Blueprints for Authoritarianism: Mein Kampf and Project 2025

 

“Christians, get out and vote.  Just this time.  You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what?  Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” – Donald Trump, July 27, 2024, Speech to a gathering of religious conservatives sponsored by the conservative advocacy group Turning Point Action.

I am not arguing that “Project 2025” is directly comparable to Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf,” but there are some similarities in their political ideology and their political plans for the United States and Germany, respectively.  Both documents are “blueprints for authoritarianism.” As the saying goes, often you need to be forewarned in order to be forearmed.

The antisemitic ravings of “Mein Kampf” are quite different from the unconscionable anti-immigrant markers in “Project 2025.”  However, the language of the documents as well as the language of Donald Trump reveal a contempt for groups of individuals that is evil and ugly. 

Hitler wrote about the “Jewish peril,” which isn’t far removed from Trump’s racism going back to the “American Carnage” speech of 2017 as well as the Project’s call for mass deportation. Trump’s language has only worsened over the years, and we never should forget his Muslim ban and the reference to “shithole” countries in his first year in the White House.

The important role of Stephen Miller on behalf of Trump and the Project is stunning; Miller is Jewish but he would have made a good Gauleiter for any Fascist party.   Miller has been working for years to get a nationwide crackdown on immigration. 

He has vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to recent articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker.  Project 2025 calls for “stringent reinforcement” of immigration and deportation measures, including “ramped-up workplace inspections,” and penalties for employers hiring undocumented workers.

The United States was alerted nearly a decade ago to Steve Bannon’s Leninist “destruction of the administrative state,” and Project 2025 moves in this direction, calling for partisan control of the Department of Justice and the FBI.  The Project wants increased military participation in domestic law enforcement, stressing the use of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to put down revolt or even civil unrest in the United States.  Even peaceful protests could be targeted. 

The Germans had nearly one decade of warning regarding Hitler’s interest in destroying the parliamentary system, but never took his views seriously.  We seem to be following the German pattern.  Are we Germany 1933?

Even a cursory look at Project 2025 regarding U.S. governance reveals a dystopian view of American democracy and American freedoms.  Trump and Project 2025 are in complete agreement regarding the plan to “dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington.”  Senator J.D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee has gone even further, saying he would “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state.  Replace them with our people.” 

In Trump’s first term, he issued an Executive Order to allow the president to remove “rogue bureaucrats.”  Trump created a “Schedule F” to eliminate civil service protections.  President Biden revoked this schedule in one of his first acts as president.  Trump will certainly restore it.

Trump and Project 2025 favor the round-up of millions of immigrants in detention camps on the way to deportation.  They advocate for abolishing the Department of Education, and the promotion of Christian white nationalism in public schools.  All climate change progress, considerable under the Biden administration, would be reversed, and the words “climate change” would be banned.

Trump and Project 2025 would destroy the Voting Rights Act, and ban abortion and IVF.  Gerrymandering, the filibuster, and voter suppression tactics would close down the channels of democratic change in our democracy.  It would be very difficult to reverse this damage.  Trump 2.0 will be worse than the first time around because Trump will be appointing far more right-wing troglodytes than the first time around. 

There will be no Gary Cohns on the economic side, or conservative military officers who were the adults in the room between 2017 and 2019.  Trump has tried to distance himself from the Project but he hasn’t identified any Project proposals that are anathema to him, and virtually every key member of the Project worked in Trump’s administration and was identified as a super-MAGA.

In at least one respect, Project 2025 must be taken just as seriously as Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”  The latter was the hatred and musings of a narcissistic paranoid.  Project 2025 is a product of Trump’s acolytes who have created an entire institutional framework to put their agenda into place.  The Center for Renewing America was formed to “end woke and weaponized government,” and to address the threat from critical race theory, which it terms “vast, real, and increasingly existential.”

CRA’s founder, Russell Vought, Trump’s chief of the Office of Management Budget in the first term, wrote an op-ed for Newsweek titled “Is there anything Actually Wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism’?”  Vought’s group works closely with the Conservative Partnership Institute that is populated with such troglodytes as Mark Meadows. 

Stephen Miller runs America First Legal, which has been called the ACLU of the MAGA movement.  The Conservative Partnership Institute was created in 2017 by former senator Jim DeMint, who left the Senate to run the Heritage Institution.  According to Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker, these groups have invested $50 million in real estate in and around Washington, particularly on Capitol Hill, to construct their empire.

This poses a far more dangerous threat than Trump’s first term, which was destructive in its own right.  But the mainstream media continue to dismiss Trump’s ability to turn ideas into actual policy.  The Washington Post, still runs op-eds with such titles as “The GOP still doesn’t know what it would do with power.” The Post ran an op-ed last week, indicating that Trump has softened his stance against abortion, and that Trump has “distanced himself.” 

But these are campaign statements with no real meaning whatsoever.  The key is that, while many of the personnel in Trump’s first term ignored his ranting and ravings, the zealots in any second term will be counted on to support the rants and ravings of Trump and Vance.  Hitler and Trump both benefitted from societies that refused to take them seriously, and from a press corps that underestimated the threat.

There is no question that a second Trump term would be far worse than the first regarding expanded presidential powers, social conservative initiatives, and the use of the military in the domestic arena.  The personnel in the second term would be far more loyal and far more ideological.  After all, Trump didn’t have a political structure in the first term; the second term will be dominated by hard-core polemicists and ideologues, who will not be committing insubordination to their leader.  As for their leader, he is a dangerous demagogue. whose flawed character has been accurately described in books by family members. Trump, if elected, will secure the “American Carnage” that he predicted seven years ago.

 

POSTSCRIPT: A future piece on Project 2025 will deal with the threat to the Pendleton Act of 1883, The Civil Service Reform Act, and to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 that prevented the use of the military in dealing with domestic violence.

-Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.