There is very little Donald Trump and his allies behind Project 2025 aren’t targeting in the 900-page Christian nationalist manifesto, said Nathan Empsall, an Episcopal priest and executive director of Faithful America.
Empsall moderated a recent webinar he and his guests used to cover the sweeping racial, social and environmental justice programs and rights conservatives want their next president to scale back or eliminate.
“Project 2025 seeks to expand executive authority and enact a theocratic agenda of ripping away basic freedoms through such measures as dismantling public education and the Department of Education itself and removing most public welfare and other poverty and social safety net programs. So much for ‘the least of these,’” Empsall said in reference to Christ’s command to care for the marginalized.
Nathan Empsall
Empsall, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, Zoya Teirstein and Abe Bonowitz described various ways Project 2025 seeks control of American personal and political life, to provide a “comprehensive, concrete transition plan” for the first 180 days of the Trump presidency and to bypass Congress in the process.
“They encourage Trump or whoever the next Republican president is to expand executive authority in extra-constitutional ways, to change thousands upon thousands of civil service jobs to political appointees so he can just put whoever he wants into the jobs instead of relying on who’s already there, and to fire people without federal or union protections,” Empsall said.
Coordinated by the extremist Heritage Foundation, the document is animated above all by a desire to see the country ruled by white conservative Christians, he added. “First, it is a Christian nationalist document. It takes pains to hide this, but that’s the truth, and our focus at Faithful America is reclaiming our faith from Christian nationalism so it does not misrepresent us or harm people in Jesus’ name.”
The webinar was designed to draw attention to the plan because polling shows most Americans view it negatively, he said. “Talking about Project 2025 is a great way to motivate people to get to the polls and it motivates people to oppose Donald Trump at the polls.”
A recent NBC News survey found 57% of registered voters harbor negative feelings about the project and 51% express “very” negative opinions about it. Only 4% view the plan positively.
“Among independents, 52% report feeling negatively about the plan, while 85% of Democrats say the same,” NBC reported. “About 33% of Republicans say they also view the plan negatively, with just 7% saying they have positive views of the plan.”
Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons
Eliminating LGBTQ and reproductive rights are among Project 2025’s top goals, said Graves-Fitzsimmons, senior director of policy and advocacy for Interfaith Alliance.
Authors of the blueprint want the next conservative president to establish a “biblically based,” authoritarian government that undermines the secular nature of U.S. democracy and seeks to overturn the federal protections for same-sex marriage.
“It refers to the Respect for Marriage Act as a nonreligious definition of marriage. Of course, we don’t have religious and nonreligious definitions of marriage. We have one Congress that is not a religious body and enacts laws in our secular democracy,” he said. “And the idea that there are biblically based religious definitions of marriage, and that there is a nonreligious definition of marriage, is totally contrary to our system of government and shows that this Heritage Foundation project does not respect same-sex marriage as settled law.”
The proposed attack on transgender health and identity, in vitro fertilization and access to abortion medications further illuminate the Christian nationalist ideology behind the project, Graves-Fitzsimmons said. “Proposals, especially as they pertain to LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights, will be familiar because they come from a conservative policy playbook we all know. At the same time, they are being implemented in this authoritarian way, gutting checks and balances, and so we are raising the alarm about authoritarian theocracy.”
Zoya Teirstein
Project 2025 also takes aim at the environment by proposing a radical restructuring of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Teirstein, a writer for Grist, an online magazine dedicated to inspiring action on climate change.
The project calls for a “conservative EPA” not coopted by the left for political gain and which remains dedicated to moving the responsibility for protecting public health to the states. “Further, the EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulation,” the document states.
The problem with that, Teirstein said, is that protecting public health and fighting global climate change require strong federal oversight. “The document calls for unleashing offshore drilling in ways that have not yet been seen, opening up new national monuments like Bears Ears National Monument for drilling for oil and gas and exporting far more natural gas than we already do.”
Abe Bonowitz
If enacted, Project 2025 also would cause an escalation in federal executions and greater support for states actively executing prisoners, said Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action.
In the section on dismantling the Department of Justice, the project calls for enforcing the federal death penalty “where appropriate” or else victims’ families and defendants will continue to suffer, it says.
“The next conservative administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal Death Row. It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes — particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children — until Congress says otherwise through legislation.”
Trump surely would follow that guideline if he is elected in November, Bonowitz said. “We know he would do that in a heartbeat because he personally relishes the dictator-like power to be able to decide life and death.”
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