Donald Trump is to formally accept the Republican Party’s nomination this Thursday, July 18. His speech is highly anticipated, following last Saturday’s attack. We will see if he clarifies his government program, which for the moment remains vague. We will also see to what extent he draws inspiration from the “Project 2025” concocted by the very conservative think tank “Heritage Foundation”. It is a radical government program, developed with the help of his advisors, but from which he has recently distanced himself. What measures does Project 2025 provide and should we be afraid of their implementation? Interview with Romuald Sciora, director of the Iris Political and Geostrategic Observatory of the United States.
RFI: How can we describe Project 2025? Is it a government program?
Romuald Sciora: To answer your question, we must first understand that the Donald Trump of 2024 is not that of 2016 or 2020. Let us also remember that in 2000, Donald Trump, who was rather a progressive Democrat at the time, had tried to run for the Democratic Party for the first time, he tried again to run in 2012, and he hesitated between the Democrats and the Republicans, even in 2015, before his 2016 candidacy. Why? Quite simply because Donald Trump, originally, was rather a progressive, he defended abortion, divorce, etc.
Why did he ultimately run for the Republicans?
Simply because he realized that a portion of the people who could support him both in the establishment and in the American population leaned much more to the conservative side, and that his image was more anchored in a conservative landscape. And above all, he understood that the Democrats would never let him run for their party’s nomination. It was after his 2016 election – which he did not expect – that he transformed himself. He became more or less the embodiment of what he already represented for a large part of the American population.
In 2020, he lost the election and became even more radical…
Yes, at that point, Donald Trump truly becomes the man we know today. He himself began to believe in the values that were the ones he had to support in order to win the election. For four years, we have witnessed a metamorphosis from a Donald Trump who did not really know where he stood, who was not an ideologue, who had no political vision on the domestic front to the Donald Trump of today who is truly an incarnation of a crypto-fascist politician.
It is in this context that Project 2025 is taking place. ?
Yes, Project 2025 was developed by the Heritage Foundation, a neoconservative think tank created in the 1970s to support the two candidacies of Ronald Reagan. Then, it became radicalized in the 1990s and today it is completely aligned with the ideology of the Trumpists of the Republican Party and their slogan: “Make America Great Again”. The foundation therefore wrote, in consultation with people close to Donald Trump, this famous Project 2025, over 900 pages. It is a very precise program, it is online and therefore accessible to everyone.
What are the main points of this program?
First, when a new American president is elected, he also changes part of his administration. This normally concerns about 4,000 civil servants. But Project 2025 predicts that if Donald Trump is elected – which for the moment seems more than likely – he would change not 4,000, but 40,000 civil servants, which is colossal!
So a real purge….
Absolutely. Obviously, he won’t be able to fire all of these officials at once. But he would create new agencies that would take over from the current administration. And then, there would be a very large number of early retirements. We would then end up with a “Trump State.” We have seen this kind of operation in Russia or China, but never in a democratic state.
The Heritage Foundation has also begun recruiting officials for this new “Trump State.”
Absolutely. The foundation has been recruiting since last summer, at a rate of several hundred interviews per week. It is a real machine for creating a Trumpist army. Today, I believe that the casting is almost complete. The 40,000, or even 50,000 Trumpist civil servants are ready to take office on January 20, 2025 if Donald Trump is elected again. And it remains within the law, it is completely legal for a president to create new agencies. He needs the agreement of at least one of the houses of Congress. He already has the majority in the House of Representatives and everything suggests that the Senate will also swing to the Republican side. So Donald Trump should have no difficulty in setting up this bloated administration, unheard of in a Western democracy.
Another measure proposed by Project 2025 is the attachment of the Ministry of Justice to the presidency.
Yes, the program calls for a takeover of the Justice Department, and this, through a whole series of reforms that are even more worrying. Donald Trump, and we find this plan in Project 2025, but also in several proposals formulated by the Republican Party, wants to review certain prerogatives of Congress in favor of the White House. The United States is a presidential regime, but unlike the French president for example, the American president has much less power. Donald Trump wants to change that and give more power to the president. Once again, it is legal. And once again, the Republicans in the House and the Republicans in the Senate have already confirmed that they will accept these changes wanted by the White House.
Another reform in the pipeline is that of the National Guard.
Yes, in the United States, each state has a national guard composed of many civilians who are mobilized in the event of insecurity, unrest or after a natural disaster. Donald Trump’s project provides that all of these National Guards no longer depend on the governors, but are directly controlled by the White House. Which is very worrying. Donald Trump wants, and this is also part of the measures of Project 2025, that the President of the United States can deploy the National Guard as a preventive measure, for example during demonstrations.
Some fear that with a new Trump mandate, the United States will turn into a dictatorship. What do you think?
If Donald Trump is re-elected, the United States will not be heading towards a dictatorship or an authoritarian regime at first, but I would say towards a semi-authoritarian regime. What is a semi-authoritarian regime? It is an Erdoğan or Orban regime. So quickly, we could find ourselves after a year, two years of Donald Trump’s presidency, in a country that would look like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
In recent days, Donald Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025. Is this purely an electoral strategy to avoid scaring off the moderate conservative voters he needs to be elected?
Yes, these positions are absolutely not credible. Donald Trump is an authoritarian and aspires, on the domestic level, to a form of obvious authoritarianism. This is indeed an electoral strategy. Donald Trump won the primary campaign hands down, he has his base behind him and must now seduce moderate Republicans, even Democrats who lean to the right, conservative Democrats, and there are many of them. Let us remember that the Democratic Party is made up of currents that go – if we take the French example – from La France Insoumise to the Les Républicains party, including Éric Ciotti. So Donald Trump of course knows very well what Project 2025 is, it was set up with the help of his collaborators, with his blessing. They know very well where they are going.
But Project 2025 and the radical ideas it conveys go far beyond Donald Trump. Any future Republican candidate and leader has to be on that ideological line, right?
Absolutely. The Republican Party has had relatively moderate presidents on the societal level, this is the case of Richard Nixon and even George W. Bush who was a fierce neoconservative internationally but developed social programs. This Republican Party with a moderate wing no longer exists today. Many former officials have retired or joined Donald Trump. Some were not reelected, they lost their seats in Congress against candidates placed by Donald Trump.
So anyone who wants to work with Donald Trump, starting with his potential vice president, who wants to anchor themselves in the Republican landscape for the next few years, has to embrace his political vision, whether it’s sincere or not. That’s why I keep repeating something that seems very important to me: Donald Trump is far from being a parentheses. Parentheses have been Barack Obama And Joe Biden. For the past thirty years, we have been witnessing the rise of right-wing radicalism in the United States. Donald Trump is just a step and today, everything is ready for his succession.
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