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Street sign illustrating the concept of Democracy versus Dictatorship.

Ark Valley Voice has largely avoided looking as far ahead on the political calendar as the 2024 election. After all, we have the 2023 tourist season on top of us, the 2023 election season just ahead of us, and massive climate events in the form of extreme weather to worry about. Locally, one could begin to wonder where our usual summer monsoon season has absconded to.

But when politicians tell us what they plan to do should they win, and they do it this far ahead of an election, and they come to us with a history of distortions, criminal indictments, and outrageous behavior balanced on a cult following of people who appear willing to believe anything —  it’s good to listen.

Much of what constitutes the modern U.S. government, including cabinet positions, departments, and independent agencies, is a combination of established practice and tradition, flanked by the three branches of government and held together by our mutual trust in the firm bulwark of the Rule of Law. Our leaders pledge to uphold the Constitution, not fealty to a single leader. It is — frankly — the envy of the world.

From no less than the highly conservative Heritage Foundation, now comes something rather innocently named Project 2025, boldly announcing itself as a “presidential transition project.”

As the New York Times laid out in an article this past week, the first time around, in 2016, the Trump group appeared unprepared to have won, and had to learn the levers of government. During that term, there were still good people who tried to act as brakes on his authoritarian tendencies. That is not the case now. In fact, Project 2025 identifies four pillars of power; “building now for a conservative victory through policy, personnel, and training.”

If Donald Trump wins, or it appears, even if another Republican candidate should win the 2024 election, the plan outlines the intended consolidation of power not just into one branch of government — the executive branch — but into the Oval Office itself. Trump himself announced his campaign saying “I am your retribution.”

Per The New York Times; “Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.”

It basically sets aside government as we know it. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, speaking with The New York Times, who noted that Vought ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America. “It is necessary to do a complete system overhaul.”

After all — who needs an independent Department of Justice? Who needs an FBI? Who needs a federal Internal Revenue Service, or a Federal Trade Commission, or an Environmental Protection Agency (who needs clean air or clean water?), or a Bureau of Land Management (they only hold up drilling contracts and private business, after all) or a Department of  Education, or a Department of Energy?*

Organizers of this Project 2025 are already setting up a right-wing LinkedIn to begin now to select people to replace career government staffers with years of expertise with loyal lackeys who will advance the conservative agenda. The goal — to greatly increase the power of the executive branch, and the role of the presidency.

In fact, Project 2025 is declaring that “the upcoming production of the policy book Mandate for Leadership, represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success at each federal agency during the next administration. Presidential candidates won’t be able to ignore what the conservative movement demands in this book.”

Translation: no matter who the Republican presidential candidate might be who somehow would win the White House — there is this demand to follow the Project 2025 Playbook.

In fact, just to ensure their success, this conservative group has thoughtfully laid out something they call their “Presidential Administration Academy”:

“When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. Through their action, inaction, and their encyclopedic knowledge of volumes of technicalities about the federal workforce, certain career federal employees are masterful in tripping us up. Our interactive, on-demand training sessions will change that. They will turn future conservative political appointees into experts in governmental effectiveness.”

Now this sense of unpreparedness is interesting since I have personally been told by an apolitical, high-up government staffer that in general “Republicans tend to come in with better leadership skills, and they aren’t nearly so idealistic.”

It gets better.

“The fourth and final pillar of Project 2025 is our Playbook, which will take the policy ideas expressed in Mandate for Leadership and transform them into an implementation plan for each agency to advocate to the incoming administration. What regulations and executive orders must be signed on Day One? Where are the greatest needs for more political appointees? How can we effectively use the mechanisms of government to face our most challenging problems? Our Playbook will put our movement to work answering questions like these.”

Enumerated among those “challenging problems” are how to limit governmental power in other branches and agencies, get rid of taxes on the rich, and remove all vestiges of social programs that actually help ordinary people. The right-wing is not shy in identifying these things.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Green listed them last week in a speech to a group of 200 conservatives against President Joe Biden as the fulfillment of what Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson began: continuing “socialist” programs such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights, voting rights, and health care programs.”

As if these are horrible programs that harm people, instead of the fabric underlying the lives and rights, and dignity of we ordinary American citizens.

 

There are  471 days until the 2024 election.

While Republicans might try to claim that this is simply transparency: to lay out their governance plan, we journalists have seen this before and know it for something else. While in the newsroom, we debate if the actual word should be used in news articles, the combined series of events and actions accumulate in this. It’s time to move past calling it authoritarian domination and call this what it is.

“A second term of Trump would equal the Third Reich,” said Miles Taylor, the author of “Blowback: a Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump” speaking this morning. He worked inside the first Trump administration.

“I draw the sobering clear-eyed conclusion that it would be a fascist power base,” he explained. “They’ll spy on rivals, prosecute their political enemies, administer loyalty tests, deploy the Department of Homeland Security across states that don’t follow their mandates, and withhold federal monies into blue states. They’ll regulate the media.”

We should all remember Trump’s words in 2019, when he told a fawning crowd; “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Taylor’s warning is one we share: “Truth is the final guardrail of our collective democracy. When more people speak out it creates a truth environment to protect democracy.”

There are many facets of this dismantling of the checks and balances of American democracy. Stay tuned. There’s more, and it’s not all happening at the national level.

*Editor’s Note: Contrary to what many conservatives reappear to believe, the Department of Energy is not an oil and gas lobbying group. It is charged with creating and leading our nuclear energy programs, including power and weaponry, it monitors our national store and the global location of nuclear materials and weapons.