All According to Plot

The centralization of power and the destruction of liberal democracy was underway well before the election, unleashing Trump's corruption and crime. Have Americans learned the cost of this mistake?

Who me? I don’t know anything about Project 2025. Trump in June 2024. (Photo by Justin Sullivan via Getty Images)

On the days when I grow weary, I’m inclined to do anything but dig into the violations and degradations of Donald Trump and his corrupt regime. This of course is what they hope—the more they do, the greater the scale of criminality and corruption, the more we’ll look away, overwhelmed and overtaken by fatigue.

This is not by chance; this is their strategy.

But as we look ahead toward the midterms and the opportunity to curtail their abuse of power and self-enrichment, I’m reminded of how much of their success is not only a function of the malignantly narcissistic Trump, but rather the conditions created for him to dismantle independent democratic institutions and reject the rule of law, ethical behavior and respect for the Constitution.

I want to take you back to three episodes during the last several years that explain how carefully the right-wing extremists prepared to maximize executive power, minimize the needs of everyday Americans and convince the craven Republican majority to abandon our system of checks and balances. These episodes underscore that the grim predicament of these last 18 months was tragically knowable and largely inevitable.

In July 2023, The New York Times first described the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, its plan for a “sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government.” At the time, I characterized it “as an aggressive effort underway to install dictatorship if Donald Trump retakes the White House.”

What struck me was the brazen attitude of its architects yearning to overhaul our democratic system and put in place a unitary executive who would reject the assumption that our three branches of government possess overlapping powers.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the first Trump White House and then led the pro-Trump Center for Renewing America.

“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. He and a collection of contributors to Project 2025 were planning on a Trump takeover focused on “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”

As I wrote in “Aiming for Dictatorship” in July of 2023, “This plot is committed to concentrating power in the hands of the president by ending liberal government and the independence of the Department of Justice, the civil service and other federal agencies that have been largely protected (by law or tradition) from presidential political interference.”

Sound familiar? I wish I hadn’t been right.

The second episode was soon after the election when Vought, not yet renominated to serve as OMB director, was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. “The president has to move as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers,” Vought said. “Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies.”

This followed leaked video of several private speeches Vought gave in 2023 and 2024, which were published by ProPublica in October before the presidential election. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought told an invite-only gathering. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

But the real killer came in another comment Vought made about how exactly he and his acolytes were planning to take control and tee up Trump’s second term. This should make clear that Trump would step into the job to carry out their plan.

“We have detailed agency plans,” Vought said in another speech. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

But it’s the third event that gave both the fuel and the protection that Trump would need to carry out the Heritage Foundation plans. That, of course, is the July 1, 2024 ruling of the extremist wing of the Supreme Court. The 6-3 majority opinion left little doubt of this court’s intention to maximize presidential power by not burdening a re-elected Trump with the possibility of criminal prosecution for potentially illegal acts.

How did they justify this?

“Criminally prosecuting a President for official conduct undoubtedly poses a far greater threat of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch than simply seeking evidence in his possession,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, adding that criminal prosecution means “the President would be chilled from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive” and “the threat of trial, judgment, and imprisonment is a far greater deterrent and plainly more likely to distort Presidential decisionmaking” and cause “hesitation to execute the duties of his office fearlessly and fairly that might result when a President is making decisions under ‘a pall of potential prosecution.’”

As I noted then, “God forbid that a president wouldn’t be free to pursue actions that could be determined by a court as criminal. Why not assume that taking away the threat of prosecution is necessary for a president…to pursue the job he wants to pursue?”

But I want to dwell here at some length on the fearlessly astute dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which I return to periodically to remember how prescient her fears were.

She began her dissent like this:

Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President…the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.

And later, after detailing Trump’s “allegedly false claims” of election fraud and his attempts to “exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to pressure lawmakers to delay certification and “ultimately declare him the winner,” she wrote:

The Court now confronts a question it has never had to answer in the Nation’s history: Whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution. The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.

Sotomayor took great pains to describe what the majority’s ruling meant for our country, perhaps with an eye to the reality of a man like Trump re-taking the White House. “The long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark,” she asserted, adding:

The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation…The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

And she concluded with these chilling, portentous words:

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

America is now living out the hateful dream of Kevin Roberts and Russell Vought, which depended on an extremist Supreme Court to provide the protection for a corrupt and criminal man like Donald Trump to run amuck. While we had reason to question the particulars, the broad contours of their operation were knowable.

Most voters may may have lacked either the knowledge of this plan or the understanding of what this could yield. I take no satisfaction in recognizing the danger because neither I nor many others in the independent succeeded to ring the alarm bell loud enough that it would be heard by a majority.

The week after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, I wrote an essay called “We Will Not Comply.” It was largely a rebuke of Heritage’s attempt at intimidation.

The country is “in the process of the second American Revolution,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said, and this so-called revolution “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” As I noted, Roberts was saying that “it’s up to ‘the left’—which I think includes essentially every Democrat and every other American who rejects their authoritarian agenda—to shut up, lay down and let them do what they want.”

I added, “If Kevin Roberts and Donald Trump have their way and begin their Project 2025 onslaught from the White House—assisted by a rogue and radical Supreme Court—we can expect they will pursue their dictatorial goals shamelessly and cruelly, convinced of their righteous mission.”

Again, I take no pleasure in recognizing where we were headed. My partial list of likely actions included their rounding up and deporting millions of migrants without due process, loading the civil service with Trump loyalists, cutting Social Security and Medicare, ending the Affordable Care Act and climate protections, expanding trillions in tax breaks for the richest Americans, and pushing Christianity in our public schools and government. These examples were largely laid out in the 920-page Project 2025 document.

But then as now, we must grapple with the fact that the legacy media is complicit in all this because of its refusal to explicitly describe the dangers we faced. As I wrote July 8, 2024:

Year after year he’s pushed the boundaries of the law to see what he can get away with—not just in defiance of the courts and the rule of law, but with a public that may raise its voices in protest but fail to effectively push back. It’s why the failure of leading media organizations to focus aggressively on his lying, his scapegoating and his promise to take office as a dictator—in other words, normalizing what he says, as if it’s not really news anymore—is so dangerous for the survival of democracy.

It’s also why Trump’s huge new lie—that he knows nothing about Project 2025 or the people involved, in order to create deniability right up to and through the election—should be a leading story of every news broadcast and on page one of every newspaper and digital outlet. Despite the fact that a numbers of the project’s authors, organizers and promoters are past or current Trump officials, he wants us to believe that he would not do those terrible things—that is, until we are no longer in the position to successfully thwart him.

But here we are. The issue is not to cry about what has happened, but to learn our lesson now, 126 days before the November midterms.

I leave you with the wise words of Frederick Douglass, delivered in an 1857 address entitled “No Progress Without Struggle.” “Find out just what a people will submit to,” he said, “and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them…The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

In other words, our task now is to not look away and not comply. In 126 days, on November 3, we have the ability to begin setting the critical limits of this particular tyrant and the tyrannical regime that has enabled him.

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