‘But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning’

The one sentence of Project 2025 every American needs to read.

Cut from a photo by Brett Sayles.

What is the point of publishing a 920-page prescription of policies for “the next conservative president?”

The Republican establishment – led by The Heritage Foundation, which brought together dozens of right-wing organizations to plot Project 2025 – is determined to not let Donald Trump’s second stab at dictatorship go to waste.

Historian Thomas Zimmer, who puts out the Democracy Americana newsletter and co-hosts the “Is This Democracy” podcast, has been writing and talking extensively about the significance of Project 2025. This week on my earlyworm podcast “How are you feeling about democracy?” he told me the two main goals of Project 2025:

That diagnosis is we were not ready in 2016/17. We didn't have the plans. We didn't have the expertise and we didn't have the personnel. And this must not happen again, right? 

The two big lessons they have drawn from this experience is a) we need to have more of this planning operation beforehand. We need to have our plans ready. We need to have the personnel ready. But also b) we need to purge everyone who put the brakes on what we wanted to do the last time around

Thomas and I had a great conversation about how much of this is coming from Trump and how much of this is the GOP establishment trying to define MAGA to make sure they get what they want out of Trump, whose first presidency failed to transform anything but the federal judiciary. That’s a lot! But not enough for the primal forces of nature behind America’s right wing.

You should read Zimmer’s three-part series on Project 2025. And you should also read the Foreword of Project 2025’s report on pages 33-49, as he recommends.

But if you aren’t going to do any of that, just read one sentence of Project 2025. In fact, you already did. It’s the title of this post:

But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.

That would be the governing philosophy of a second Trump regime.

You know that horrible thing almost no one wants and you couldn’t quite believe we’d actually do? It’s just the starting point. You have no idea how far we’ll go. Birth Control? IVF? Surrogacy? Your ability to parent your own kid if that kid doesn’t fit our view of our religion? We want it all.

But don’t believe me or Trump. Believe the entire Republican establishment.

Check out previous episodes of How are you feeling about democracy? with Marcy Wheeler, Carol Anderson, and Jennifer Mercieca. If you want to back what we’re doing, please join the earlyworm society – free or paid, your support matters.