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Donald Trump is a notoriously dishonest man, but one of his oft-used slogans has proved absolutely true: Promises Made, Promises Kept. Unfortunately, this time around, the promises being kept weren’t all made by Trump. They were made by the fanatics who penned Project 2025.
Yes, Elon Musk is Trump’s right-hand man (J.D. who?), and he is on a tear with the Department of Government Efficiency, employing gangs of young men barely out of puberty to decide which pieces of—and people in—the federal government should stay or go. But the mass firings, the power grabs, and the agency shutterings are not just Musk’s doing. They were planned and proposed well before Trump was even elected, right there for everyone to see, in Project 2025.
Trump may have said he had “nothing to do with” the far-right game plan for his presidency—always a dubious claim, given that its architects are either former administration members or people with close ties to it. But now that he’s in office, he’s following their plan almost to the letter.
A month into Trump’s presidency, I went back through the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership.” It was stunning just how closely it tracked with the Trump presidency, not just in content but also in strategy. One of the first arguments the document makes is that new presidents have a narrow window within which to implement their agenda; hesitating while they sort out policy details wastes precious time. And, indeed, Trump has hit the ground running. The only way he has been able to do so much is because the Project 2025 team wrote it all out for him.
As Democrats and the public struggle to even keep up with what the Trump administration is doing to the nation, it’s tempting to get caught up in the play-by-play. And although the details certainly are important, the single message must be this: Trump is trying to be a king or a dictator, and Project 2025 is his monarchical playbook.
This is not a tough argument to make, especially given that Trump is now sharing images of himself in a crown, writing, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” This cannot and will not stand. Trump is not a king, and we don’t have to collectively pretend that he is or act as if this is some sort of joke—just as we don’t have to tolerate unelected lunatics from the Heritage Foundation or unelected egomaniacal billionaires setting the rules for a pluralistic America.
In its first section, the “Mandate for Leadership” sets out Project 2025’s overarching ideology: a theory of an all-powerful president, someone with authority more akin to that of a monarch than an elected democratic leader. The core section on this comes from Russell Vought, now the Trump-appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget, essentially the central nerve center of the federal government. The idea of agency or expert “independence”—with independence rendered in scare quotes—is rejected. “The greatest challenge” ahead, Vought writes, is “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch,” which requires the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
If Trump has done one thing so far, it’s break the federal bureaucracy.
The best way to implement the Project 2025 vision, its authors are clear, is to gut the federal bureaucracy, firing career civil servants and those who lack the requisite MAGA loyalty. “The new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees,” the document flat-out directs. The Office of the White House Counsel, for example, should not be some fair-minded place for smart lawyers to assess presidential actions according to existing law; it should be an “activist” entity, with subordinates who “see their role as helping to accomplish the agenda through problem solving and advocacy.” And forget expertise or qualifications: “While a candidate with elite credentials might seem ideal, the best one will be above all loyal to the President and the Constitution.”
Trump has been in office only a month, and already thousands of federal employees have been fired, some allegedly for performance, though in most cases no proof has been proffered. (And parts of this firing spree may very well be illegal—Trump’s layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, have been halted by a judge.)
Many of these workers are veterans or members of military families. Their work includes things like researching cancer, running national parks, responding to natural disasters, ensuring aviation safety, and providing health care to those who served in combat. And these rapid, poorly planned firings have resulted in a bunch of mistakes: Some workers have been fired, only to be told, Whoops, you’re actually still employed! (Some were then fired again.) The administration sacked several Department of Agriculture workers, only to realize that some of them were crucial members of a team protecting the public from bird flu, and quickly walked back the terminations.
Hiring has been more challenging, including when it comes to staffing the administration itself. Finding staffers who show total loyalty to Trump and who aren’t suspected to be ideologically compromised by, say, working for a Republican or even a former Trump official who has fallen out of the president’s favor, leaves precious few qualified candidates to choose from. Loyalty tests and purges are standard; requirements for MAGA fealty are high. Under regimes like this one, competency and qualification tend to be the first things to go. Qualified candidates make way simply for candidates.
There must be a German word to describe this particular combination of ironic and hypocritical: Conservatives obsess over “DEI” supposedly requiring the hiring of unqualified workers and accuse diversity initiatives of causing plane crashes, then turn around and forgo qualifications and competency in favor of unthinking devotion. (When it comes to the people working in the Trump White House, I feel fairly confident in saying that America is not sending her best.)
But this is also part of the strategy, one well practiced by autocrats throughout history: Make it ridiculous. Hire absolute nincompoops. Reward doggish devotion rather than actual qualification. After all, those who are unqualified understand that their power and position come only from the autocrat. With no reputation or future to protect, they have every incentive to stay loyal.
On the campaign trail, Trump claimed to have never read Project 2025. I would bet he still hasn’t—he doesn’t strike me as much of a reader. But he has surrounded himself with its architects. And according to a recent CNN analysis, more than two-thirds of his executive orders seem to stem from Project 2025 mandates. The very existence of this how-to manual has allowed this administration to flood the zone so effectively: The plans were all there, just waiting to be put into action.
This doesn’t mean that Project 2025’s creators have gotten everything they want. They’re hostile to Big Tech, for example, in ways that this administration—now partially run by a tech billionaire—is not. Their plans for the U.S. Agency for International Development involve drastically reshaping the organization in a Christian nationalist image, not totally destroying it. For the most part, though, the strategy has worked exactly as intended.
The job of fighting back is a complicated one. Opponents have to meet these attacks wherever and however they come—the response to flooding the zone cannot be to cede the zone. Democratic Party leaders, though, have a particular task, and that’s to make all this legible to an overwhelmed, exhausted, and largely tuned-out U.S. public. The extremists of the Heritage Foundation and MAGA and DOGE have their narrative: This is about restoring power to a president who should be nearly all-powerful, who has a mandate to lead, whose opponents are enemies not of Donald Trump but of America, and who is going to break through any barrier (including the thin parchment of the Constitution) to get done whatever needs doing.
Democrats need to zoom out and respond with their own: This is actually about protecting America the democracy from a power-drunk mad king and his billionaire boys’ club.
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