Elvert Barnes (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A digital mobile billboard parked near a protest against Project 2025, Washington, D.C., January 2024.
Donald Trump is very keen to learn tricks and techniques from others. His father, Fred Trump, was not only a great influence on young Donald’s style and character, the elder Trump also launched his son’s business career with an inheritance and loans totaling more than $413 million in today’s dollars, according to a 2018 investigation by The New York Times. Fred Trump was a huckster who was even depicted in a 1958 episode of the television Western Trackdown called “The End of the World.” And even earlier, in 1954, folk singer Woody Guthrie penned a song about Old Man Trump and his racism.
In 1973, the Justice Department took both Trumps to federal court on charges of civil rights violations in the New York housing market. The case was ultimately settled with a far-reaching consent decree.
The Trumps retained Roy Cohn as their attorney. Cohn is best remembered by history for his role as prosecutor against alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and later as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, in his witch hunt against suspected communists in the U.S. government, the U.S. Army, and other places. But Cohn and the younger Trump remained friends until Cohn’s death in 1986, and the lawyer taught Trump many of his techniques, like “attack, counterattack, and never apologize.”
Some of Trump’s darker lessons may have come from other sources. In the February/March 2024 edition of The Progressive, I pointed out that “according to a 1990 interview in Vanity Fair, Trump’s first ex-wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer that Trump kept My New Order, a book of Hitler’s speeches, by his bed. When questioned about it, Trump acknowledged receiving such a book from a friend, but told journalist Marie Brenner, ‘If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.’ ”
Of course, Trump is well known for not reading. During his first term, advisers were said to have complained that they had to include his name repeatedly in any document they wanted him to go through. For this reason, when he stated during the 2024 presidential campaign that “I haven’t read it; I don’t want to read it” in reference to the 920-page conservative playbook known as Project 2025, it should have come as no surprise.
The document, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, describes itself as the “product of more than 100 organizations to prepare for a new conservative administration through policy, training, and personnel,” but is more accurately deemed a product of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Its key author and organizer was Russell Vought, who now serves in the White House as director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget (OMB), along with two other jobs (as most Trump officials seem to be doing), as Acting Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Vought, more than any other government official, has the tools and the knowledge to fast-track the proposals made in this document into U.S. law.
And fast-track may be an understatement. As of this writing, according to the Project 2025 Tracker website, in the past 240 days, about 47 percent (of a total of 317 objectives affecting thirty-four separate agencies) of the project has been achieved, with 1,221 days remaining in Trump’s term in office to finish the remaining 53 percent. Sixty-three objects are listed as being “in progress” with 138 yet to be addressed. While these numbers are frightening, they also give some guidance as to how a response might be mounted.
The moves by the Trump Administration have been fast and furious, following the guidelines developed by rightwing organizer Steve Bannon of “flooding the zone.” Bannon, back in 2019, said in an interview with PBS’s Frontline, “All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day, we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocities.”
This approach of moving quickly and on several fronts simultaneously has served to disorient the opposition and clog the courts. While some actions have been stalled or stopped in federal court, it is often only after some damage has been done—as in the tragic example of the planeload of detainees being shipped to a horrific prison in El Salvador that was already in the air when a judge ordered it stopped. Trump later had his Justice Department investigate the judge for misconduct.
But knowing which elements in Project 2025 have not yet been begun may give individuals and organizations a chance to anticipate what is coming next. With 138 objectives affecting twenty-eight agencies yet to be addressed, and another sixty-three objectives in twenty-three different agencies only 50 percent complete, there are a lot of places where response and pressure are possible.
In the 1967 book The Strategy of Civilian Defence (published in the United Kingdom and later reissued as Civilian Resistance as a National Defence: Non-violent Action Against Aggression), an essay by nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp notes: “Nonviolent action is based on a different approach [from military action]: to deny the enemy the human assistance and cooperation which are necessary if he is to exercise control over the population. It is thus based on a more fundamental and sophisticated view of political power.”
Sharp, whose writings have been used by movements for change around the globe, continues in this essay to outline methods of nonviolent action including “nonviolent noncooperation [which], if sufficient numbers take part, are likely to present the opponent with difficulties in maintaining the normal efficiency and operation of the system, and in extreme cases the system itself may be threatened.”
The German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht crafted the short poem “From A German War Primer” (1936-1938) that may well give us strong insights for the times ahead. In it, he wrote, “General, your tank is a powerful vehicle / It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. / But it has one defect: / It needs a driver.”