Project 2025 is disaster waiting to happen

An article released this week shows the end result of the decades-long, rightwing misinformation campaign that has targeted the heart of this country and swayed millions of normal, everyday Americans into the belief that people like Donald Trump and his billionaire backers are somehow looking out for the working and middle classes. As reported by major media outlets earlier this week, a Washington Post/Schar School poll shows voters in key swing states say that when it comes to threats to our democracy, they trust Trump more than President Joe Biden. “The poll … surveyed voters across six swing states and identified a subgroup of respondents labeled as ‘deciders,’” The Hill reported. “It found that 38 percent of ‘deciders’ said Trump would do a better job of handling threats of democracy to the U.S., while 29 percent said Biden and 23 percent said neither.” As anyone who has been following Trump’s plans for a possible second presidential term and who is familiar with the far right’s Project 2025 plan, the thought that anyone would entrust our democracy to Trump is nearly unbelievable. After all, the plan to destroy our democracy — and set so many regular Americans up for failure — is clearly stated in the Project 2025 plan meant to guide the first 180 days of the next Republican presidency. As The Guardian reported in May: “Project 2025 details across more than 900 pages how Trump and his allies could dismantle and disrupt the U.S. government. It suggests ridding the federal ranks of many appointed roles and stacking agencies instead with more political appointees aligned with and more beholden to Trump’s policy prescriptions.” The Guardian points out that Project 2025, “led by the rightwing Heritage Foundation … showcases a federal government that cracks down intensely on immigration, vanquishes LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, diminishes environmental protections, overhauls financial policy and takes aggressive action against China.” If enacted by Trump or any other Republican president, Project 2025 would likely mean the end of the United States as we know it, since the plan would effectively eliminate the Founding Fathers’ system of governmental checks and balances and, instead, deliver an inordinate amount of power to the executive branch and empower a president to be more of a dictator or autocrat than elected official dedicated to doing the work of the American people. “Project 2025 is nothing short of a blueprint for an aspiring dictator to become an actual dictator," California Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman told Newsweek earlier this year. For those unfamiliar with the far right’s Project 2025 — which Trump would likely rely upon to shore up power during the first few months of his second-term presidency — the Center for American Progress is keeping tabs on the possible consequences of the sweeping plan to reshape our nation into something more like Hungary, where autocrat Viktor Orban has held on to power since 2010 despite massive protests from the Hungarian public. Here are just a few of the things that could happen if Trump regains power and enacts Project 2025, according to the Center for American Progress’ reporting: Head Start programs would be eliminated and access to child care in rural America would be severely compromised; Millions of Americans who have taken out student loans to fund higher education would pay much higher monthly fees and loan forgiveness programs would be canceled; “Medicaid caps would strip benefits from low-income populations … threaten healthcare for up to 18.5 million Americans;” Workers’ right to organize and join unions in a bid to garner higher wages, better benefits and safer working conditions would be compromised; Nearly 50 million women would lose access to free emergency contraception guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act; Prescription drug plan costs would increase for nearly 19 million seniors and other Medicare recipients; and “A radical plan to eliminate federal transit funding could devastate local transit systems, hurt families and undermine economic growth.” And these impacts haven’t even touched on half of what Project 2025 would do to dismantle the rights we all enjoy as Americans. As the Chicago Sun Times recently reported: “The agenda proposed in Project 2025 is grisly” and calls for “dismantling the foundations of immigration policy, tearing families apart, turning away desperate refugees and stripping away protections for Dreamers; undermining climate change mitigation, environmental justice and the transition to clean energy; eliminating racial justice initiatives and preserving advantages for white Americans … gutting public education, wiping out Head Start and other support for low-income students, and withdrawing federal oversight of public schools … (and) slashing health care insurance, putting 18 million Americans at risk of losing coverage entirely, killing the drug price provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and Affordable Care Act’s protections for pre-existing conditions.” We absolutely cannot afford to allow our country to go the way of other democracies that have fallen prey to power-hungry autocrats and oligarchs. If we give our nation to Trump and the far-right billionaires backing him, we will likely never dig out of the destruction. As Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW) news agency warned in 2022: “When democracies falter, they rarely recover.” The November presidential election will ask voters to decide between Biden, a president who has his fair share of faults, but who has invested heavily in needed infrastructure and has, according to a recent report by Oregon Public Broadcasting, “taken more action on climate than any president,” and Trump, a man who will dismantle our democracy and reshape the U.S. into a country that — if Trump’s crowning achievement, his 2017 tax cut, which, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported, “was skewed to the rich, expensive and failed to deliver on its promises,” is any indication — will benefit the wealthiest while punishing everyone else.

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