Forward, Into The Past

Project 2025 arrives with a vengeance

Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is an unelected white South African man with deep anti-DEI sympathies, who, with the President’s blessing, is joyfully decimating the federal government, as envisioned by Project 2025.

You remember Project 2025, the guiding document for the Trump Administration that was written for the right-wing Heritage Foundation by a slew of current and former Trump appointees, led by Russell Vought—more on him in a sec. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump pretended not to know anything about it, except that he heard it was bad. He assured Americans it had no place at his table, where we were told we’re all honored guests. As it turns out, we’re actually on the menu.

P25’s most consistent theme is best seen through the rear-view mirror, for it seeks to take us back to the days of Jim Crow, where you’d best be a straight white “Christian” male if you want a seat at the table. The indispensable Doug Porter points out, “This week, the Defense Intelligence Agency ordered a pause of all activities and events related to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Juneteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day and other "special observances" to comply with President Donald Trump's executive order, according to a memo obtained by NBC News.

Soon, you’ll see Klan meetings with greater diversity than our government.

Fifty years of a slowly but consistently leveling playing field has met its match. All walks from this point forward will be uphill, against the wind. If there’s one thing once and future OMB boss, Russ Vought, and his merry band of homophobic “Christian” racists hate more than people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ communities, it’s government by and for the people. (FWIW, my Bible stars a loving Christ who would not recognize this seedy bunch, of which Vought is the Chief Seed.)

As the NY Times recently noted, P25 isn’t as bad as you thought; it’s worse.

Here are five issues—mostly thrown together the way a toddler makes his bed—that the administration is forwarding as per P25:

1. Kill anti-discrimination protections. Feed the flames of hate. Watch it fester and grow.

2. End all efforts aimed at debunking disinformation (Facebook has reversed itself and joined Musk’s X in this effort).

3. Isolate. We’re out of the Paris Climate Accords again, as well as the World Health Organization. Foreign aid is frozen, and our best “soft-diplomacy” platform, USAID, is being dismantled. (The isolation movement is bigger than I have space for, so I’ll come back to it in a subsequent column.)

4. Russ Vought, via Pro-Publica, will cancel all loans and research grants. In his words, “Put them in trauma.” This includes HIV drugs that have saved more than 25M, allowed 5.5M babies to be born AIDS-free, and reduced the burden on health care systems worldwide. AP reports that a federal judge has stopped them…for now.

5. The Administration removed any reference to climate change from federal websites. The real-world implications are staggering. Look, for example, at the Department of Agriculture where farmers depend on climate data. And, in an infantile game of Climate Gotcha, Trump directed the federal government to open the gates on two reservoirs in Northern California. He said that had Biden done that, the LA fires wouldn’t have happened, but the truth is that water doesn’t have a way to LA. The sad fact is, that water—now wasted—Is reserved for the San Joaquin Valley. Thus, farmers in one of our most fertile areas will not have the water they’ll need this summer. And for good measure, they’ve also removed the “T” from LGBT+.

Our role in providing medical assistance, technical, economic, and democratic know-how to the developing world is terminated. We have essentially ceded the world to China. In fact, China, which already has a larger military than we have, is being handed the world on a silver platter.

At home, the Republican wet dream of ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is coming true at last. There will be no more regulatory agencies acting as watchdogs on commercial lending, or capping bank fees, or virtually anything else that helps consumers, but not banks or industry. It is a full reversal. Additionally, it’s a certainty that the “supply-side” tax cuts that loaded us with debt in the last Trump administration, will be renewed. They didn’t work for Reagan, Bush, or Trump, but here we go again, because while there has never been the predicted “trickle-down” of money and jobs, they do mean people like Elon Musk pay no taxes.

For 80 years, we were the world’s military, economic, and moral leader. Those days are over. Per the new Republican ideology, which is shockingly similar to the 1930s isolationist movement, “America first,“ which was led by Nazi sympathizer, Charles Lindberg, we’re pulling in our wings. Only 49.8% of us chose Trump (48.3% chose Harris), but 100% of us will pay for the biggest mistake in our country’s history.

©2025 Jon Sinton