Project 2025 and Trump’s “Unified Reich”

Project 2025, led by The Heritage Foundation, is a sprawling endeavor to prepare for a potential conservative administration starting in January 2025 if the Republicans win the election in November.

The nearly 1,000-page project, fashioned as their 2025 Presidential Transitional Project, Project 2025 pledges to build on four pillars: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook to “pave the way for an effective conservative administration” and to “start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.”

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to “cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum, and order issued by President Obama.” 

His playbook has not changed much since then—except this time, he’s out for revenge.

“Revenge does take time, I will say that,” Trump told Dr. Phil last week. “And sometimes, revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”

While the manifesto pledges to undo much of the policies introduced into government by who its authors refer to as the “radical left,” a closer look at the guide reveals a more insidious plan to reverse many of the country’s cornerstone civil rights legacies.

Project 2025 strives to eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce and to dismantle the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. The constitutional right to protest will also be under threat by a Republican government, which could mean the deployment of the U.S. military whenever citizens exercise their right to protest. The agenda will also eliminate protections against sexual and gender discrimination and diversity, equity, inclusion and affirmative action will all be a thing of the past. Reducing government regulation, particularly in labor markets, will undoubtedly hit the African American community hard. Many of the government departments Project 2025 aims to eradicate have helped Black Americans and other communities of color.

African Americans currently represent 18.2% of the federal workforce compared to 12.6% of the overall population.

“The evidence shows that the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice has failed to protect law-abiding citizens and has ignored its most basic obligations. It has become at once utterly unserious and dangerously politicized,” the manifesto states. “Prosecution and charging decisions are infused with racial and partisan political double standards. Immigration laws are ignored. The FBI harasses protesting parents (branded “domestic terrorists” by some partisans) while working diligently to shut down politically disfavored speech on the pretext of its being ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation.’ A department that prosecutes FACE Act cases while ignoring dozens of violent attacks on pregnancy care centers and/or the coordinated violation of laws that prohibit attempts to intimidate Supreme Court Justices by parading outside of their homes has clearly lost its way. A department that has twice engaged in covert domestic election interference and propaganda operations—the Russian collusion hoax in 2016 and the Hunter Biden laptop suppression in 2020—is a threat to the Republic.”

Funding for public schools will be drastically cut, and instead, efforts will be made to boost private schools via vouchers. Public education’s Title 1 program, a federal education program which supports low-income students nationwide, will be phased out altogether, meaning millions of U.S. children who rely on free school meals could go hungry.

Clinics that provide abortion or contraception services will be defunded and Republicans will reinstate the Comstock Act to ban mail-order abortions as well as the majority of reproductive healthcare services that include abortion.

Some of Trump’s proposed policies may seem, at least on the surface, to be fairly innocuous. However, Trump has always been very open about his adoration for authoritarian rule, and last month, he posted what could be considered his most chilling message yet.

The former President posted a video showing images of a fake newspaper article referencing a “unified Reich,” detailing “what happens after Donald Trump wins.” The word “Reich” is often primarily associated with Nazi Germany’s Third Reich. Adolph Hitler’s state-coordinated genocide systematically murdered over six million Jewish people between 1933 and 1945.

In true Trump style, the narrator reels off hypothetical headlines such as “Economy Booms!” and “Border is closed,” fashioned as World War I-era newspaper clippings.

The video was deleted from Trump’s Truth Social account by the following day.

Last month, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett recently denounced the radical government blueprint, labeling it as a “playbook for authoritarianism.”

“It calls for eliminating the Department of Education, eliminating the Department of Commerce, deploying the military for the use of domestic law enforcement against protesters under the Insurrection Act of 1807,” Crockett told America First Legal’s vice president Gene Hamilton during a Republican-led House Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. “It also has the repealing of Schedule F status for thousands of federal employees to allow a president to replace career civil servants with unqualified partisan loyalists. That’s probably my favorite of it. It also prohibits the FBI from combating the spread of misinformation and disinformation like Russia and China, who are actively trying to interfere with American elections.”

Her remarks were vastly overshadowed by her tête-à-tête with Rep. Majorie “bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body” Greene, but the fact that the GOP is not publicly shying away from its sinister agenda is deeply concerning.

Voters are entitled to feel unfulfilled by the Biden-Harris administration, but to say that the administration has done nothing in its four years would be factually incorrect.

In February, the administration issued a fact sheet touting its achievements, including creating 2.6 million jobs for Black workers, the lowest Black unemployment rate on record, and the lowest gap between Black and white unemployment on record. The number of Black children living in poverty in 2021 was reduced by 50% through ARP’s Child Tax Credit expansion and Black wealth is up by 60% relative to pre-pandemic—the largest increase on record.

The fact sheet was largely overlooked, but this November, Black wealth is on the ballot, whether voters acknowledge this or not.

Trump and his legion of misguided supporters will tell you that Black voters endorse him because of his infamous mugshot, felony conviction and proposed tax breaks—but if Trump wins in November and Project 2025 is enforced, the few legal protections Black Americans are provided will likely soon vanish.

In 2022, 17.1% of Black Americans lived in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared to 8.6% of white people. Black Americans currently account for 20.1% of the population in poverty in 2022 but only 13.5% of the total population.

Project 2025 would see these numbers skyrocket.

So, can we really afford to vote for Trump? The numbers say no, we cannot.