Project 2025 Overview Podcast

[Music] [Music] what is going on guys ver ofoten here and today I'm G to jump into another why is this happening uh podcast about project 2025 there's been a few actually more than a few podcasts that I've listened to to try to figure out which one kind of breaks it down um in the most digestible and relatable uh information bytes I guess without having the 900 page PDF in front of you that you can reference to um what I think I'm going to do is kind of break up some of the other ones into smaller bites as I clean to do with my last post that didn't happen but this one this particular conversation is worth not splitting up and if you can kind of stand just watching me run you know nightmare dungeons with my druid for hour hour and a half it is uh it is absolutely worth it so let's go ahead and get this going project 2025 is their declaration of war on this idea of America that's what this is and so in many ways this is on the ballot in November those are the stakes and I think this is really you know in in a fundamental way in November is going to be a referendum on whether or not we want to continue down this path towards multiracial pluralistic egalitarianism or not hello and welcome to WIS this happening with me your host Chris well as we've been saying throughout this campaign year covering campaigns are always a little bit speculative in this sense we don't know the future and when someone's elect to be president you don't know ultimately what they're going to do because that lies out in the future and you can make pretty good educated guesses but sometimes there's surprises I don't think people that had closely studied LBJ and the you know 50s and early 60s would necessarily have thought this will be the person that pushes through the most landmarked civil rights legislation since reconstruction but that's what happened there were reasons to think that FDR who at one point ran on austerity and balance budgets would sign the New Deal so there are surprises for sure but as I keep saying in this context we have a a unique situation where for the first time since the late 19th century we have two men squaring off who who both have records because they've both been presidents and then there's an additional way in which we have a pretty clear sense of what the future will hold in a Donald Trump presidency and that is this extremely granular road map that has been put together by a bunch of sort of right-wing activists and think tank folks and xover employees that's called the project 2025 presidential transition project mandate for leadership and you've probably heard about it as project 2025 now interestingly enough I saw some polling today that suggested only about one in four voters have heard of project 2025 but it's it's a pretty remarkable document because basically the kind of leading Lights of the Maga movement and American Republican conservatism r large came together to basically say you know agency by agency in the federal government this these are will be our objectives this is how we intend to govern this is what plann to do with the executive power vested in us should we win the presidency and it's really clear and I think really alarming there's been a fair amount of coverage of it the New York Times has been running a series about it a lot of outlets have talked about it we've talked about on the show but today we're doing a kind of it's not quite a withpod 2024 the stakes because we're not comparing the records here but it's in line with that theme because I thought it take some time with someone that has spent a lot of time reading and thinking about project 2025 to talk about what is in there what does it portend for a possible Trump second term and a great person to do with that with is Thomas Zimmer who's a historian at Georgetown University he writes about and studies the sort of anti-democratic tendencies in the American right since the 1930s he has a substack that's called democracy Americana and on that substack he has been writing about project 2025 extensively he's he's read it and been writing about what it is and what it means and sort of putting it in a broader context of these anti-democratic Tendencies which I think are reflected in Project 2025 so Thomas simmer welcome to the program thank you so much for having me first of all just tell me how you got interested in Project 2025 like your entrance Point into it yeah I think I started hearing about it when it was it was launched about two years ago and then they published this you know this 920 page report which outlines their policy agenda that is what you have been referencing this of what they call it mandate for leadership that was actually published about a year ago and at first you know it seemed like maybe that's just you know whatever they have some plans they're making plans who cares but then once I there there was some reporting about it right and I felt like maybe I should take a look at it right and get some sense of what it was but I I didn't think it was going to be that important but then when I started reading I felt like wait they're outlining their vision for America and how they want to impose it on the country in really the clearest way possible and this is something that if you want people to know what the American right is all about and what they want to do to the country this is the best way to S of clarify that for people it's not me telling them is actually me telling people look it's out there read it right so I started digging into it and I think I mean it's just to be clear this policy report is only one part of project 2025 it goes even well beyond that this is a massive planning operation it also has it's also a a massive hat hunting operation they're looking for personnel thousands of people to staff the government that's all part of project 2025 and the deeper you look and the deeper you dig the more I I became convinced that this really is such a great insight into where the American right is today and and really what you know what they want to do to the country so here's my understanding of the problem that project 2025 seeks to solve and you tell me if I were and I think it it's similar in some ways to 19 80 we call the Reagan Revolution there's there's some Echoes here although I think this is much more sort of forthrightly anti-democratic and authoritarian than the Reagan Revolution but the basic sense is the structure of the federal government particularly the federal agencies are in some ways bound to a vision of governance that is antithetical to right-wing objectives because of the permanent civil service because of the institutional cultures this is something that Reagan thought as well that there kind of the enemy they are in Trump's words the Deep state which is what he talks about a lot right in terms of the CIA and FBI but more broadly this idea that there's a sort of set of Institutions that are hostile to the most extremist imperatives of Maga right-wing governance and so you have to have a plan both in terms of policy objectives personnel and internal mechanics to basically remake these places yeah totally to transform them ruthlessly right so as to turn them the way that a virus turns a cell into a factory for producing more virus that basically you need to take these organs you need to take these cells that are the federal government agencies and turn them into actively places that will reproduce this kind of right-wing governance because if you don't do that then you'll fail to achieve your objectives and that's the general sense about much of the Trump agenda in the first term is that is that your understanding of it yeah it's really crucial to S of the diagnosis from which all of this starts they are convinced they meaning the people behind project 2025 but this goes beyond just those people the entire American right is very clear about the fact that they see the first Trump presidency as a failure right they are extremely disappointed with the first Trump presidency and they're extremely clear about the fact that when they first rose to power in 2017 Trump World had no concrete plans they had no Personnel to implement whatever plans they might come up with and just very little understanding of the vast and powerful machine that is the American government they were not ready and really no one understands this more clearly than the right themselves and they are determined to just not let that happen again and eliminate all the hurdles that slow them down or sabotage them as they see it in Trump's first presidency and that is precisely those two levels which is one we need plans we need to know what we want to do and two we need the right kinds of people in place to actually Implement those plans and not be again sabotaged like the first time around when they were running up against what they see like a bunch of quote unquote woke bureaucrats who would just you know sabotage everything they wanted to do that is that is the whole plan and that's also why it's not you see a when you read about project 2025 in sort of mainstream coverage you hear a lot about oh they want to dismantle government and I think that's really not what this is about this is about a sort of an authoritarian takeover of government yes they want to dismantle certain parts of government everything that can be used as a tool tool for like a more egalitarian fairer society that needs to go but other parts of government they want to mobilize and weaponize and not dismal at all they want to turn government into an instrument to impose their vision of society on the country and I think that's really something very different from dismantling the government yeah that that's really well said and important and we and there's two things I think that are sort of important to note one is in some ways the existence of the vast bureaucracy that is the federal government and the Civil Service and and the Pentagon for instance like every Administration comes in and is a little bowled over by this I mean it really is the case that the federal government is enormous that it contains all sorts of organizations within it that have their own imperatives that trying to get things done even in the most benevolent sense right like just trying to do good stuff you could be really frustrating I know people have worked in government and there's a lot of people telling you no all the time there's a lot of lawy saying you can't do that but at the same level those are part of the checks right that like there's a kind of I would say productive friction that is in some ways kind of the point between the restraining forces of the vast architecture and bureaucracy the government and the imperatives of an Administration and that productive tension which I think could be frustrating at a personal level to people whatever your ideological inclination are right I know this for fact they view it as like a structural flaw they want to get rid of yeah and they want to like truly reconceptualize the federal government from and maybe this is a good place for us to start the schedule F stuff which is yeah a huge thing is that most of the people that work for the federal government are civil service employees which means they are not political employes which means you can't come in day one and be like you're fired because we don't like you we want to bring in your own people yeah and the reason for that is prior to the Civil Service reforms in the 19th century the federal government looked a lot more like what a big Urban machine like the Chicago machine would look like you like you get into power and then like you appoint all your partisan buddies to be postmasters at the time this was like the you know these Post Office jobs was the big Bank of jobs in the federal government and then they kick favors upstairs and they go and do stuff for you and it was basically like an an enormous corrupt machine civil service reform was a way of doing away with that it's embodied in something called schedule F which is the tell me a little bit about this structural before we get to like the ideological there's this structural goal here which is to remake the Civil Service and get rid of it as it's currently constituted yeah so some people may remember this shortly before the 2020 election Donald Trump signed an executive order schedule F that's what it was called that was rescinded then by President Biden immediately upon taking office before it could really do any damage but it was intended to fight the kolu Deep State and they are now project 2025 and really everyone on the right is determined to execute schedule F as soon as they get another chance it would convert tens of thousands of Korea civil service positions into Political appointment so you know there are about 4,000 or so political appointees across the American government and every Administration when they come in they look at all those political appointees and they usually you know they usually bring in about a thousand or so of their own people you know plus minus a little bit but you know the vast majority of people who work in government are civil civil servants and they have job protections right and the Trump Administration wants to come in and turn again tens of thousands of those Korea civil service positions into Political appointments so that they can fire them that's the whole point right because that would take away all the job protections that come with civil service because they don't want any more independent experts and they don't want competent bureaucrats they want their own people they want loyalists they want s of ideological conformity because again that's what they feel like sort of hampered them the first time around and they don't want to let that happen again and I just want to like put a fine point on this because this can all sound abstract like somewhere in the Federal Highway Transportation bureaucracy there are a bunch of civil engineers who have to evaluate like what the safe turning radius for a road is like if you're doing a federal you know on a Federal Highway an on-ramp and an off-ramp they promulgate regulations and there are people that are they're not idogs or partisans they're civil engineers who evaluate this right and then there are people who manage those like you don't want that job I think you don't want someone who's got 20 years of experience doing that kicked out and replaced with someone who is like a right-wing vlogging influencer yeah because they're going to be ideologically devoted to Donald Trump and they've been handpicked to put in to now run the bureau that's going to figure out the Turning radiuses you want actual expertise there but that's kind of what's on the table I mean I'm making up this specific example but that sort of thing happens throughout the federal government in a million different ways yeah I mean again the whole point about these Civil Service protections is to say we need the federal government to be staffed with people who are not replaced every four years by whatever ideological criteria but who are there because of their expertise and because they can do the job that they are supposed to be doing but this would change that now they're saying oh we're converting people policy adjacent positions or policy advisory roles but those terms are so vague that no one really knows what that means and really it would probably go down to even maybe like some administrative assistance somewhere in in some agency because you know aren't they also executing policy so who knows right again they're talking about they're explicitly talking about 50,000 people all of this of course only makes sense if you have 50,000 of your own ideological loyalists that you can replace them with because otherwise you're just firing people and you have no one to come in and that is why Again part of all of this project 2025 is also this really unprecedented head hunting operation where they are looking for they're vetting thousands and thousands of people trying to find sort of their type of ideologically pure right-wingers yeah there's this old saying in DC and I think it actually is a Reagan Era that Personnel is policy right that yeah when you get people in and and I've watched this in government up close how true that can be maybe this is a good time to talk about like like who who's doing this like who like it's not you know it's not explicitly the Trump Campaign which they'll tell you although it's a lot of people who are Trump aligned and the idea is like this is a toolkit for whoever this actually you know this actually happened before I'm going to jump in here real quick and say that of the authors and contributors to project 2025 I want to say I think like 52 or 54% of the people are or were Trump appoint ease during the administration again out of the I think it's like close to 300 people who uh wrote and advocated and helped sculpt project 2025 in various ways over half are from Trump's Administration and his cabinet and whoever is following him now and you can look up videos on your own you can maybe I'll post some on here but you can literally hear about not only the people like the head of the federal Society um praising Trump's contribute uh contribution to this but also Trump himself praising this directly the primary so whoever was going to be the Republican president or nominee it's gonna it's now Trump as the nominee who is actually doing this right so we should probably say that planning operations are happening on several factions on the right are s of you know coming up with their own plans right now but what makes project 2025 really stand out even in this sort of Universe of emerging right-wing planning is that this is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and it stands out because it unites much of the conservative movement and the Machine of think tanks and activists and lobbying groups behind this goal of sort of installing a more effective more ruthless right-wing regime as members of its Advisory Board project 2025 currently lists over 100 organizations and institutions it's really Again by the way this is all online if you just if you just Google project 2025 you'll get right to it you can click on it and then you can read this for yourself if you look at the Advisory Board it's a who is who of right-wing actors Alliance defending Freedom America First Legal Foundation Center for renewing America Claremont Institute um young Americas Foundation moms for Liberty they're all on there right and this is really why I believe this stands out again it's spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation which for decades has been of the most influential most it's so really the power center of uh s of the conservative think tank world they're spearheading it but they have managed to really unite much of the conservative machine behind this and I think that's what makes project 2025 really so both interesting but also threatening if because this is what they what they have agreed to do and Heritage is interesting too because it's sort of it's been around for decades it's always been at the center of conservative politics in Washington it has taken a very Maga esque turn recently yes almost in like tal it just all of its Public Communication and its president are this like sound like truth social posts like all caps like truculent trolling aggressive Agri like it's in that like trumpy and register like everything they're doing now it used to be a little more like chin stroking oh yeah tonal like we're serious people consider and now it's just like Fu Libs is basically like their entire am I wrong about that or no no absolutely yeah they so I mean Heritage has been it was established in 1973 and for the longest time it's Associated itself with reaganism and it was associated with reaganism but in recent years they have gone in a decidedly more trumpian Direction and Kevin Roberts who took over as president of the Heritage Foundation at the end of 2021 he has been really key in this development that's not Roberts is not some moderate impostor who just pretends to be hardcore you know to blend in with the Maga crowd no this guy is he comes from the religious right he comes out of the world of of reactionary Catholicism he also by the way before he uh before he became the president of the Heritage Foundation he also worked for a a a lobbying group in Texas that made the quote unquote moral case for fossil fuel so he's also entirely is he's like a a hardcore culture Warrior but also fossil fuel industry that type of thing he holds a PhD in history you know whatever that means um but this guy he again he is is in his own words he has sort of defined the mission of the Heritage Foundation now as quote institutionalizing trumpism and they don't mean this as s of you know taming it they mean it as making it more efficient making it more effective and he's also been entirely clear about you know what his politics is people may remember that in the summer of 2022 in the fall of 2022 just of Neo fascist Neo fascists in Italy um came to power under Georgia Maloney and like Roberts was just ecstatic about that right absolutely ecstatic it like yeah this is it this is the model for American American conservatives and so yeah it's it's very clear these these people are they're True Believers this is not some moderate Republican traditional conservatives these people are all in um and Roberts is really I think indicative of how much the power centers of the of the right have radicalized towards Trump and trumpism so let's stay on this personnelist policy because I think the Civil Service reforms that they Envision are one of the biggest sort of fuls here can you do that unilaterally like it's just not clear to me that you Civil Service I think is set by a set of statutory requirements passed you know through the year so can you unilaterally just be like we're making 50,000 more political Pointes or would that have to go through Congress I mean look some of this is certainly legally questionable and I'm I'm certain that schedule F you know if executed would it would certainly be tested in court especially now now that the administration the Biden Administration has just really I think has enacted a new rule that basically prohibits the kind of intervention that schedule F envisions this came down from the office of personnel management basically saying look you you can't do this um so if the if the Trump Administration now wants to overrule that or change the rule they would have to find a court that agrees with them they would have to find a federal judge that says yeah that's fine or they could ignore maybe the the rule and just do schedule anyway and then again it would it would be tested in court but I think you know here's the thing I think what we've learned over the past if we didn't know this already what we've learned is that you can do a lot of things if you just ignore norms and precedence a lot of this stuff doesn't necessarily run on law uh it runs on Norms and if you are entirely willing to discard those and just do at the very least you'll get a lot of time to cause harm and damage before the CTS catch up to you yeah exactly right exactly right and I think that is the problem here right you can say oh they can't just do that this this strikes me as yeah and maybe again it will absolutely be tested well the other lesson is that the the laws whatever five right-wing justices say is I mean that so that's you know I mean yes you know there are you can make all sorts of preposterous claims and they might get a hearing I mean that like the president is immune from you know yeah uh sending SEAL Team Six to assassinate political Rivals like so yeah I mean ultimately this stuff will be sorted out by the courts and I think the courts did a decent job last last time around of checking some of these imperatives and I think that's not at all a foregone conclusion no this time around so my understanding is is the parts I've read it sort of breaks it up by agency like different parts of the federal government right that's right so I think it'd be a little tedious to go through each one so maybe just like what do you what do you see as the most important things for people to know about what's being called for we talked about this sort of structural change to the way the very fabric of government Personnel functions like Trump toes in positions way further down into the bureaucracy than we're imaginable I mean a you know a a 25x increase right in sort of political pointees or a 10x I mean depending on how it all shakes out what do you see as the the other top things to take away from this document yeah so again this is the part of project 2025 that outlines a proper policy agenda it's like a 920 page report it goes agency by agency Federal like you'll find agencies in there that I believe few people have actually ever heard of probably and they go chapter by chapter again I think it's really important to understand this is a sort of it has it has two sort of it operates on two level on one level this is a program to dismantle the state right and you see this for instance with Department of Education needs to go out we don't want it they want they just completely abolish it right that needs to go or for instance when it comes to the EPA any sort of climate change regulation that all is out it needs to go we don't want it so that is sort of the dismal part of this project but then there's the weaponized and mobilized part and that is sort of the idea to turn government into a tool that you can use for really only two purposes one is to punish your enemies and two is to impose this sort of vision of white Christian patriarchal order on American society now you see this for instance in the Department of Health and Human Services which is I mean if you read it it's it has very little to do with Public Health at all it's entirely conceived as an instrument to impose a certain understanding of what you know a sort heteronormative understanding of gender that's just man and woman a heteronormative understanding of marriage a sort of Hardcore pro-life anti-abortion sort of approach and that's what the Department of Health and Human Services is for right it's it's not about oh you know Public Health in a broad sense it's about here's what's right here's what they call it the natural order and here's how we're going to use this you know this Machinery to impose that on society so for instance the CDC which on the one hand they really hate because of Co right so parts of the CDC they want to dismantle and Say Never Again can these bureaucrats you know tell us what to do I want you guys it to kind of perk your ears up right now because what the plan for the CDC that project 2025 has I think he's about to go into detail it is full out 1984 Nazi propaganda well not even I guess Nazi utilization uh of a government system to track and punish people I want you really listen to this and um if you don't believe it I it's later on I think it's like around page 5 or 600 is the CDC chapter of project 2025 it is [ __ ] chilling and again this is not hyperbole this is what they wrote this is their vision of America in black and white in case of a pandemic but then also they want to turn the CDC in into sort of a sort of an all knowing departmental institution where information about every single abortion in the entire country including like the name of the people who are pregnant the doctors everyone who quotequote helped with the abortion right they explicitly say we're going to use the CDC to do something against all this quote unquote abortion tourism by again turning this into a repository for information detailed information about every single abortion entire country and they want to force blue states to give that information to the CDC which as of right now California for instance doesn't give that information to to the extent it even has that information it doesn't give that information to the federal government and but they are saying no we're not going to accept that anymore every abortion in the country we're going to collect all this information at the CDC and you know this is not a small government Vision right that has nothing to do with small government or that is really I got to say that's really that's deeply chilling I mean that's UPS yes absolutely it absolutely is but that's I mean that is explicitly again that is in the in the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Service and I think it it captures that dichotomy right parts of the CDC disal we don't on it but also oh nice we can turn this into a tool for the kind of society we want to create here so Nationwide surveillance of pregnant people yes in States in states red or blue states where it's legal or not legal yeah so that we just know who's getting abortions I mean they're being sort of ominous or they're being sort of they're not explicitly saying what they will then do with this information right but the entire chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services is all about basically Banning abortion through the back door even without National legislation because that's not what they're talking about and also they know that that you know might not come they might not they might not be able to enact sort of a National Abortion ban but they're very clearly saying that they want to Outlaw mistone um they're talking about outlawing again any sort of medication that is used for abortion they're talking about this vision of abortion surveillance and again they're being very explicit about about using the Department of Health and Human Services for this of Hardcore pro-life they're basically saying explicitly the Department of Health and Human Services needs to be a pro-life right tool that's Health and Human Services as an example and you have a background in actually writing about Public Public Health through your your scholarship I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the Department of Justice because the place that all this stuff kind of gets the scariest to me and and the place that I keep referring to the Department of Justice as sort of like the check offs gun of American liberal democracy which is which we've seen tested a few times and really was tested during Nixon which is that the Department of Justice is in the executive it is part of the Article 2 Branch it reports the president the President appoints various people and at the same time not really through statutory restriction but through norms and promulgations within precedential findings by the department itself yes there are all sorts of ways to Reg at that power such that it isn't just turned into a kind of authoritarian police force right yes you signed a petition against my government the FBI shows up your door the next day to investigate you about XYZ right and this happens in this happens in authoritarian regimes all the time um presidential dictatorships that are sort of like plausibly democracies but aren't really in action right this is a key for those listening to this this doesn't happen in just authoritarian countries this happened in Texas last [ __ ] week the AG the ousted the prosecuted or actually now um what's the word I want to look for he was basically his own party that found him guilty of corruption let him go and he's still the AG of Texas he just raided a bunch of uh Latino groups that are there to help register people to vote and he raided their um homes and offices with state employees to basically try to find some fault of doing so they didn't have probable cause to begin with and if you don't know what probable cause is that's basically like the government can't just investigate you to Simply investigate you cops can't just pull you over to pull you over there needs to be probable cause and without that and this leads into like KBS Corpus um that's basically just saying all right well we're going to keep looking until we find something and if we don't find something we're going to make something up and we're going to throw you in jail um Texas is already doing this uh the states that have outlawed abortion are trying to do this by trying to restrict people to Interstate travel which is an actual right laid out in the Constitution saying that if you are a citizen of one state you have the absolute freedom to travel to any other state right as long as you have not broken any law and you can go to another state that has laws or things that are legal that your state does not and you can legally participate in them by going to that state and doing so this is the sort of again I'm I'm this is not good one's law this is literally a Nazi Vision that the Nazi Kim party I'm going to refuse to call them the conservative party or GOP from this uh point forward they are a nazan party that they are looking to again dismantle all the safeguards all the checks and balances in the Constitution rewrite it and create an authoritarian state in America and if they get the chance they will and this won't stop with Trump I absolutely believe Trump is going to lose um in November but it doesn't matter because again if you read project 2025 it doesn't even name Trump specifically right this is the Outlook of the Nazi KH party going forward regardless of who is actually going to be their nominated person for president or any other office that is what is so scary about this this is why my entire life I have been an advocate that citizens should not be able to own guns I now own three and I practice regularly and I suggest you do the same before those laws are changed way that those become corrupted what do they say about all that stuff yeah I mean they're being 100% clear there's not going to be a uh Department of Justice with any kind of autonomy from the White House it's entirely they're being very explicit no the Department of Justice has to do what the president tells us to do and this is one of the biggest frustration not just of trump himself but also of these people that are behind project 2025 they believe that in the first Trump presidency they were hampered by these lawyers in and around the White House who had too many qualms about questions of legality and norm and precedent and by the way we're already talking about even in the first Trump presidency we're talking about Federalist Society lawyers right yes these are all right they're all right- Wingers Jeff sessions and yes yeah proper conservative SL right-wing lawyers but the people behind project 2025 are convinced that you know they were putting too much of a break on for instance they are convinced they should have invoked the Insurrection act in the summer of 2020 to suppress other the protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder they are convinced that you know there should have been more investigations into Trump's enemies and they feel like they've been you know they've been sabotaged by these lawyers so this time around I mean there's been basically a falling out between of Trump World and even the Federalist society and they're like no we're not going to do this anymore this whole idea of a sort of a a semi-independent Department of Justice that's entirely out and by the way I can really recommend reading that chapter on the Department of Justice because it's really funny how they kind of try to justify this idea of making the Department of Justice into just a tool that does the president's bidding they basically say oh the people have lost the trust into the Department of Justice and if this report is to believe that's because the Department of Justice didn't investigate Hunter Biden's laptop enough and also because it was just not going hard enough after the quote radical agents of the left like antifa this is this is entirely it reads like a sort of a hardcore culture War it could be written by margorie Taylor green but this is again an ostensibly a policy document in which they are outlining this is what we're going to do to the Department of Justice and they're talking about Hunter Biden's laptop and that really gives you a sense of what sort of the spirit is behind these ideas yeah and there's a broader ideological Vision here which we should maybe take a step back to talk about which is back during the Bush Administration one of the the things they would talk about is this notion of a unitary executive which is that the Constitutional structure of the country has an article to branch which is the executive yes and it all power flows from the president and anything that sort of checks that is itself kind of constitutionally suspect so when you have all these kinds of consultative boards you know all the that are promulgated by Statute when you have administrative procedures like there has been a hostility to that running through conservatism for a while it's also a hostility that is showing up before The Supreme Court and the federal Society towards the administrative state which is basic basically we don't like these bureaucrats despite the fact that they have been given this Authority via perfectly like you know passed statute signed by a President right through the Constitutional order they have been created and given this you know authority to decide these questions right we just don't like them and we're sort of coming up with a reason why they're unconstitutional and so this idea of basically making the president's Authority within the government itself kind of more dictatorial is yeah something that they kind of are all on the same page against on we don't want lawyers and bureaucrats saying no you can't do that we want the Edict of the president to go well as long as and if the president is a republican we should say because this is an important point because if it's the wrong president then we don't want it then then the government no longer has the power to regulate carbon no if it's a Democratic president then everything everything the president does is is a sort of dictatorial overreach but but no absolutely I mean again at its core project 2025 envisions a vast expansion of Presidential Power and hovering sort of in the background of all of this is this ex unitary executive Theory this sort of legal Theory it basically says there are zero limits of Presidential Power when it comes to the executive like the president has absolute king-like Powers over the Executive Branch and like you said that's been around for decades it's something that the conservative legal movement has been pushing for a long time and it does have sign significant support not only in the conserv legal movement certainly there are at least two maybe more conservative justices on the Supreme Court who are certainly let's say a unitary executive Theory interested and you see this throughout project 2025 the vision of the president's s of basically unlimited control over the government is justified by this but it's also justified by something even more profound by this idea that the president at least this President a right-wing president embodies the true will of the people and that nothing must impede the will of the coqu real America you know the sort of white Christian patriotical America and certainly not some bureaucrats or lawyers or even the law itself I also want to be clear you know they're talking about this like the unitary executive Theory but it's really not like these are like really it's really not about a a consistent legal Theory with this people yes it's not very theoretically developed it's yes that's a good point this is explicitly designed as a response to what they see what they call the leftist woke threat and they see what they do as Justified because everything no matter how radical is Justified in defense of quote unquote real America that is sort of the permission structure that governs conservative politics in these circles and so yeah if they can leatch onto unitary executive Theory to make that sound more I don't know less extreme or or more you know more legitimate they will do that but you know they will also do whatever they want to do here even without that theory more of our conversation after this quick break going got to see if I can Skip by this the best things in the best things I'm Angie hicks's higher skilled PR from MSNBC my latest podcast ads and extra episodes been a little lost to history is that Donald Trump wanted the my podcasts with zero ads and you get all of msnbc's original podcast including how to win 2024 Prosecuting Donald Trump the veli baned book club which is so good you get all of those all with zero ads and all the shows have bonus content and extra episodes that are only available to people who have MSNBC premium you can sign up now for MSNBC premium on Apple podcasts you know one of the things that's been a little lost to history is that Donald Trump wanted the department of justice to prosecute his political enemies and called for them to do so publicly via Twitter all the time yes and they largely didn't it was they had the the John Durham sort of special prosecutor who kind of did that and then very embarrassingly failed to secure convictions on the two trials he brought both were acquittal which is like essentially unheard of in in federal prosecution like no one goes 0 for two anywhere in the federal government prosecution but they used it more as a as a shield than a sword and I think the place where the rubber really hits the road and the thing that really concerns me is using the Department of Justice as a as a weaponized tool and they talk about this all the time because they're doing this projection now with with the case is brought against Donald Trump that that's what's happening to him here and that turnabout will be fair play and that there will be special prosecutors and they're going to just start Prosecuting everyone in sight who who stands against them and I guess there's no way you could answer this but given the fact that you've Ed yourself in this world how realistic eventuality do you see that if Trump is is elected do you mean specifically the Department of Justice going after Trump's enemies yes oh I mean look I would say generally they will not be able to implement all of these plans exactly as they have outlined them here that's just not how the world works right but if you look at if you combine the plans with this sort of personnel operation that they're running this head hunting operation and and if you think about who the people are going to be that they will that they will be bringing in and there's nothing going to stop them from bringing in those people there's nothing going to stop them from Staffing the Department of Justice with people who are on board with this kind of vision I mean some some are Senate conf confirmable positions but there's lots of they did a lot of messing around with vacancy appointments last time exactly right exact I mean that's I mean that's that's a really important point in some sense we've already seen sort of a preview of what we might be getting in sort of the last year or so of the uh of Trump's first term when he was starting to play around with this sort of stuff they just avoided they basically avoided confirmation battles altogether and everyone was in was a sort of acting under the yeah right exactly and by the way all of those acting somethings are now among the people who have S of contributed to project 2025 of a lot of them have written those chapters on this department or that agency so yeah I mean in that sense it's absolutely realistic I don't see again all of this will be challenged it will be challenged in there might be a public outcry against it but the idea that this is all we can all just dismiss this as just hot air I don't see how that is a realistic take on this because again this is not just project 2025 this is a good example of how Trump himself and the Trump campaign and project 2025 what they are envisioning again while those are two separate kind of planning operations and two separate although not entirely separate there's a lot of overlap personal overlap between those camps but there are two separate camps but you can see with this point specifically with what they want to do with the Department of Justice and how they want to bring in these lawyers who will just provide you know pseudo legal justification for whatever the Trump regime wants to do I mean this is entirely compatible what Trump wants to do and what project 2025 is outlining here there's no friction there's no you know tension here no they're entirely on the same page about this yeah one of the big lessons of the period between the election and Inauguration in 2020 and 2021 and the runup to January 6 this aftermath is that ultimately What mattered was what the people with law degrees in positions of power were willing to accept or not yes and enough people in positions of Power with law degrees including the acting head of the Department of Justice the acting AG the chief councils to the vice president of the United States his chief of staff all these people were simply not willing to go along with a cou yeah there were people who were but they were outnumbered and if you rerun that experiment in which all the people not willing to go along are willing to go along and are willing to say yeah that's fine let's do this let's send out this department this doj letter on doj letterhead saying the results are right you know called into question and you should convene your state legislature like you got a totally different like that was a place where this question of personnel is policy and actually more than Personnel is policy Personnel is law right really comes into focus and you know what it's even worse than that I think this is maybe to me the biggest mistake that people make that look at these planning operations and say you know I'm not going to take this too seriously we've had Trump in power before and you we're just looking at a rerun it's just going to be more of the same but this time not only are they going to have the plans and the personnel which again they did decidedly not have in 2017 they're also going to be operating under circumstances that are decidedly more favorable to their sort of overall project they will be working with a super majority on the Supreme Court which again they did not have in 2017 right they will be operating with a fully or almost fully Trump ified Republican party like there's like the mid romnes they are right right the list Chinese they're all been ostracized from the party right so these people are out this is an entirely different not entirely different but a significantly different Republican party and also they're going to be operating in an environment in which everyone who stands up against whatever Donald Trump wants to do and I'm not talking about people on the left I'm talking about whatever level of resistance is even still left within the Republican party they have all seen now that they can expect an enormous level of violent threat directed at them right because that is what all the election workers are facing across the country that is what every Republican is facing who has said anything critical about Trump so we are operating under entirely different conditions that was just not the case in 2017 or less so the case I mean there were some that so the case but it's it's way more widespread and almost sort of priced in as ubiquitous now I mean just look at the judges and the depart the the district attorneys and the the judges clerk in a civil fraud trial I mean anyone that gets in the crosshairs has to deal with a security situation they have to deal with doxing there maybe their phone is going to be overwhelmed they may have to move Apartments like these things are real tangible costs of sort of the threat of violence and the security burden is a tax right that is applied to people that cross Trump yes absolutely and again I think if you combine those three elements right so different Supreme Court different Republican party and this sort of environment of heightened violent threat this does not mean that they will be able to do whatever they have outlined here again this is not what I'm arguing what anyone any serious person is arguing but it will mean that the idea that we're just looking at a rerun of like the first Trump presidency that is just not a plausible analysis of the situation I feel like now at this point we have to talk a little bit about the sort of the fascism debate or the authoritarian debate I mean right the language in this project 2025 and I have read large parts of it not all it I have read the justice department section it is it's pretty close to fascist language I mean it's a constant paranoid obsession with an internal enemy who is seeking to undo the purity of the nation from within yes it's textbook fascistic now it's also you could say textbook reactionary or textbook conservative and and there's lines between those I'm not that interested in this debate that has played out over the last 10 years about the degree to which trumpism is fascism or not the name doesn't matter that much to me but what does matter is models of authoritarian governance right and I you know people talk about Hungary a lot as a sort of model and Donald Trump has explicitly said orban's great I like what he's doing yes and one of the things you see there is you know the newspaper that is you know or the university that is a a sort of Bastion of dissent and criticism comes under all sorts of regulatory scrutiny or tax scrutiny or in Turkey where erdogan is also sort of overseeing this kind of presidential dictatorship which is ostensibly Democratic but corrupted in key ways you know you pass a law regulating large media Enterprises and then they're sort of forced to sell to Friendly competitors there's there's all these ways in which like it's not the tanks roll in right but you're using essentially the mechanisms of governance in a fundamentally coercive fashion directed at constraining speech and against political enemies and I wonder how much you think what's laid out in Project 2025 fits with these other kind of presidential dictatorship authoritarian models so I mean look the answer to the question of you know whether or not this is adequately described as fascism depends on how you Define fascism and there's no consensus definition of fascism out there so that's that's one of the problems here but I think you framed this exactly right it's not about what label you slap on it it's about we shouldn't get bucked down in s labeling fights to me I will say this and I think most of serus academic observers I think would agree with this there is trumpism specifically Trump and trumpism specifically represents a specifically American specifically 21st century version of fascism that does not mean that everything on the right is fascism that doesn't mean the whole Republican party if you look historically so fascist movements and parties have always existed in sort of coalitions in alliances with more established conservative right-wing reactionary forces and I think that's also exactly what we're seeing here right we're seeing sort of an alignment we're seeing an alliance a sort of a coming together a making common cause between these different strands on the right the people behind project 2025 they're not Trump although again there are strong connections there many Trump alumni Trump Administration alumni among them but again granted they're not Trump himself but what project 2025 offers is a story of a once great nation in decline because of the Enemy Within and the enemy without but they are in cahoots right it's like the the woke Enemy Within is in cahoots with and the globalist elites are in cahoots with like communist China they're being 100% explicit about this by the way I'm not just paraphrasing here and project 2025 is sort of a promise to restore this former National Glory by purging these enemies and these deviants from the Nations is is visy you put it like that I'm I'm somewhat you know on purpose putting it like that but look project 2025 regardless of where you look regardless of what chapter you read it offers sort of a visceral disdain for any kind of pluralism and diversity and all that is channeled into this program aiming to extinguish that pluralism diversity look again I think by any reasonable definition of of fascism there's some key elements of that that are present here but again if you'd rather call these people enablers of fascism or making common cause with fascism I don't care I really don't what is important here is that we understand how radically anti-democratic this is how radically anti pluralistic and that this is really an extreme reactionary vision of white Christian patriarchal dominance and an sort of aggressive Embrace of State authoritarianism in order to impose that Vision on society against the will of the majority and as as we can agree on that and how dangerous that is you can honestly call it whatever you want I don't think it's it matters all that much but the diagnosis matters we'll be right back after we take this quick break so I'm going to speed try to speed B commercials but I just want to kind of stop and point that out there like there is no definition that you can find of fascism and again this is the def definition by one or two people or one institution versus another is not is not the focus point right it's that what does the plan seem to do does it produce more freedom or less Freedom right that's kind of like that's how you can basically look at it um it all of it is about restricting freedom but restricting Freedom specifically of minorities of women of people who don't align with your way of thinking um that is the epitome of fascism right I mean if you are like me where most of your education you know I'm I'm going to be 50 here in a few years like the threat and the cost and the reverberations of World War II were very prominent in my education whether it was in grammar school high school college whatever I have no idea you know what that looks like now with a lot of the um sort of book bands that have been taken across in uh red states where they've banned books like the Diary of an Frank um they've banned uh the handmaid's tale they've banned um God I I think it's something like over 4,000 different books now that they deem are you know CTIC to American life and need to be banned um that in itself people who ban books for people to read at a government level again epitome of fascism right that is their logic on this is basically like well you know yeah you have the right the freedom to Speech but you don't have the freedom to read right so we can tell you you can't read anything um that's the kind of uh sort of [ __ ] idea that they are going with here and that they're going to be pushing forward um and if you don't believe me just wait a few months it's coming so you need quality certified course of the day to bring my experience see so one of the things that I wrestle with here is that I think there's a little bit of a sop being run by Bannon and some people on the right which is and you even saw this the other day Ronnie Jackson who's the you know ex White House doctor turned right-wing magga Texas Congressman you know saying people are scared about Trump's second term you should should be scared and there's a little bit of big bad wolf happening you know it's like Steve Bannon is like talking a lot of trash from his microphone and it's like I'm not scared of you sweaty doofus like you you know I I refuse to be I just refuse to be too cowed by these losers um and and I I wrestle a little bit with balancing two imperatives that are in intention one is taking seriously the authoritarian aspirations and threat represented by this movement which they say I mean Bannon the other day literally said we got to get rid of the entire FBI and start over it's totally corrupted and yes we are going to prosecute there will be punishment for antitrump forces in a trump term like fully like not even in coded language right like straight up saying this is what's coming so one level I'm trying to balance in in the way I think about this in the coverage of it being very cleare eyed and serious about what a threat this is but also not letting their like trash talking make them seem more powerful and imposing than they are you know what I mean because that's part of the game here part of it's like yeah you should be scared of us and Trump's going to rule forever and you know it's the last election in America and it's like no it's not the I I refuse to seed all this stuff I refuse to seed it because if you seed it ahead of time you say if Trump's elected all these terrible things are going to happen you may have to wake up on the Wednesday morning after he's elected and say like no we like we're not going to go without a fight and I wonder how you think about those how to think about those two imperatives CU there's a certain amount of like brag and again I will say this uh I agree with him that we should not seed any sort of like uh oh this is going to happen so I better not do anything and he is right that you know if Trump wins again we have a clear plan of what they're going to do and you'd better be able to fight well in a fight against fascism I cannot think of a single fascist country right that was brought down without violence I mean even Gandhi's ability to get Great Britain to release its grip on India while he as a leader was nonviolent um the people against him were not and the people who fought for him and uh alongside him and who eventually killed him because of that uh used violent force and it's just a it's a reality and when people say that violence doesn't solve anything I'm like how did every how does every war end it doesn't end at a voting box it ends typically with like an Insurgency war and one side losing or bombs being dropped and like you know someone gives up finally like that's how this [ __ ] ends up like it's and this again this is not like some illusional rhetoric this is just historically speaking this is what happens you know and I'm yeah you got you got to be ready to fight and if you're one of those people that would rather fight at you know the pundit and on YouTube and all that that's that's awesome more power to you I love it I'm not saying that there's not a place for that there absolutely is but I intrinsically am not one of these people that can just sit back and be like oh yeah I'll just you know wait for someone else to step up and like wait for the Right leader and trust that they're going to allow us to vote again because it they won't like Trump has literally said it like if he is voted into office America will never have to vote again um yeah and again these are things don't take my word for it look it up on your own and uh yeah as I would say like if this happens you have to be able you have to be prepared to fight in whatever capacity that ISO that's happening here they really like to talk like Disney villains like there's this like cackling like I'll get you you know it's like all right so I mean I I will be honest with you I try to ignore Steve Bannon as much as I can yeah because I don't I find I do not find that very insightful I not I'm not gaining any insights from listening to whatever he has to say I'll say this what everything we're seeing here this sort of radicalization this of anti-democratic radicalization of the right of which project 2025 is a manifestation um it's not coming from a place of strength it's coming from a place of weakness that's an interesting way because the right is the reason why they are radicalizing is because they and I think they're quite correct about this they can feel and they can see that American society is moving away from their vision of for what of what America should be broadly speaking over over the past few decades right the country has become less white more pluralistic more diverse more secular certainly yes absolutely yes so and that's mostly for demographic reasons right so again I mean Barack Obama was reelected in 2012 with like 40% of of the white Vote or something like this entirely Unthinkable in previous eras of of American history and so in a very real sense they are reacting to something that's real they're not Imagining the fact that the country is becoming more pluralistic and more diverse and so that is why there's s this sense of being under siege that is really uh that you can grasp and I really recommend everyone read the forward that Kevin Roberts the president of the Heritage Foundation wrote for this policy report that project 2025 put out it's only like 15 16 pages long and it's all about it's like it's so it's so tangible this sense of being under siege and having their backs yes and having their backs against the wall and it's all about this we are losing and the left and the Woks and the globalist and the progressives they have taken over all the institutions of government and all the institutions of American life this is precisely why they say conservatism is no longer enough that's now explicitly what you hear on the right we can't be conservative anymore we need a counterrevolution we have to embrace sort of a counterrevolutionary spirit right there's nothing left to conserve we need to we need to be much more radical than this but again don't let Steve Bannon tell you that this is because they're so strong and so manly or all this kind of nonsense it's because of out of a sense of weakness and that is I think a sort of a glass Hall full kind of way to look at the current situation right in many ways and I mean this sincerely in many ways the country has just never been closer to finally realizing the promise of sort of egalitarian pluralistic multi-racial democracy that I mean it has never kept that promise so far but it that promise has always been part of s of the American project and in many ways the country has never been closer to realizing that that is precisely why they are again feeling so much under threat on the right and I think it's it's really important to keep that in mind whenever you hear Steve Bannon like pretend he's like the man there's a line I think it's a Benjamin whtas line of of lawfare who said that you know describing the Trump Administration or Trump as you know malevolence tempered by incompetence which I thought was and and one thing I think is good to remind people even though again I don't want to fall into trap of being like Oh it can never happen here it'll we'll be fine I don't think that but also the incompetence isn't just going to go away like there's something like they will be more competent this time but it doesn't mean it's going to go away like Trump is still Donald Trump he's still and and in certain ways a extremely distractable you know flawed figure for executing projects in a systematic fashion just I mean that's just the truth about him let me take of the other side of this of this debate and push back a little bit against it although I'm not entirely I'm not saying you're entirely wrong but look it is true right in some ways Trump is a less than ideal vessel for the kind of abitious comprehensive plans that are emanating from the right he's erratic he's lazy he's volatile he's certainly not sitting down and reading his extensive policy memos I mean No One Believes that he is like reading 920 nor does he care about anything except you know himself and his own sort of glory and yeah no that's right but in other ways Trump is especially suited to lead this kind of crusade ised righted really takes a radical leader to implement extremist plans and kind of you know that's Trump look I mean at it's very if you if you strip it down to its core what project 2025 is about is again this massive expansion of Presidential Power and making the uh making the executive into a tool for whatever the regime wants to do and it doesn't take much sophisticated analysis to explain why such a plan would appeal to Trump he wants power he wants impunity and he wants the ability to plunder right and so again while he will not sound sit down to read those plans he will look at this and say oh yeah I get more power and I get to go after my enemies awesome he also he doesn't have a lot of ideological commitments but he does have a few the biggest one is his own glory and vanity and power but he's genuinely I think a bigot like I think he he's not an egalitarian he really thinks there's like a small group of people and of certain races and nationalities that are better than others and he's genuinely authoritarian at a principal level like I think he really genuinely viscerally deep in his heart thinks democracy is bad and strong strong men are good and I think he thinks that oh yeah as like a foundational fact like it's not a madeup thing it's not just an incidental thing he likes dictatorship affirmatively as a model of governance and every time he talks about Kim Jong-un or she or Putin or whoever is like they're strong they're strong it's like that they his people salute when he says something I want my people to say that he once said that about Kim Jong-un he to his is an authoritarian I mean he is he is the perfect Avatar of sort of a grieved masculinity and he's the perfect Avatar of sort of a white male grievance and that is not just he's not putting on a show he is not like Kevin Roberts is again he's the president of the Heritage Foundation that guy's coming out of this of reactionary Catholic World right that's not Trump and Trump is not deeply steeped in white Christian nationalism in that way but again he is sort of an griefed white male Alpha who believes the world is not giving him his due anymore and that's not right because all the women and the and the brown people and the black folks and they're they're being a little too loud and too rowdy and why are they not shutting up and so again I think in that sense I kind of struggle when people say oh all he wants is like plunder and and and enrich himself no I mean there is this again there is this sort of AG griefed white male masculinity and that is also very much what he is and again in that sense also how he sees the world and what he wants America to be is entirely 100% compatible with this vision of white patriarchal order that emanates from Project 2025 where are you from Thomas originally uh I'm German how about that what what brought you to the states uh well you know I was offered a job at Georgetown and so um and my wife was also at the very same time offered a very good job in DC we were offered our jobs within three days of each other and so we felt like that's too good to um we can't say no to that so and we came over can I ask as a final question as someone who is from a a nation whose sort of defining feature of the last say 70 years is Reckoning with with fascist evil and the aftermath of that like how you feel about being an American or Living in America at this moment that's a good question um you know what I I struggled with this a little bit because I'm not I'm not an expert on like German history I'm not an expert on Nazism but it is true certainly that the idea that it cannot happen here is certainly not something that you have in your DNA if you grow up in Germany in the late exactly I mean I was born in 1982 and so like the it is the very core of s of my school education about German history that it can absolutely happen because it did happen right and so I think in that sense um you know I do think that this has probably immunized me a little more against these sort of tales of American exceptionalism the sort of tales of America supposedly America is supposedly immune to this kind of stuff and America supposedly has 250 years of stable Consolidated democracy and stable Consolidated democracy do not fall to authoritarianism I mean first of all it's not 250 years of stable Consolidated democracy the first time America had any right to call itself a multi-racial democracy in in any sense of the word is in the 1960s after the civil rights legislation of the 60s and even then this is has been the defining political fault line in American history whether or not the country should actually continue on this path towards becoming again that which it has often promised to be a a multi-racial pluralistic egalitarian democracy that's what all people are created equal ultimately means right a country that is not defined by sort of you know discriminatory hierarchies of race and gender and wealth and religion but something where the individual is not again not measured by you know who you are and what you look like and who your parents were and all of these things America has never been that but since the 1960s there has been this s this struggle over should we continue down this path towards becoming that finally realizing that promise and I think again when I hear people who are confidently telling Their audience and these are people with like big platform