At a Democratic campaign rally in Flint on Friday night, Vice President Kamala Harris warned of what could come after Nov. 5 should former Republican President Donald Trump win their Election Day showdown.
“If you want to know more about Donald Trump’s plans, just Google ‘Project 2025,’” Harris said, drawing loud booing from the audience that included Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Earvin (Magic) Johnson.
“It is a detailed and dangerous blueprint for what he will do if he is elected president,” Harris continued. “Donald Trump will give billionaires and corporations massive tax cuts, attack unions, cut Social Security and Medicare, and impose a Trump sales tax, a 20 per cent sales tax, on every-day, basic necessities.”
The 920-page document includes an assault against abortion rights and child care and a goal to “maintain a Biblically-based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family” while opposing “radical gender ideology.”
Trump has disavowed Project 2025. He claims he hasn’t read it (probably true) although many of his highly-placed supporters produced it through the reactionary Heritage Foundation. It reads like vengeance against the right wing’s many culture-war enemies, real and imagined.
One contributor is Michael Anton, a lecturer in politics and a research fellow at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center in Washington, D.C., which acts as the branch “campus” of the private, influential Conservative Arts college based in southern Michigan near Ohio and Indiana.
Anton also was a national security official under Trump. But it is difficult to ascertain Anton’s specific role in Project 2025. No essays have his byline. He sometimes writes under a pseudonym. In 2019, his writing sounded like Trump’s anti-immigration vows.
“The ceaseless importation of third-world foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty, means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican . . . and less traditionally American with every cycle,” Anton wrote, according to USA Today.
In a different essay, for the Washington Post, Anton urged revocation of birthright citizenship for babies born in the U.S.A.
“Why do we need more people?” Anton wrote. “For the extra traffic congestion? More crowded classrooms? . . . Diversity is not ‘our strength.’ It’s a source of weakness, tension and disunion.”
As for Muslims, Anton wrote in a different screed: “Islam is not a ‘religion of peace.’ It’s a militant faith that exalts conversion by the sword and inspires thousands to acts of terror — and millions more to support and sympathize with terror.” His words drip the venom of bigotry.
Anton did not return several requests for comment. In Project 2025, he is listed under “Contributors.” In addition, under “Advisory Board,” the only school mentioned is Hillsdale College, which often touts its connections to the Supreme Court and other right-wing Washington institutions.
As for reproductive rights, Michigan — with Democrats in power and women in high offices — led most states in combatting the Supreme Court’s 2022 abolition of abortion rights by passing an amendment to the state constitution protecting choice. That right might die in a second Trump regime seeking — incrementally — a national ban.
According to the Center for American Progress, Project 2025 is an “authoritarian playbook . . . to curtail the decision-making power of pregnant women, patients and medical providers . . . Fearing criminalization, providers will be forced to deny care to patients . . . Maternity care deserts will proliferate . . . Politics, not science, will regulate drug safety determinations.”
Because Project 2025 and abortion rights have put Republicans on the defensive, at least in places like Michigan, attack ads against them on Detroit-area television have concentrated on these MAGA vulnerabilities.
Conversely, attack ads against Democrats suggest that Harris and liberals will murder babies after birth and allow dark-skinned immigrants to rob stores and even vote while the American economy descends perilously into Soviet-style Marxism and politically into dictatorship.
In that Michigan is a “swing state” in a close election, both sides will fiercely campaign here in the last weeks, as Harris did Friday when, according to the Washington Post, she also met with Arab and Muslim leaders in the Great Lakes State.
That large voting segment in Michigan might swing away from Harris because President Joe Biden has supported Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which has escalated into attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon and a missile attack from Iran. But would they vote for Trump, who instituted a “Muslim Ban” of airport harassment in 2017 against people from Arab nations?
Another local, election-related detail that escaped most local media last week was the revelation by special counsel Jack Smith that a Trump election official in 2020 urged Trump protestors to riot in downtown Detroit at the TCF Center, now called Huntington Place, once called Cobo Hall.
They tried to stop the vote count when mail-in ballot tabulations began to favor Biden. According to a 165-page court filing unsealed last Wednesday by federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump’s “private operators sought to create chaos, rather than seek clarity.”
The document said a Trump election official outside the Center learned from a colleague (a Republican lawyer) inside the Center that people were chanting “Stop the count!” and that violence might occur.
The Trump official has been identified in news reports as Mark Roman, Trump’s Director of Election Day Operations. From afar, he encouraged the mob.
“Make them riot,” he texted. “DO it!!!”
This amounted to a dress rehearsal for Jan. 6, when Trump’s lynch mob marched from the White House to the U.S. Capitol to intimidate both Vice-President Mike Pence and Congress into reversing the election results.
With Trump convicted now of 34 felonies and other trials pending, he faces at least two possibilities: The Oval Office or prison. He is desperate and so are his extremist supporters. If and when Trump loses to Harris, expect MAGA to re-enact the Jan. 6 protests with even more ferocity.
Consider Kevin Roberts — the President of the Heritage Foundation. His name appears first in Project 2025 as author of the lengthy forward to the 30-chapter screed that screams between the lines “White Christian nationalism.”
In the forward, Roberts writes, in part: “The Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent” . . . “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned’ . . . “The noxious tenants of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula” . . . “Finally, conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: Overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children.”
If you lack time to read his entire encyclical and the rest of Project 2025, just note what Roberts said in public last summer.
“We are in the process of the second American revolution,” Roberts said, “which will remain bloodless — if the Left allows it to be.”
