‘Blueprint for a soft coup’: Inside the far-right plan that could grant unchecked power to Trump

If you’ve been keeping up with our show, you’re likely familiar with the radical plan of the far right to overhaul our government within the 1st 180 days of a new Republican administration. It’s a plan known formally as Project 2025. It’s spearheaded by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. The plan is more than 900 pages long, and it’s filled with far right policy ideas for dozens of federal agencies. Project 2025 Advisory Board consists of nearly 100 groups representing various far right interests including Trump loyalists and abortion activists, Christian nationalists, opponents of LGBTQ plus rights, and anti environmentalists. The threat that Project 2025 poses to our democracy cannot be overstated. At the top of the list are plans to consolidate presidential authority, fill the ranks of the executive branch with loyalists, dismantle civil rights, and weaken federal agencies that are responsible for a wide array of social services spanning from poverty and education to healthcare and Environmental Protection. It also advances a Christian nationalist agenda, aiming to replace secular education with a Christian curriculum by redirecting funding from the Department of Education, which it refers to as a woke education cartel. Those are their words, and redirecting the money to charter and private schools. Probably the most troubling aspect of Project 2025 is it’s planned to grant Donald Trump unchecked power over the executive branch, potentially allowing him to weaponize it against his critics, including including those in the media. So he constantly says he’s going to target anyway. Project 2025 is ultimately A blueprint for a soft coup, one that replaces our age-old system of checks and balances with cronyism. What Trump couldn’t achieve in his first term, Project 2025 seeks to facilitate by removing obstacles to his authority. This includes an active plan for purging the executive branch of any dissent by replacing longtime civil servants with those who pledge fealty to Trump. The groups database of potential political appointees includes more than 4000 vetted candidates who are, according to the document, ready and willing to begin, quote, dismantling the administrative state from day one. End Quote in an interview with the New York Times, Trump advisor Russell Vote Put it plainly, what we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them. End Quote doesn’t stop there. By the way, Project 2025 calls for invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow presidents to deploy the country’s military forces against American citizens who protest their actions, something that is illegal at the moment. Additionally, it claims to reverse recent LGBTQ plus civil rights protections, including the same sex marriage. It criminalizes transgender identity, equating it with pornography. It would designate librarians who promote banned books as sex offenders. It would define life as the beginning. Life is beginning at the very moment of conception for the purposes of legal protection. These are just some of the things that the Religious Right plans to implement under Project 2025, and if this alarms you, it should. The greatest danger lies in underestimating and dismissing the gravity of this plan, especially because it’s already underway. Just in March, tucked within a larger spending bill, Congress quietly approved a Project 2025 proposal to ban the LGBTQ plus rainbow flag from flying over US Embassies across the globe. As abortion rights advocate Jillian Kane aptly warns, quote, there’s a line in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that’s useful for the moment. We’re in nothing was prepared for the war that everyone expected. End Quote For more on this, I’m joined by Molly Jong Fast. She’s a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, an MSNBC political analyst and the host of the Fast Politics podcast. Olivia Troy joins us as well. She’s a former senior adviser, then Vice President Mike Pence. She’s also executive director of 97%, a bipartisan gun reform organization. Good morning and welcome to both of you, Molly. You remember when the the the Republican Party decided they’re not going to actually have a party platform that usually parties debate at their conventions. Donald Trump was going to be their platform, and basically some people were alarmed by that. But most people thought Donald Trump is a bit of a stuffed shirt. That didn’t really matter. Now there’s a real platform. This is not a Republican Party. Actually, this is a a a real platform by by far rightists in this country that spell out highly specifically what everyone’s going to do. So there’s no plausible deniability anymore For somebody who votes for Donald Trump thinking he didn’t break anything last time. He’s not going to break anything this time. Yeah, I think one of the scariest things happening right now is that the Republican Party has really embraced this authoritarian dictate. I mean, authoritarian Trumpism, the sort of stuff that Trump said where everyone sort of winked and said, well, but he won’t really do that. All that stuff is in this document. And I mean, one of the things that I think is the top line here is that every single government agency will be politicized. So that means from the FDA to the, you know, I mean to the to the DOJ to like the EPA, I mean every single part of the federal government will be serving Trump and his Republican Party. And if you think about that, that’s actually really terrifying. You know, right now the Republican Party, the House and the, you know, and the Republicans of the said, it basically served as a campaign arm to Donald Trump. Now imagine an entire federal government that serves as a campaign arm to Donald Trump. Olivia. Here’s the thing that strikes me in in reading this and that is that groups like the Heritage found Foundation. It’s not a fringe organization. People who watch this may disagree with a lot of things they do, but it is a highly influential, fairly mainstream conservative think tank that was once associated with Reaganism. What does this project 2025, tell us about today’s conservative movement? Yeah, I’m so glad that you point that out, Ali. And honestly, I think that the way that you’re referring to it as a radical plan by the far right is the correct way to name this, because this is not a conservative plan. It is the more extreme arms of conservatism that you are seeing reflected in here. And I think it goes to show the complete transformation of the Heritage Foundation, a group that actually for a long time has been long respected. I know many people that have worked there. I know that’s former general counsel. These are honorable, decent people who you may differ on policy, but they were not completely, like, insane about their approaches to things. I mean, they just viewed the world differently. They viewed limited government. They were usually, you know, protecting the government institutions. They were looking at a strong defense, strong justice. This is the antithesis of that. And you know, what Molly said is is so accurate. This is the policy plan. And while Trump may sit there and shift, you know, whatever direction, whenever he gets pushed back and he’s trying to watch the polling and he’s like, what’s the popular thing to say right now? These are the policies of these people, Molly. Donald Trump probably hasn’t written, read a lot of the stuff that’s been written. There’s been interesting stuff written in the last 15 or so years about executive authority and the expansion of executive authority, though. He speaks in those terms, right? His his entire view of the presidency is that presidents should have authority to do all sorts of things. And part of the issue with Project 2025 is it goes farther down that road. The problem with presidential authority is that a lot of presidents try to expand it and everybody supports it when it’s their guy. But this is an extreme expansion of presidential authority that is going to perhaps change our our political landscape and our democratic landscape. I think the scariest part of this is that the Supreme Court, Alito and Thomas, if you listen to that Trump immunity case, those guys are totally bought in on this. I mean that that I really do think there’s a real sea change from Trump in 2016 where he was this outlier that the establishment kind of made fun of the Republican establishment, to now the Republican establishment is all in on this. And they have decided that they’re going to use Trump as a sort of Trojan horse, get him in there, and then push embryonic personhood and all of these, you know, I mean, the attack on librarians, but, you know, this kind of stuff, which is attack on LGBTQ, this kind of really idealistic, really authoritarian stuff. So I do think it’s quite scary. And I do think they’re really organized now. You know, they know. They sort of remember in that Time magazine article, Trump said that his mistake was being too nice. But what he meant was his mistake was not finding people who are ideologically, completely aligned with his quest for power. He has found those people and he will install them. So let’s let’s do a little chicken and the egg here. Olivia, Would Project 2025 have emerged with a different type of Republican candidate? Is this an opportunity for people who wanted to do all these to say Donald Trump’s a bit of an empty vessel who believes that presidents should have royal type authority. So why don’t we put everything into this 900 page document? I mean, this is crazy stuff. Talking about calling librarians, labeling them as sex offenders for for dealing with the the type of banned books we talk about. This is super extreme stuff. What’s the Who’s the leader here and who’s the follower? No, I think this is scary. I think that the charlatans and the craziest of the pack have come together and they have found a home in Trump. They have found a leader and they have found someone who will listen to the last person in his ear. Like, I watched that happen first hand. And I’ll say this, Ellie, I lived the Trump administration from day one when they came into office. I lived it as a national security public servant. I was at DHS when some of these policies were enacted. I have served under several administrations. And while I will say this, that the behavior of these individuals was very different than anything that I had witnessed in the past, that behavior will be more extreme. And I’ll say, like all the competent people that you see in government that have, you know, developed these policies who are going to be able to say, no, you can’t do that. This is why, This is why that was enacted. Or, oh, by the way, that is illegal. All those people will either be fired, which is what they’re saying directly, that they are going to do, or you’re going to find them in the statement in the basement with their red staplers, right? And they’re going to be like sitting there, like putting paper clips together and boxed in while the other loyalists are sitting there doing the policy. So when you look at the child separation, I was in those meetings. I can’t tell you how hard it was to sit. And there’s those debates and the horrificness of it, and then watching some of the most extreme voices in the room saying we don’t care. Those are the types of policies that are going to be pushed. Molly is it? Is it? Is it critical that people understand that this is real policy? Does the idea that this is on paper and it’s 900 pages long and speaks, as you said to every department of government, important to people who are still on the fence about how they’re going to vote in November To understand, when we talk about this, you know, some of us feel like it’s hair on fire discussion about the erosion of democracy. We actually have a plan here. Is that going to motivate people to understand this is serious? I think people need to hear it because I think most voters do not like this. And we know most voters are in the middle. They do not want this kind of far right stuff. They don’t want a king. I mean, they want a president. And I think there are a lot of Republicans. Look, we saw in the primaries, even after she dropped out, Nikki Haley still got 3040% in some of these states because voters don’t like Trumpism. I mean, Republicans are afraid of him and they have allowed him to capture their party once again. But I really do think that if he is defeated one more time, I hate to say this because I know this is an enormous amount of energy, but I don’t think the majority of Americans believe in this kind of stuff. And and I know they don’t because this stuff is beyond the pale. This is not anything that that people want. Yeah, right. This is. Yeah. Yeah, this is. I would agree. And that’s why it’s important to read it because even if you are a conservative in this country and there are lots and there are, you know, and we, we want to have real debates. Most people would say this is a bit beyond the pale and it’s not the kind of stuff we’re looking for. I appreciate both of you so much for being here. Molly Jong Fast is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and an MSNBC political analyst. Olivia Troy is a former senior advisor to Mike Pence and the executive director of the organization 97%. We’ll be right back.