Government shutdown, Project 2025, and Trump’s authoritarian dream

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Donald Trump government shutdown Project 2025 authoritarian authoritarianism

Government shutdown, Project 2025, and Trump’s authoritarian dream

As the so-called shutdown of government continues, many so-called conservatives are celebrating it as an opportunity to reduce spending while simultaneously blaming Democrats. However, when we look at the situation through the lens of Project 2025 — a 900-page blueprint of priorities for Donald Trump’s second presidency and calls for a massive expansion of presidential power — we see how Trump is leveraging the faux-crisis as an opportunity to make his authoritarian dream come true.

During his 2024 campaign, Trump claimed to know nothing about Project 2025, but a quick look at his second term as president shows that the document is guiding his every decision in many, including:

When it comes to Trump using Project 2025 and the so-called lockdown to expand his authoritarian dream, we first need to go back to an article I wrote during his 2024 campaign where I warned how Project 2025 and Agenda 47 were equipping Trump to build a police state.

One of the policies in Project 2025 promoted the idea that Trump needed first seize full control of every federal agency — a job he initially delegated to Elon Musk and the DOGE project — using a perverted interpretation of Article II of the Constitution. The creators of Project 2025 and a cadre of Trump’s inner circle shared a belief in what is called unitary executive theory, an idea that Article II of the Constitution gave the president control over federal agencies, thus preventing Congress from allowing them to do anything contrary to the desires of the president.

Trump talked a lot about possessing a god-like power over government using Article II many times during his first term:

Project 2025 called on Trump to renew his first-term executive order creating a “Schedule F” employment category that designated tens of thousands of civil servants as political appointees and then fire anyone deemed disloyal. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts estimated that 50,000 civil servant jobs could be eliminated and then replaced with Trump loyalists, and when asked in a New York Times Magazine interview about the motivations behind this move, Roberts said that his goal was “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

Project 2025 also promoted the idea that the president, not Congress, had full control over spending and could grant himself authority to bypass Congress on spending issues. Through a misuse of the president’s “Impoundment Power,” Trump could simply ignore congressionally approved spending and do whatever he wants with taxpayer money.

Taken together, these policies created a perfect storm where Project 2025 and the government shutdown could make Trump’s authoritarian dream come true (via APNews.com):

President Donald Trump is openly embracing the conservative blueprint he desperately tried to distance himself from during the 2024 campaign, as one of its architects works to use the government shutdown to accelerate his goals of slashing the size of the federal workforce and punishing Democratic states.

In a post on his Truth Social site Thursday morning, Trump announced he would be meeting with his budget chief, “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

The comments represented a dramatic about-face for Trump, who spent much of last year denouncing Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s massive proposed overhaul of the federal government, which was drafted by many of his longtime allies and current and former administration officials.

Trump has since gone on to stock his second administration with its authors, including Vought, “border czar” Tom Homan, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller and Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission and now chairs the panel.

For those who think that those of us concerned about how Project 2025 and the government shutdown allows Trump to fulfill his authoritarian dream, let me remind you that he went on record even before his inauguration to be a dictator on day one of his second term, thus proving his predetermined intention to ignore the Constitution.

Let me close by saying that I have been and always will be a Christian constitutional conservative who believes that our government has grown too big and spends too much money, and for that reason I’m happy anytime the tax-and-spend Republicans and Democrats find an opportunity to cut the size of government and spend less money. However, I’m not willing to surrender liberty in exchange for authoritarianism.

Project 2025 calls for a massive expansion and centralization of executive power that James Madison warned in The Federalist Papers, Number 47 would result in tyranny:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Donald Trump wants to use the government shutdown as an opportunity to check off a few of the Project 2025 priorities and make his authoritarian dream a reality. I hope my conservative friends realize this before it’s too late.

 

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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