It was all there in plain sight. They wrote it down, bound it, and put it online. They boasted about it on podcasts and cable news, laughed about it in donor briefings, and bragged that this time, they’d be ready. Project 2025 is not a policy platform. It is a soft coup given institutional cover and bureaucratic form. David A. Graham’s The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America is a sober, detailed account of this quiet seizure of the state. But it arrives too late, and with too much faith that sunlight might still disinfect what is already festering in full daylight.
We are past the point of warning. The architects of Project 2025 do not fear exposure. They crave it. This is not a conspiracy. It is an open declaration of intent to end liberal democracy in all but name. The administrative state is to be dismantled. The civil service will be purged and politicised. The Department of Justice turned into a partisan weapon. Abortion outlawed, gender erased, federal education and healthcare systems gutted. Trumpism 2.0 is not the clown show of the first term. It is ideological governance by loyalists, forged in resentment, sanctified by Christian nationalism, and backed by capital.
Graham lays it out clearly. Russell Vought and Paul Dans, the chief architects, emerged from the first administration disgusted by the “lazy” appointees and obstructive bureaucrats who in their view had prevented Trump from realising his full potential. Their solution is total: replace the state with the movement. A database of 10,000 pre-cleared ideologues. A training curriculum in how to run government like a hostile takeover. Executive orders pre-written. Civil servants threatened into submission or removal. This isn’t politics. It’s regime change.
And yet Graham writes as though his readers might still be swayed by reasoned evidence. He patiently explains the dangers of impoundment, the assault on agency independence, the ideological purge of the Department of Education. But the people behind Project 2025 already know all this. They want it. The liberal habit of describing creeping fascism as a tragic misunderstanding. As if its authors simply haven’t considered the long-term implications. This is part of the problem. They have considered it. They like what they see.
Project 2025 is not an overreach. It is a reckoning. The authors are explicit: this is the “second American Revolution,” peaceful “if the left allows it to be.” What they mean is: peaceful, if there is no resistance. That resistance cannot be moral persuasion or constitutional appeal. The legal frameworks are being rewritten. The norms are being reversed. What’s required now is something far more serious: a politics willing to do what liberals will not. Which is recognise the stakes and act accordingly.
If the Trump administration plans to govern by decree, with federal agencies as instruments of vengeance and surveillance, then the only viable response is defiance. Not at the level of tweets or editorials, but at the level of state power. The sanctuary city was always a stopgap; what’s needed now are sanctuary states. Whole jurisdictions that will refuse to comply with federal attempts to criminalise abortion, dismantle healthcare, persecute trans people, or nullify civil liberties. The GOP has spent decades championing states’ rights—fine. Let’s give President Trump a big fuck you and see how he likes a republic that no longer answers to him.
This is not civil war, but it is civil disobedience, scaled to the nation-state. Blue states have the numbers, the wealth, the institutional infrastructure. What they’ve lacked is the will. If Project 2025 is serious about remaking America in the image of Christian autocracy, the left must be just as serious about resistance. Americans cannot count on the Constitution to save them. They will have to find other means and quickly.
Because what happens in the United States does not stay in the United States. We’ve already seen the first wave of the invasion. Britain’s Supreme Court has ruled that trans women are not women for the purposes of the Equality Act. A decision that would fit neatly into the pages of Mandate for Leadership. Across Europe, parties of the nationalist right coordinate strategy, share language, adopt tactics. This is a coordinated counter-offensive against modernity itself. The conditions differ, but the vision is the same: hierarchy, patriarchy, submission.
We do not have the luxury of watching this unfold as spectators. The warning was given. The hour is late. What comes should not be polite.
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