As I began reading the now-infamous Project 2025 manifesto, Mandate for Leadership, I was immediately struck by the writing style used by the authors. The word choices, voice and tone of the document say a great deal about those behind the project.
For example, the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin D. Roberts, who penned the Foreword to the document, introduces a new, made-up moniker for those whom he opposes: “the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’” Roberts seems rather proud of this new phrase given that he uses it three times.
The Foreword alone led me to wonder what the entire text of Mandate (minus the endnotes) would look like in a word cloud. So I converted the more-than-287,000-word tome into a Word document and input it into an online word-cloud-generator to create this:
The image is obviously cluttered. With more than 287,000 words, Mandate is 200% longer than the Declaration of Independence, 40% longer than Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, 12% longer than JK Rowling’s Order of the Phoenix, and nearly as long as Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. But this exercise gave me a starting point — a different way to look at the Mandate.
I then went through the text word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase, making note of high-frequency words, concepts woven throughout the document, overall tone and more. After doing so, I excluded extraneous words and created a series of new word clouds to depict the most frequently used words and phrases throughout Mandate. This provides a different picture of what the authors of the text find most important.
Not less government, but more and of the ‘right kind’
For those who have been following the rhetoric of vice presidential candidate JD Vance, it should be no surprise that the Republican Party of today — and the one behind Project 2025 — does not embody the laissez faire attitude toward government that most Republicans of the past did. Vance has made it very clear that today’s “conservative Republican” actually wants more government — not less.
This is not our grandfathers’ Republican party.
This quest for more government and of the “right kind” is evident throughout the text of Mandate, exposing the Trump Republican claims of wanting to dismantle the “administrative state” as the hogwash they are.
Time and again, Mandate suggests firing nonpartisan, career employees who serve both parties and provide continuity of operations and replacing them with Trump loyalists. Mandate also calls for abolishing agencies like the Department of Education (the authors even suggest a name for the law destroying it: “The Department of Education Liquidating Authority Act”). However, after “liquidating” various departments, the authors then shuffle the work to existing agencies they will expand.
More notable, however, is the emphasis on what role these extremist Republicans want government to play in the lives of Americans.
The Department of Life
Buried deep in the Mandate, one finds Trump Republicans want to rename the Department of Health and Human Services to the “Department of Life” to enforce the rejection of “the notion that abortion is health care.” Meanwhile, of course, the end of abortion access in places like Texas has resulted in both an increase in infant deaths and in critically ill women being forced to carry non-viable/dangerous pregnancies to term.
According to Mandate, the “right kind” of government has total control over people’s sex lives, family formation and, especially, the bodies of women and girls.
This is evidenced over and over by how frequently these words are used, and in what context.
“Girls are also singled out while boys are never mentioned in the document.”
“Women” (mentioned 86 times) are constantly spoken of in isolation, whereas “men” (mentioned nine times) are only spoken of to differentiate them from women, as in the phrase “men and women.” Similarly, “girls” (16 times) are also singled out while “boys” are never mentioned in the document.
Throughout the document, “girls” are discussed most often with “gender” (mentioned 102 times), particularly as it relates to “gender identity” (mentioned 20 times), “transgender” (12 times), “gender ideology” (8 times) and “gender transition” (three times). The authors are especially concerned about “girls” in relation to their “biological” (30 times) existence and their “bodily integrity” (four times).
“Gender” is often used interchangeably with “sex,” (mentioned 68 times) but even so, there’s a focus in the document on the “sexual” nature (mentioned 42 times) of women and girls.
Unsurprisingly, “women” (mentioned 86 times) are connected with “pregnancy” (29 times), “babies” (45 times), “birth” (12 times), “the unborn” (12 times) and, of course, “abortion” (202 times). There are even mentions of “fetal tissue” (nine times), “mifepristone” (five times) and “aborted baby parts” (four times).
The thread running through the entire document is what Kevin D. Roberts calls the restoration of the “family” (mentioned 274 times) to the center of “American life.” Yet, as many commentators have astutely pointed out, the Trump Republican version of “family” is a narrowly defined configuration that consists of a heterosexual couple united in “marriage” (57 times) with the goal of producing “children” (279 times).
Of course, the new “Department of Life” will eliminate the requirement for “so-called evidence-based” sex education curriculum, will implement policies and enforcement to use “child support” to “strengthen marriage as the norm,” allow for the reallocation of “child welfare funding” to “marriage and relationship education,” eliminate the Head Start program and “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family” and so much more.
To put all of this into a larger context, within the Project 2025 Mandate:
- “Abortion” is mentioned more times than “tariffs” (171 times), “manufacturing” (150 times) and “agriculture” (106 times).
- “Gender” is mentioned more frequently than “discrimination” (98 times), “water” (94 times) and “the courts” (86 times).
- “Women” are mentioned more than “oil” (82 times) and “commerce” (65 times), but slightly less than “money” (121 times).
- “Marriage” is mentioned more frequently than “liberty” (30 times), “conscience” (39 times) and “happiness” (10 times).
The Mandate’s expansion of government into the most intimate and personal spheres of American life will affect every single one of us. And its obsession with the bodies of girls and women as government-controlled incubators for the Department of Life should terrify us all.
Mara Bim
Mara Richards Bim is serving as a Clemons Fellow with BNG. She is a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater practitioner, playwright and director and founder of Cry Havoc Theater Company that operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.
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