By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” ―JD Vance, Trump’s VP Running Mate
“Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” ― Exodus 22:21
“MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” That’s what a sea of red, white and blue signs said on day three of the Republican National Convention, as the party pretended to cloak itself in Christian virtue and calls for national unity. But the patriotically-colored sea of hate signs was a reminder of exactly what sort of unity the GOP has in mind: the unity of a bullying mob chasing after scapegoats.
While the culture war face of RNC was unmistakable, the class war face was deliberately blurred. Trump’s plans to deport 15 to 20 million immigrants, according to a May Time magazine interview, would disproportionately target hardworking members of the working class, many with US-born children — not the imaginary mob of criminals Trump luridly describes, since immigrant crime rates are 30% below that of native-born citizens.
Beyond that, Trump’s mass deportation plan would have a devastating economic impact, especially on food prices, hitting the broader working class especially hard. A recent analysis by the Peterson Institute of International Economics showed that deporting 1.3 million workers would cause the size of the U.S. economy to shrink by 2.1 percent, essentially creating a recession. But Trump’s plan would deport at least three times that number — an unmitigated economic disaster. In contrast, a February report from the Congressional Budget Office showed the other side: If things continue as they are, immigrants will add $7 trillion to the economy over the next 10 years.
But that was just the unspoken blurring of the class war. Day one saw it blurred right out loud when Teamster President Sean O’Brien spoke, urging both parties to adopt a pro-worker, pro-union agenda that Biden is actually advancing, even as the GOP does everything to block it. He later admitted on CNN that Biden “is definitely the most pro-labor president we’ve ever had,” but simply delivering his speech conveyed the opposite impression—that the GOP was more favorable to labor.
The Teamster’s social media team wasn’t so easily fooled. It shared a tweet asking: “Did anyone ask Sean O’Brien if he read the part in Project 2025 about Republicans wanting to end overtime pay? Do his union members know about this?”
And Project 2025 is where the gaslighting ends—as we’ll see below. But first, let’s hit a few highlights of the next few days. Or lowlights, to be real.
A Cavalcade of Lies, Bullshit, And Gaslighting…
Tuesday’s theme “Make America Safe Again,” was premised on three lies: first, that crime in America was up under Biden, when it’s actually down dramatically, with murders down 13% in 2023 alone; second, that illegal immigrants are responsible for it, when—as noted above—their crime rate is 30% lower than native-born white Americans; and third that Biden is responsible, because he has an “open border” policy that doesn’t keep anyone out. In reality, the libertarian Cato Institute reported last November, “In absolute terms, the Biden DHS is removing 3.5 times as many people per month as the Trump DHS did.”
There was also a fourth unspoken lie: A major reason for the post-Covid immigration surge is the ravages of the climate catastrophe which is hitting the global south hardest. But at the RNC, across all four days, the climate catastrophe simply didn’t exist. You can’t possibly make America safe if you won’t even acknowledge the biggest risk facing the entire human race.
On Wednesday, accepting the VP nomination, Vance presented himself as the Appalachian-born representative of the working class. But his business and political career both have been heavily subsidized by rightwing tech billionaire Peter Thiel, he grew up outside Appalachia, and his reputation-making book “Hillbilly Elegy” was “not about the brave nobility of rural poor/working class people,” political scientist Lily Mason reminded journalists on Bluesky. “It’s deeply insulting to rural poor people – presenting them as lazy addicts who rely on welfare instead of working. The book is about how amazing Vance was to escape that backward culture.”
Finally, Thursday concluded with Trump’s low-energy acceptance speech. The build-up was a reminder that it wasn’t just immigrants who were unwelcome. No past GOP President, Vice-President, or nominee for either office was there, because none of them were welcome, either. Instead of a parade of party luminaries setting the stage, there was a middle age “Kid” Rock, fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson, one-time performance wrestler Hulk Hogan, and wife-beating Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White—a parade of B-list celebrities straight out of Celebrity Apprentice.
Trump was unifying his fan base, not the nation. And his “unifying” speech? It was a rambling, low-energy, lie-fest that went on for an hour and a half, edging into Fidel Castro-length territory. He called for unity by dismissing all criminal charges against him, just as any ordinary crime boss might do — and threatened in advance to once again ignore the will of the people. “The election result, we’re never gonna let that happen again,” he warned.
And The Underlying Truth
Which is why we need to take Project 2025 so seriously. Trump’s anti-democratic bluster isn’t new, but the muscle assembled behind it is. Project 2025 isn’t just a policy agenda, it’s accompanied by a recruiting effort to quickly staff up a potential Trump administration for a blitzkrieg of executive actions that would dramatically reshape America into something no one living today could imagine.
One key facet is the plan to replace up to 50,000 professional, non-political civil servants with Trump-selected political appointees — a move that would effectively subvert the 1883 Pendleton Act which ended the deeply corrupt spoils system set up by Andrew Jackson half a century earlier. Trump tried to do something similar in his last month in office, introducing a new category of politically appointed workers, called “Schedule F.” Biden repealed that change as soon as he took office. But if Trump regains the White House, it will return with a vengeance.
As layer upon layer of lies, bullshit and gaslighting wove through every speech at the RNC, millions of Americans were coming to know about Project 2025’s plans after Taraji P. Henson drew attention to them while hosting the BET Awards on June 30. “Pay attention. It’s not a secret: Look it up. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!” Henson exhorted.
Even before Henson’s warning, Navigator Research had conducted polling showing that Project 2025 was deeply unpopular if people came to know about it. Seven in ten people had heard little or nothing about it, but when fully informed, it was opposed 67-19%
The top concerns were that “it would threaten American rights and freedoms” [abortion, birth control, free speech] (49 percent), that “it would hurt the middle class and working families” [cut overtime pay and healthcare, raise the Social Security retirement age] (35 percent), and that “it would threaten our democracy” [centralizing power in the hands of Trump] (32 percent).
With the RNC trying to gaslight America with the idea that the GOP is a working-class party, Project 2025 starkly reveals the truth: 62% said it would hurt working-class families, and 60% said the same for the middle class. The only groups it was seen helping were “the wealthiest Americans” 61%, and “CEOs and corporations” 60%.
“If these plans are enacted, even without congressional approval, 4.3 million people could lose overtime protections, 40 million people could have their food assistance reduced, 220,000 American jobs could be lost, and much, much, more,” the People’s Guide to Project 2025, from Democracy Forward, warned.
Navigator asked about a suite of Project 2025 proposals, almost all of which were quite unpopular. Here’s a list of the most unpopular ones, with percentages opposed:
- Allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime (87%)
- Allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies and potentially prosecute them if they miscarry (85%)
- Removing health care protections for people with pre-existing conditions (83 percent oppose, (82%)
- Eliminating the National Weather Service, which is currently responsible for preparing for extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, and wildfires (82%);
- Eliminating the Head Start program, ending preschool education for the children of low-income families (81%);
- Putting a new tax on health insurance for millions of people who get insurance through their employer (81%);
- Banning Medicare from negotiating for lower prescription drug costs and eliminating the $35 monthly cap on the price of insulin for seniors (80%);
- Cutting Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age (80%); and,
- Allowing employers to deny workers access to birth control (79%).
With Henson’s help, the unpopularity that Navigator found is taking off. Even People magazine has written about it, warning:
Though the mandate accuses the “woke” left of infringing on people’s religious freedoms, its policies are rooted in a singular, extremist view of how society should function based on its authors’ own Christian nationalist values. It repeatedly calls for the punishment, even imprisonment, of people who do not conform to the think tank’s platform.
To take just one example People goes on to cite, under the rubric of “outlawing pornography”:
The group’s broad definition of pornography suggests that the Trump administration could seek to imprison LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, authors, librarians, teachers, and allies with little cause.
Read “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “The Color Purple,” go to jail. Well, that’s an exaggeration. Your friendly neighborhood librarian who kept them on their shelves would go to jail.
The items Navigator highlights are just a fraction of what can be found in Project 2025, much of which is rather obscure for non-policy wonks. Take, for example, how they’d make homeownership much harder over time. In the long run, they’d like to get rid of 30-year mortgages, replacing them with 20-year ones. In San Pedro, this would increase monthly costs 16+% from $5,471.13 to $6,375.69 a month for a median single-family home, according to figures compiled by real estate broker Carl Clark, who’s written for Random Lengths before.
The immediate plans are less extreme — an increase in the mortgage insurance premium. It’s a surcharge for those unable to pay a 20% down payment. “So, an unknown percentage of the populace would become forever tenants, with rental rates which typically increase at a faster rate than purchase prices,” Clark explained. So much for wealth-building, the stated rationale. If it reminds you of Trump University’s promise of real estate wealth-building secrets — the ones that got Trump sued for fraud, costing him $25 million — you just might be onto something!
Assigning vs. Escaping Blame
With growing attention to Project 2025’s menacing power grab, Trump initially tried to distance himself from it, making three incompatible claims: that he knew nothing about it, that some of it was terrible, and that he wished those responsible “good luck!” But the co-authors and editors overwhelmingly came from his administration and previous transition team—81% of them according to a tally by the Guardian.
Equally significant, Project 2025’s institutional author is the Heritage Foundation, in coalition with more than 100 other conservative groups, and in April 2022, Trump thanked them in advance for their work. In the keynote address at their annual leadership conference, he said their organization “is going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans on exactly what our movement will do.” Project 2025 is exactly what he was talking about.
Finally, many of the things proposed in Project 2025 echo things Trump already did or tried to do in his first term, or that sycophants and allies of his have advanced elsewhere.
So, same old same old. Typical Trump gaslighting.
But communicating the threat to voters can be hard—especially first time, or just potential voters, or those who don’t vote regularly. These voters hold the key to who runs the country, and they’re particularly targeted by groups like Swing Left, and here in California by the California Grassroots Alliance, focused on winning back control of the House by flipping key GOP-held seats that Biden won in 2020.
Patti Crane, an Alliance leader with South Bay Indivisible, told Random Lengths there’d been a long process of multiple organizations digging into Project 2025, analyzing the harms it would do and testing and developing ways to communicate its threat.
“At first only one in four people have heard of Project 2025,” she said. “And then maybe people have heard about it but it’s like ‘Ah, don’t worry the Dems will stop it or the courts will stop it, or Congress will never allow it.’ And of course all those reasons have proven to be not true because of the way MAGA distorts our system and corrupts our courts,” she warned. But most people just don’t realize that.
So the approach they’ve come up with called the “walk about the box,” is intended both to bring that threat home — and to offer hope in terms of what Democrats are doing to fight it. In field tests, opposition to Project 2025 increased by a whopping 40%! Here’s the formula in a nutshell:
- What MAGA has already done in specific red states about this issue
- What MAGA promises to do nationwide on this issue if they gain power
- What Biden/Harris have already done nationwide about this issue
- What Harris promises to do nationwide on this issue with a congressional majority
“You have to say very specifically, ‘They already did it in this place where they had power, This is how they would take that nationwide.’” Crane explained. For example, draconian abortion bans passed in Florida and Texas as a first step. Now “they propose to use the dead letter law from the 1870s [the Comstock Act] to literally outlaw medication abortion nationwide, with one fell swoop and do it in their first hundred days.”
When it comes to fighting back, Crane cited two examples: first, that Biden protected the reproductive rights of military members, “no matter where they were stationed,” and second that he reinforced the emergency care rule that federally funded hospitals must provide emergency room abortion services for women whose lives are at risk with a non-viable pregnancy. Fourth and finally, with a congressional majority, Harris would codify Roe v Wade in federal law, restoring reproductive rights nationwide.
The same formula could be applied to a long list of Project 2025 proposals. But only a handful are top-tier concerns in voters’ minds, and those are the ones that the Alliance and other groups across the country will be focusing on from now until Election Day.
It doesn’t matter how many sweeping denials Trump may make, or what distractions he and his allies come up with. The factual record speaks for itself, once it’s presented to people. So that’s the task of preserving democracy. And anyone can join in.