By Barrington M. Salmon | Trice Edney Wire
(TriceEdneyWire.com) – If Donald Trump becomes president again, African-Americans stand to lose the most. But so do women, other Black people, brown folks and immigrants – documented and undocumented.
This is not a conjecture.
The Center for American Progress says Project 2025’s sweeping tentacles would touch and influence just about every facet of American life with the goal of implementing “an authoritarian playbook that would destroy the system of checks and balances our forefathers designed when they sought freedom and popular sovereignty almost 250 years ago.
Their researchers continue, “In dissolving the American idea, the plan’s extremist policies would give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.”
The LDF Thurgood Marshall Center concurs.
“Project 2025 represents a direct and deliberate threat to Black communities across seven key areas addressed in this report: civil rights, education, political participation, the criminal legal system, housing, reproductive rights, and environmental protections,” Thurgood Marshall officials write. “At its core, it aims to dismantle essential agencies and regulations that protect civil rights while promoting anti-democratic and anti-justice initiatives that will weaponize civil rights enforcement by federal agencies. These proposals are designed to erode the very principles of equality, justice, and fairness that form the foundation of our democracy—and the impact would be devastating.”
Trump’s animosity toward Black people is palpable. He has spoken with contempt and hatred toward African Americans and immigrants and he promises to fight against and reverse civil rights and social and economic gains African Americans enjoy – if he’s elected to a second term.
The former president is promising retribution for his enemies and said he will defend his fellow Republicans who feel aggrieved and resentful of Civil rights, women’s equality, LGBTQ and trans rights and everything that has elevated non-white people since the 1960s.
The vehicle Trump and throngs of far-right extremist supporters plan to use to drag the United States back is Project 2025, The 922-page document describes in stark detail every element of the plan.
Project 2025 is a sweeping rightwing blueprint orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing conservative think tank and the Koch Brothers, which finances far-right and libertarian causes. More than 100 far-right organizations, all funded by a vast and secretive dark money network, are the financial and ideological drivers behind this project.
“The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025,” the Project 2025 manifesto says. “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”
Project 2025 plans to privatize government functions, deregulate targeted industries, cut taxes for the most wealthy and American corporations and help the oligarchs churn out money at the expense of American workers, the middle class and everyone else who’re lower on the food chain.
Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47 – another radical Republican scheme that embodies many of the Project 2025 proposals – touches everything from reproductive healthcare, access to abortions and abortion rights, general healthcare, labor, schools, labor unions, education and workers’ overtime. It would redirect more unchecked power into the presidency, use every mechanism and lever available in government to dismantle democratic institutions, while jettisoning America’s middle class, working class and the working poor.
USA Today explains that the plan calls for the overhaul of several federal government agencies, including the FBI. It would allow limited access to abortion pills; repeal aspects of the Affordable Care Act; push the Food and Drug Administration to reverse approval of abortion pills; and further empower Immigration and Customs Enforcement to round up, detain and deport as many as 20 million legal and undocumented immigrants.
Family Compassion, an organization committed to strengthening American families and the institutional and social frameworks that support them, warns of the dangers Project 2025 poses.
“Project 2025 presents a grim outlook for American families and the fundamental values and freedoms that exist today. The plan will drastically cut budgets to critical support programs, likely leading to widespread financial instability, health crises, educational setbacks, housing insecurity, and food shortages,” agency officials said.
While acting as “a mandate to foster economic growth and enhance national security, Project 2025 poses a significant threat to the stability and well-being of countless families across the nation,” officials warned. “If successful, the project is likely to lead to devastating consequences for existing programs and policies that provide essential support to families.”
The far-right slate of proposals “will undercut the American Dream for another entire generation. And it will have our government turn its back on hundreds of thousands of innocent people in vulnerable situations, which is exactly the opposite of what our faith calls us to do.”
Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large at The American Prospect, in a commentary titled, “The Far-Right has a Plan to Remake America. They Even Wrote It Down,” said the far-right cabal has compiled an extensive enemies’ list that includes “welfare recipients, lazy and liberal civil servants, anti-business regulators, environmentalists, and union bosses, “scientists, woke bureaucrats, woke educators, woke diplomats, woke generals and admirals, woke G-men, and anyone who doesn’t indulge the next Republican president’s every whim (an adaptation to the likelihood of a Trump nomination).”
Project 2025 organizers are said to have 55,000 Trump loyalists ready to step into civil service positions if Trump regains the White House. The Project 2025 document calls for “Those in charge in the incoming administration are prepared to purge those deemed disloyal after identifying and interviewing “every Treasury Department official who participated in its DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) activities and programs, and make such activity ‘“per se grounds for termination of employment.”’
Trump and conservative Republicans are openly hostile to education and what is taught at traditional colleges and universities, characterizing it as anti-American and politically motivated.
Of particular concern is the planned evisceration of the US Department of Education and the traditional public school system coupled with the elevation of school choice and voucher programs for private schools. Republicans would cut federal funding for public schools, including Title I and Head Start programs wish would affect millions of students, particularly those in low-income communities.
According to The Washington Monthly, “Project 2025, from pages 319 to 361, envisions a transformed higher education system in which the federal government strips resources from traditional liberal arts colleges and universities, politicizes college curricula; privatizes student loan programs; and weakens protections against race discrimination, sex discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.”
Democrats have for months publicized and put a spotlight on Project 2025. And Trump has been trying to dance away, pretending to be completing unaware of the plan and claiming in a number of social media posts that he doesn’t know the people behind the plan and insists that the group doesn’t speak for him.
Try as he may, the numbers don’t lie. A recent CNN report shows that at least 140 people who were in the Trump administration were involved with Project 2025 to varying degrees.
Critics say this radical policy agenda would position each aspect of government to dismantle democracy and pull the rug out from under America’s middle class.
Some areas that are threatened by Project 2025:
Civil rights: A new Trump administration would destroy all affirmative action policies as a way to fight the scourge of “anti-white racism.” Trump’s DOJ Civil Rights Division would also “prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” with affirmative action or DEI policies. The DOJ would also go after “voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction,” and any policies that discriminate against White people.
Education: Including eliminating the Department of Education, the plan would roll back the Biden administration’s student debt relief efforts which have eliminated about $138 billion worth of student loan debt so far. Black borrowers would bear the brunt of any large-scale debt reversal.
Economic Support Programs: Project 2025 would potentially significantly undermine economic support programs that families depend on. The Child Tax Credit, a program crucial to reducing child poverty, faces severe cuts or elimination through the reallocation of resources.
Higher Taxes for Middle Class Families: Project 2025’s playbook includes plans to increase taxes for middle class families and allow employers to stop paying overtime.
Regulations on Contraception and Life Saving Reproductive Care: Project 2025 would remove some forms of emergency contraception from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act would be rescinded, removing coverage of preventive services, including all FDA-approved birth control methods and counseling, without copayments, coinsurance, or deductible. Almost 48 million women of reproductive age would lose their guaranteed no-cost access to emergency contraception. Project 2025 would remove this much-needed option, severely undermining couples’ ability to expand their families.
Health care: Project 2025 would dismantle the Affordable Care Act and allow states to impose work requirements on Medicaid, a federal program which helps those in the low-income bracket. Some states are preparing to restructure Medicaid, in anticipation of Trump winning in November.
Black Civil Rights and civil society organizations have sounded the alarm:
“Our democracy stands at a crossroads: a path of infinite promise towards a more inclusive, equitable, and durable democracy on the one hand, and one of immeasurable and, potentially, irretrievable demise on the other,” said Jania Nelson, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s eighth President and Director-Counsel. “The assault on Black communities envisioned by Project 2025 will almost certainly condemn us to demise.”