Retiring Guy's Digest: Project 2025: GOP created road map to fascism

Project 2025

Headline: Religion Dispatches, 3/15/2024:

The presumptive GOP nominee’s 2024 campaign-trail bombast—including promising to be a dictator on “day one,” to “close the border,” and “drill, drill, drill”[1]—is reminiscent of his 2016 campaign’s authoritarian rhetoric. He has also adopted the rhetoric of fascists in denouncing his political opponents as “vermin”[2] and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”[3] At right-wing events and on the campaign trail, he rallies his followers with promises of revenge against elites who ruined their shared dreams of a second Trump term. “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” he thunders. “I am your retribution.”[4] He has vowed to “obliterate the deep state,”[5] throw off “the sick political class that hates our country,” and “come down hard” on media outlets critical of him.[6] In the words of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU professor and author of a book about strongmen in modern history,[7] “He wants to convert American democracy into some kind of autocracy.”[8]
Project 2025, an unprecedented collaboration[9] among former Trump officials and the Right’s legal and political infrastructure, would enable Trump to make good on his threats, were he to return to power. This should be a cause for alarm. While some commentators dismissed his 2016 campaign statements as hyperbole,[10] as President, Trump willingly cast the Constitution aside and mobilized his followers to political violence to keep him in power after losing the 2020 election.