure. The term “sexual orientation” would be forbidden from federal legislation.
- It would terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows “dreamers” to stay in the United States and would lower legal immigration limits, as well.
- It would bring the FBI under direct control of the president and eliminate the Education Department.
- It would stop expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy.
- It would make pornography illegal and imprison people who make it.
- It would officially recognize the Sabbath and infuse Judeo-Christian values throughout government.
- And it lays out how the president could purge nonpartisan civil servants and install loyalists who would accomplish all of this.
But don’t worry: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has promised that this revolution will be “bloodless” if the left acquiesces.
It is no wonder, the Editorial Board writes, that Trump wants the official GOP platform “to be as anodyne and vague as possible.” But his intentions are anything but.
Catherine allows that Trump might not know some of the particulars of Project 2025 — “few would mistake the man for a policy wonk.” Even if so, that’s just as dangerous; Trump delegated major decisions to his underlings last time and would do so again.
The underlings who are writing Project 2025.
Chaser: President Biden says he’s going to give it “my all” to stop all this from transpiring. Alexandra Petri wonders: Would we accept the same from a pilot landing our plane?
From political strategists Celinda Lake and Justin Zorn’s op-ed on the crisis of trust in government. The piece is full of statistics about how Americans’ distrust levels are not only increasing but also diverging, with Republicans putting their limited remaining stock in very different institutions from the ones favored by Democrats.
But this should be your top-line takeaway: Things can get better.
Lake and Zorn point out that “Republicans have a strategic advantage in an age of distrust,” with individual-oriented skepticism at the heart of the conservative message. That does not mean, though, that Democrats can’t adapt to the political culture.
The writers lay out a game plan for doing just that — for example, “working to redefine voting and political participation as not just civic duties but ways to attack lobbyists’ power or transform entrenched systems.”
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