THE PROJECT

A close look at the ultra-rightist Project 2025, now playing in a capital near you.

Atlantic staffer Graham dubs the authors of the Heritage Foundation–funded Project 2025 “contrarians,” but they’re more than that: They believe “that the only way to deliver the Christian, right-wing nation they desired was a carefully organized assault on the U.S. government as it existed.” That radical assault has four chief aims: to restore the man-headed family, dismantle the “administrative state,” close the border and defend the nation’s sovereignty, and “secure our God-given individual rights to live freely.” Trump claimed not to have heard of Project 2025 and its playbook, but as Russell Vought, an author of the platform who’s now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, proudly acknowledged, he and his Heritage cohort were busily writing executive orders long ago, a stack of them awaiting Trump in his first minutes in the Oval Office. Vought also proudly owns up to being a Christian nationalist: “We are people who believe that we have a Christian nation.” Project 2025 is to be carried out, as has been plain, by seizing control of agencies and placing them under the rule of loyalists who will put Trump’s policies into action, with the understanding that “although the president’s choices for high-profile positions might not be the most qualified picks, the ranks below them would be stocked with well-prepared and committed deputies.” With broad planks restoring discriminatory measures against minorities, nonbinary citizens, and the like and slashing social services, Project 2025 also aims to replace the progressive income tax with a regressive consumption tax that would fall heavily on the poor. In fact, as Graham makes clear in his close reading of the text, the intended beneficiaries are wealthy white fellow travelers, and no others need apply.

Essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the Trumpian maelstrom.