The Blueprint
(Illustration by Roberto Parada)
The far right has a plan to remake America. They even wrote it down.
It’s not like we haven’t been warned.
Should the Republican presidential nominee (likely Donald Trump) win the election next year, conservatives have been pretty clear about what they intend to do. In fact, explicitly clear.
Trump himself isn’t much on policy, of course. The 2020 Republican National Convention was notable chiefly because, at his behest, it made no effort to pass a party platform, effectively giving Trump carte blanche for whatever he wished to do in his second term.
But Trump’s all-too-personal vision for a second-term agenda is now leaking into the press. According to stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post, it begins with transforming the Justice Department into an instrument of his vengeance, initially against those first-term appointees Trump thinks betrayed him: former Attorney General Bill Barr, former chief of staff John Kelly, former Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley, and others who opposed his attempted seizure of power. Then comes filing charges against Joe Biden and his family, with the substance yet to be determined.
To this end, Trump is assembling a cadre of lawyers who supported his attempt to cling to the presidency, and who won’t be deterred from doing his bidding—as those wusses from the Federalist Society were—by the niceties of constitutional law. A leading figure among these l’état c’est Trump legal eagles is Jeffrey Clark, a Trump Justice Department official who during the plot to overturn the 2020 election countered a White House counsel’s argument that Trump’s putsch would lead to “riots in every major city” by noting, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act”—a law that allows the president to deploy the Army to quell protests. That exchange is quoted in the federal indictment of Trump for fomenting the January 6th insurrection. (The Post indicates that Trump is plotting to invoke the Insurrection Act on the first day of his presidency: January 20, 2025.)
At a recent campaign event in New Hampshire, Trump stumbled into a rationale for going after Biden, should he win the 2024 contest. “This is third-world country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said. “And that means I can do that, too.”
If nothing else, that quote explains why Trump is seeking more lawyers like Jeffrey Clark.
But Clark’s current ambit isn’t confined to Mar-a-Lago. He’s also part of Project 2025, an initiative of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which, in collaboration with over 80 other far-right groups (including the Center for Renewing America, where Clark is a senior fellow and director of litigation), is laying out the tasks and recruiting the candidates that the next Republican president must employ to de-woke-ify America, banish liberalism, and extirpate modernity.
When the Post reported that Clark is leading a study on how to implement the Insurrection Act, a Heritage Foundation official quickly sought to assure the wider world that “there are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”
Oh really?
Earlier this year, Project 2025 published a 920-page manifesto called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, laying out its agenda for Trump or any other Republican who should win the White House. The book consists chiefly of the world’s longest enemies list, with detailed instructions on how to target them, oust them, and reverse their policies, both real and imagined.
I’ve read every damn page of that book. Here’s what it says.
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME Heritage has sketched out a blueprint for a conservative presidency. In 1980, the think tank aided another neophyte politician with revolutionary aspirations—Ronald Reagan—with a report, also called Mandate for Leadership, that stretched to 1,100 pages and covered virtually every nook and cranny of government. Heritage boasts that Reagan took up the majority of their proposals, including across-the-board tax cuts, “Star Wars” missile defense, inner-city “enterprise zones,” and a hard line with the Soviet Union. On the latter, Heritage claimed that “Reagan sticks so closely to the Heritage suggestions that [Mikhail] Gorbachev complains to Reagan about Heritage’s influence in the first few minutes of the [1986 Reykjavik] summit.”
A subsequent edition of Mandate for Leadership has been produced for every presidential election since 1980. This iteration, very much in the spirit of Trump, is lighter on policy and heavier on retribution. Its enemies list begins with the usual targets of right-wing ire: welfare recipients, lazy and liberal civil servants (since they’re liberal, one might think Heritage would be heartened by their laziness), anti-business regulators, environmentalists, and union bosses. But it expands from there to include more recent bȇtes noires: scientists, woke bureaucrats, woke educators, woke diplomats, woke generals and admirals, woke G-men, and anyone who doesn’t indulge the next Republican president’s every whim (an adaptation to the likelihood of a Trump nomination).
The particular frustrations Trump encountered when federal employees pushed back at his more lunkheaded notions loom large in Heritage’s assessment of the federal workforce, which the book’s editors describe as “largely underworked, overcompensated, and unaccountable.”
No matter what department or agency is under discussion in this volume, their officials’ and employees’ adherence to the president’s policies and piques should be their primary, if not only, task. When dealing with the State Department, the book advises, “the next Administration must take swift and decisive steps to reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine that serves the President.”
If that requires a purge, so be it. The authors advise the incoming administration to identify and interview every Treasury Department official who participated in its DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) activities and programs, and make such activity “per se grounds for termination of employment.”
In a 900-page book, one occasionally encounters boilerplate affirming the importance of hiring qualified experts. Writing about the CIA, one author apparently on autopilot says that the administration must avoid selecting intelligence leaders “for their policy views or political loyalties.” But when fully conscious of who he’s advising, he gets down to the real stuff, writing, “The President-Elect should choose a Deputy Director who, without needing Senate confirmation, can immediately begin to implement the President’s agenda.”
That last part is critical. For Project 2025, speed is at a premium, lest career officials persist in doing their jobs. Besides, a Democratic Senate or even a Senate with a narrow Republican majority may resist approving a number of Trump’s more outrageous appointments. Jeffrey Clark as attorney general? Michael Flynn running Defense? All the more reason why deputy directors who don’t need Senate confirmation should take power immediately to begin Trump’s war on his so-called “vermin.”
Waiting for Senate confirmations, some of which are still pending for the Biden administration nearly three years into his presidency, does not align with this wholesale takeover of government. And this is where Heritage’s knowledge of the federal vacancy process becomes useful.
Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, for most federal agencies, a vacancy at the top means that the next available deputy becomes the acting head. Project 2025 sees a path to manipulating this law to ensure loyalists take control.
“Where a career employee holds a leadership position,” explains Ken Cuccinelli, the former acting deputy homeland security secretary under Trump, “that position should be deemed vacant for line-of-succession purposes, and the next eligible political appointee in the sequence should assume acting authority.” Other authors call for political appointees to be put into the line of succession directly, “selected by the President-elect’s transition team” and “in place the first day of the Administration.”
This gambit would hand over the administrative state to those dedicated to crushing it. That would combine with the restoration of Trump’s October 2020 “Schedule F” order, which would reassign up to 50,000 civil service workers with a designation that robs them of employment protections, making them easier to terminate. So the leadership of executive branch agencies would be ideologues, and many bureaucrats under their care could be fired at will.
Republican candidates have warmed to this vision. Vivek Ramaswamy has said that if elected, he would fire more than 75 percent of the federal workforce, and disband such agencies as the Department of Education, the Food and Nutrition Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the FBI.
In short, Heritage’s directions for Day One presidential appointments come straight out of Macbeth’s musings as he ponders the timing of his imminent murder of Duncan, his king:
THE REPUBLICAN NEED TO BANISH the ostensibly woke is nowhere clearer than in Heritage’s agenda for the armed services. Picture Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and his viewpoints (such that they are), only inside the Pentagon. Project 2025 sees a Defense Department that “has emphasized leftist politics over military readiness,” and makes an impassioned plea to DOD to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination.” (You didn’t know that all recruits are required to read Volume III of Das Kapital?)