Project 2026
Voters gotta be doing it for themselves
The US and the world are being shaped by a detailed, elaborate and worked-out plan put out in advance of the last US Federal election. If it had not been leaked to the public, it would be the stuff of speculation, discussed on cable news in measured terms. "The rumoured…", "The unsubstantiated…" would precede mentions made of it, as the same programs were eviscerated, the same unconstitutional interventions, the relentless presidential decrees piled up that characterize Trump's reign.
The brazenness of the document had perfect cover; nobody reads anything, and Project 2025 was not much of a TikTok trend. Families of exhausted parents with three streaming channels whose $50 a month represented the majority of their entertainment budget never found it among the 'recommended for you' suggestions on Disney+ or Prime, possibly because the directors of those companies are the class it was meant to benefit.
The document benefited from its unofficial status. Trump himself, in yet another transparent lie – the kind where he claims to have never read the report, never met the person, doesn't believe such a thing exists – repudiated it in a way that was as good as saying, "that's exactly what we'll do"; Nobody cared, like the asteroid in Don’t Look Up, as in, “don’t look up what Project 2025 says about rounding up people”.
Welcome to Trump 2.0.
Even once it was out, the original's unofficial status meant that everything could be treated as 'it’s just the little ole Heritage Foundation, thinking out loud': it didn't matter that the implications were criminal, economically ruinous, unjust, destabilizing. It was just a healthy sign of freedom in the marketplace of ideas. And that limited the discussion, even with it out in the open, to topic of, 'why are you against free speech?'. Did those opposing Project 2025 want there to be no debates in America? Even if ideas in the document explicitly proposed to limit free speech.
Let’s Do It Again
So what might – will – the Project xxxx document of a future election contain? In posing this question, the thing that also needs answering is, "what party are we talking about?". To that end, let me throw something of a prediction out there, concerning how Trump's reputation will stand by the end of the current term.
The key things to take account of in formulating your answer, are that under Trump, the DOJ is now a political instrument of the Executive; Congressional oversight is eliminated, or is reduced to a rubber stamp; Electoral redistricting means that representatives, especially the most extreme in the party, choose their electors, and not the other way; The pardoning of massive organized violence against the state and its legitimate democratic processes on behalf on the party in power are a given; Public institutions can be coerced and perverted from their established mandates, through withdrawal of funding, even when that jeopardizes the fundamental stability of the country, and destroys the fabric of justice.
So it might seem like there’s nothing more for Republicans to wish for, even though the list above is far from complete. But of course, there always is. A third Trump term, for instance.
Nostrumpdamus
The next three years, optimistically, is a continued series of confrontations with courts, institutions and business that will accumulate defeats for Trump. We can see this pattern clearly already, not even a year in. He loses a lot, but enough remains to seriously degrade the underlying principles that Americans historically paid lip service to.
Were the Supreme Court functional and operating independently, then the absence of what has tended to weaken the record of defeats would make the rout of his policies obvious even more one sided, and the damage would be less. But not none, and not undoable at the end of the current presidential term.
These defeats will get worse, not better, but the question is, is one of them a breaking point, at which voters or representatives see association with Trump as a danger to their own self-preservation? It’s a question that will become more acute as the end of Trump's reign approaches, since it's the continuing control exerted by Trump that provides the sense of insulation that most GOP elected members clearly rely upon.
This makes the Epstein case crucial, insofar as it has proved to be the only issue that has produced a deep and unbridgeable rift among Republicans, pro- and anti-Trump. This is more dangerous than just Epstein's own hideousness. It forces both parties to contemplate the cutting adrift of those exposed, people who would normally be protected by their position, but mostly by the solidarity of the beneficiary classes in government, finance and business.
Apart from this rift, and apart from the actively discussed possibility of Trump's premature death, it's SCOTUS that's underwriting his ability to survive and remain credible to his base. There are two things court has done to sustain Oval Office criminality; decisions at SCOTUS that defy the logic of precedent and cling to absurd whatever-we-say-it-is originalism to sustain several of Trump's most patently illegal actions; and the SCOTUS finding of presidential blanket immunity. These together set the tone in many ways for what has followed, and should be seen as the long-planned enabling partner that has Project 2025’s realization possible.
Impeachment: Three Times a Charm?
The immunity decision mitigates the worst case for Trump; a Senate and Congress dominated by enough votes to carry an impeachment; but the midterms could change that. What might be impeachable? The already known massive transgressions will never be all addressed; but we can see the largest scale, most consequential disasters Trump is cooking up.
The obvious point of failure for Trump is the economy, which he certainly has a very credible chance to completely tank. This wouldn't be the '29 Great Depression type of collapse, which was experienced as an internal failure of the US economy. We can remind ourselves that in '29, the US had miniscule armed forces, little international power projection. Its primary markets were domestic, the alternative to a global market heavily influenced by the still existent and entrenched British and French colonial economies, who could exert direct control over large swathes of Africa, Asia, and parts of South America in their own favour when it came to trade.
The failure that Trump is directing the US to is much worse: a global repositioning of the US, losing its clout, both economic and military; and losing ultimately the primacy of the US dollar in settling global debts, which currently immunizes the US economy from any number of ills others suffer from. We saw that in the bond market crisis, where the super wealthy started to get cold feet on lending the Trumpian regime the loot from their Scrooge McDuck gold vault swimming pools.
Losing access to this lolly, would accelerate US debt pain, as US bonds become second- or third-best options, and service cost on the debt starts to destroy the interest of foreign investors – who have for a century or so provided a massive influx of investment in the US economy, which gave it the impunity it imagines itself to be divinely endowed with.
The obvious point is that poor economic decisions are not impeachable offences.
If an Effigy Burns Outside The White House, Will the Economy Be Sound?
The rage that people in America felt at the scot-free escape of the Wall Street bankers who engineered the 2008 crisis, lacked a central figure to focus itself on; someone who most obviously benefited from the malicious mismanagement that destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. To blow up the lives of Americans for the second time in twenty years, while grossly profiteering from the policies that caused the disaster, Americans will have their burnable effigies, in the persons of the Trump clan, and their coterie of the self-enriching inside traders that surround them.
And this is most certainly impeachable. In fact, it was the first issue discussed in Trump’s first term: clearly, the emoluments/personal enrichment of the Trump circle is a fuse waiting to be lit. And, the post-impeachment legal effect on *la famille Trump* would be financial, which may be the only meaningful way to inflict pain on Trump's criminal legacy. That, or retirement in Moscow or Beijing, with what ever wealth he's surreptitiously spirited out of the country (cryptocurrency, anyone?), courtesy of his besties, in the style of a failed African dictator.
This will, in the best case scenario, produce a late-conversion among Republicans, who will jettison Trump, brand him as anathema, and make corruption the centre of their castigatory speeches in the House, and at $100k fee-earning special events to Chambers of Commerce and Defence Contractor Conferences.
La Trahison des Jerks
There is an often observed tendency among right-wing parties and groups, faced with the public failure of their leaders, to treat them less than kindly. In some analyses, this stems from the institutional nature of conservatism. Conservative thinking historically, has allied itself to institutions, to the degree that the institution becomes the argument for resisting change, even when obviously out of step with prevailing opinions or when clearly dysfunctional. Slavery, for instance; or indeed the Depression Era resistance to workable monetary policies including Keynesian economics; or the US resistance to Universal Healthcare or rational gun control.
Consider the resistance to the People's Budget in UK House of Lords in 1909.
The latter is a good example of how conservative inflexibility proves catastrophic for their movement; the resistance to progressive taxation, or any rational economic strategy to deal with Britain's political and economic dilemmas at that time ended up with the effective end of the House of Lords as a power-wielding body; and with it the loss of conservative landed-gentry effective control over the UK economy and governance for a generation or more. In other words, conservative institutionalism tends to be an all-or-nothing strategy.
The Lords who found themselves as decorations, not a power-wielding star chamber, quickly were rejected by conservatives, except insofar as they flattered the monarchist vision of Great Britain; but no attempt to restore the power of the Lords was ever seriously mounted. The result is the Conservative Party’s ability to exert an iron grip on the electorate. But it could be argued that took until the election of Thatcher, extending up to the Cameronian Era; and see how that ended, with the last 4 Tory PMs a generally reviled laughingstock.
One of the ironies of Trump's economic 'ideas', is that his revival of a tariff-based policy is a return to Republican economic orthodoxy dating back to Hoover's policies; a program so inarguably dangerous and ineffective in the early thirties, that it established the progressive taxation-based regime of the New Deal that not only continued for half a century, regardless of the party holding Congress or the White House; but remains the standard for generalized prosperity, economic growth, innovation, equality, improvement of quality of life, robust institutions accepted by the US people (including acceptance of the tax regime itself).
The so-called Reagan Revolution, with its own now roughly equal time in ascendancy, with its obviously terrible ideas from balanced budgets to trickle-down economics, can be shown to have completely failed to deliver the Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness that are there on the label, for the American people, by every useful metric, simply by comparing its results to the New Deal era.
When conservative leaders fail, as in the fall of Nixon, Thatcher, the Argentitian Junta of the Falklands War era, Brazil's end of its own junta, or any of the other examples i mentioned, and many more, the tendency among conservatives is to a.) bring forth a faction to publicly reject and revile their once cherished leadership; b.) consolidate all the partisan inroads made under the ousted leadership; and c.) produce a behind-the-scenes radical movement that takes the view that the cardinal sin of the now repudiated leader wasn't that they went too far: but that they didn't go far enough.
This can be seen multiple places, starting with Trump's own political base. This was built on the inluence and energy of people like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort; the first brought a bitterness at Nixon's fall, and a doubling down on the idea of the Imperial Presidency which culminated in the SCOTUS immunity doctrine 50 years later; while Manafort legitimized the ethos of the illiberal, self-enriching, fascist ruling style of Putin and the ousted pro-Moscow Ukrainian leadership of his erstwhile employer, Yanukovych to US campaign strategy. (Both have been pardoned by Trump for various crimes, it can be recalled.)
Thatcher's summary turfing out produced the subcurrents that Farage now is resurgent in, with a far more radical program than Thatcher ever tried; Millei in Argentina, for all his talk of anarchist-economist 'libertarianism', is an economically simple-minded authoritarian that continues the poisonous politics of Argentina's right; Netanyahu has amplified by orders of magnitude the violence and hatred of the Sharon era; and so it goes.
You Can’t Keep a Good Monster Down
At the extremity, a revival of Hitler's underlying political program in Germany, and Mussolini's in Italy, and a general ‘rehabilitation’ of both is underway, with a base in 'legitimate' politics; and Orbán is a retrenched strongman with a program entirely out of step with Europe, but aligned with the politics of Hungary's dark pasts as a compliant, totalitarian satellite of two discredited totalitarian regimes.
What links all of these are their appeals to a lost, often imaginary era of unquestioned dominance; nostalgia for an ethos and a program entirely rejected by the democratic process. It can take months, but it usually takes years measured in electoral cycles, and it can take a century: Slavery's end produced the Southern mindset that eventually mutated into the Dixiecrat base that the Republicans brought on board to elect Reagan, thanks to precursors of Bannon like Lee Atwater or Roger Ailes.
We should expect the end of Trump to see him profoundly disgraced, quickly out of power, which will produce another eight to 12 year era where a middle ground, traditional, Jeb Bush-type Republican leadership fights to distance itself from Trump's legacy, while seeking to preserve its excesses; at its most successful, the GOP would hold a small majority in one or the other house, but with a less partisan, non-monolithic voting distribution. This would allow cosmetic changes to legislation, after all of Trump's executive orders have been rescinded – at least the ones that aren't helpful to the PAC-class that supports both Republicans and Democrats whose Citizens United dependent existence will continue.
The radicalized wing of the Republican party will soon manifest itself, as it has in these periods where they have destroyed their credibilty, with extra-legislative organization (what the John Birch Society, the Tea Party, or indeed Citizens United have been;) and beneath that surface, the resources and the loyalists and the financiers will be amassed to start the next Project xxxx document.
This won't bring the Vances and the Bessents and the Lutnicks, or the Cruz's and the Jordans, to say nothing of the Speaker Johnson types of the party any succour or pleasure. The RFKs will likely not be there at the end of the term, and the Hegseths and MJTs, of which there are so many, will be spat away into some political twilight.
They will all become reassuring symbols of what the suddenly mainstream party fathful have firmly rejected: the terrible, awful, very bad actors of that terrible, awful, very bad era that the GOP won't countenance returning, repeated by Lindsey Graham on Meet the Press and CNN's endless hours of accommodation to anyone with a paper-thin story that matches the simplified narratives they are structured to repeat.
Trump himself will probably physically survive one electoral cycle after being turfed out before dying, and that is assuming that he lives to see 2028. If he dies in office, or not, lacking a leader and certainly not one who would not be torn to pieces by the base, the collapse and internal war among Republicans will happen regardless, and the sauve-qui-peut attitude will ultimately favour the now-mainstreamers who rubberstamped Trump's initiatives for eight years.
Rising From the Flames: You Smell That?
But the Millers, and the Bondis; the extremist radicals with no allegiance to morality or truth, if past history indicates anything, will resurface after decades on the payroll of extremist think-tanks, the shit-phoenixes of American politics.
And in the meantime, behind the scenes, the next Project XXXX documents will be going through the first drafts. Following the pattern of aiming for higher, not lower levels of what formed the basis of the catastrophe, by setting a program of greater excess, more radicalism, and more disregard for the law, can we start to imagine what those drafts will contain?
Probably; but only by imagining what most serves billiionaires and beyond: now with Musk's new pay rise, the gauntlet is down. It's a world now of the one percent of the one percent of the one percent, the trillionaires; only a small number, who can exert higher and higher degrees of influence on electoral outcomes. Musk's quarter-million payout to buy 6 months in the White House, aimlessly inflicting destruction of the American electorate's trust of the system will seem paltry. To get in the club, you'll have to be ‘worth’ over $100Bn, making for a nice small group, easy to seat around the table and set the agenda for the end of democracy.
And will they seek another Trump? Doubtful. Most messiahs find their shoes filled by flinty administrators: Jesus and Peter, Joseph and Brigham, Vladimir and Josef. The function of the interim Republicans after Trump will be to hold on to the many many gains and distortions and destruction, across dozens of institutions, that Trump's regime of executive decisions already has wrought.
And this is a point worth remembering: yes, the roots of conservatism are institutional, because institutions are a way of taking the active democratic process, and transforming it into something excluded from debate, that can develop unaccountability around itself, and control of which increasingly devolves to the privileged. This is the idealized conservative form of the institution, historically.
But when actual democratic process either seeks to reform institutions (as the DEI movement so-called has done, or science, or demographics), then conservatives find themelves on precisely the opposite side, railing against the institutions that sustain society, even as those institutions attempt the fundamental democratic balance of permanence with change. This is what the conservative path to Trump has been, a radical rejection of the part of conservatism that actually focuses on what is conserved.
Meantime, the question ought to be; where is the Project 2028, or maybe Project 2026, written by citizens who are ready to assert their democratic rights, to put a value on retaining, and indeed expanding what their franchise is meant to benefit them?
Before IKEA, It Was Icky
Education, health, opportunity, employment, leisure time (the time you need to organize, and stay organized), equity, justice, accountability, and reducing political money that overrides outcomes? Sweden is the poster child for the social democratic political economy that historically has delivered these to their population, imperfectly, but still beyond useful comparison with the tragedy that America has become.
Sweden has an interesting political history. Here's a key data point: up until the late 19th Century, wealth inequality in Sweden, which we imagine as being commited to a highly equal distribution of wealth, was about the most extremely imbalanced in Europe. This mattered all the more, because electoral rights in that country were allocated on the basis of wealth. Mo’ money, mo’ votes.
In practice, this led to many many situations where one wealthy resident of a town, or even a county, could themselves alone, be granted enough votes because of their wealth, to outvote all the other citizens in that area.
It sounds absurd to even call that a democracy. But Sweden was not the only country of the era that did this; and others made it the case that only people from certain groups, castes, families, and above all levels of wealth, could run for office, predetermining outcomes. Yet, how different are these, actually, from what prevails in America today?
Now, we can agree that money in politics, and its dynastic aspect has to end. But is that enough? The problem with issues like this is that to prevail, they have to become single-issue determinants of a citizen's vote. The contradiction is, that for many voters, getting money out of politics would open up the way to achieving many of the other things that consistently poll strongly, like Universal Healthcare, student debt forgiveness, childcare, maternity/paternity leave, gun control, rational immigration policies, a right to housing, and so on. And in the US, the Democrats are just as dependent on lobbyists who have these agendas in their crosshairs, as the Republicans.
And this is very hard to do, when you always have a Second-Amendment hysteric who is running against you, claiming you'll take away everyone's guns, making that the issue. Or someone claiming that abortions are happening after babies are born, as Trump and his not-so-bright cadres have done. I mean, if they’ll kill the born fetuses, imagine what the’ll do to the unborn ones.
What the US in their lost state needs is something bigger, with vision, and interlocking planks in the platform, something that becomes easier to yes to as a whole, and not so susceptible to picking votes off, issue by issue. And the pathway to that is not the parties, but an idependent citizen’s movement, explicitly exclusionary of extremist positions, with the preparedness to lose a few to gain a stronger loyalty, cross-party, with more. And they need it soon, like a Project 2026.
You can see this in Mamdani's government-run bodegas proposal. It won't lose him more votes than it gains him including from the right. But even for those who find it outrageous, the appeal of his other positions, and just by communicating that it's something he's not afraid to say, before he even steps up to the mike, ends up mattering more to voters, including ones that never had a position on the government selling them Doritos and beer before. It's clear that this isn't something a stock-standard Democrat, even an AOC can do. Americans have to turn off Netflix, delete TikTok, and do it for themselves.
Are Americans going to do this? What else can they do?