Trump’s Project 2025 Is A Blueprint for Disaster – Here’s The Proof

As the world comes to terms with the shock of Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, the playbook for his second term, designed by a handful of right-wing extremists, is already underway in Argentina. It is called Project 2025, and it is not just a big backward step for progressive policy there but already genuinely horrifying.

If ever you wanted proof that governments can make catastrophic errors of judgment that have global consequences, look no further than George Bush’s time in power. Bush served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. This was the era of the so-called New American Century. Wikipedia describes this as – “The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that focused on United States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997 and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC’s stated goal was “to promote American global leadership”. The organization stated that “American leadership is good both for America and for the world” and sought to build support for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity”.

Of the twenty-five people who signed PNAC’s founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Observers such as Irwin Stelzer and Dave Grondin have suggested that the PNAC played a key role in shaping the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, particularly in building support for the Iraq War that ended with almost a million dead civilians and a global backlash, including a wave of terrorism across the Western world.

Much of the post-9/11 panic was manufactured so that President George W. Bush could boast his invasion of Iraq would protect the “homeland” and the rest of the world. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

The result of this illegal invasion, as determined by the architects of The New American Century, was 1.8 million American soldiers permanently disabled. Nearly 5,000 U.S. military personnel and more than 3,500 contractors were killed in Iraq. According to the Brown University project, the Iraq war cost at least $2 trillion; another estimate puts the total cost at $3 trillion and (still) rising.

The other result was that America and its closest ‘allies’ in that conflict profoundly harmed its credibility. Tony Blair had a good government record until then and has been vilified for his decision to join in ever since. And as the Century Foundation states in its 2023 report – “Today, a majority of Americans still believe Bush’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the false claim that Saddam Hussein played a role in 9/11. Bush’s success at political dishonesty established the template for Donald Trump’s Big Lie years later.”

That Foundation was right when it said the brazen political dishonesty of a war built on a false narrative supported by a massive propaganda campaign shattered global norms and what remained of the international liberal order. The Project For The New American Century was a catastrophic mistake, and its foundation was dismantled in 2006.

But now we have Donald Trump and Project 2025. OpenDemocracy reports that what is unfolding in Argentina, using Project 2025 as its ideological principle is nothing short of terrifying. It writes that;

Project 2025 is set out in a nearly 900-page ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’, produced by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing US think tank, as a ready reckoner for the incoming Trump administration. It details authoritarian tactics that exist in various parts of the world, from attacking public education to dismantling policies to tackle climate change to restricting the rights of women, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants, workers and Black people. But if there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.

A copy of the ‘Mandate for Leadership’ was handed to President Milei of Argentina by Heritage’s executive vice-president Derrick Morgan when the two met in Washington in February for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

A central goal of Project 2025 is to “dismantle the administrative state” allegedly co-opted by the left or wokism. It entails disbanding federal ministries and agencies, cutting public funding for health, education and welfare, and eliminating programmes and resources to combat gender-based violence, discrimination, pollution and climate change.

Milei has worked fast in his first ten months in power and has followed this script entirely. “I love being the mole inside the state”, Milei said in an interview in June. “I’m the one destroying the state from within”.

Milei has made an unprecedented cut to all public spending at close to 30%. He cut investment in education by 40%, denied increases to pensions, cut access to life-saving drugs for cancer patients, defunded the science and technology system and universities, and laid off almost 27,000 public employees.

He closed the public media and froze food distribution to soup kitchens. Now, he’s set to sell off public companies in the fields of nuclear energy, aviation, fuel, mining, electricity, water, cargo transport, roads and railways. Milei has eliminated nine ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the Ministry of Education.

He has dismantled all gender policies and defunded services, including those for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Last year, more than 170,000 people accessed these services, while official figures show that a femicide is committed every 35 hours in Argentina. He also closed the Institute against Discrimination, Racism and Xenophobia, which he called a “sinister body used for ideological persecution”. Project 2025 authors would no doubt be delighted. Their blueprint for Trump goes to great lengths to explain how every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy, programme and fund must be removed.

The Heritage Foundation has a database of some 20,000 people in the US who would make up a transitional staff for Trump. But it would require firing tens of thousands of career civil servants to replace them with people loyal to their ideology and ban public employees’ right to unionise.

According to Project 2025, the next US president must “remove from every existing rule, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation, and federal law the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights”.

Milei eliminated a programme to prevent teenage pregnancy and has not set aside any funds in the 2025 budget for comprehensive sex education – which is mandatory by law and considered essential to prevent child abuse. Instead, authorities hired the Chilean Catholic organisation Teen Star, that promotes abstinence, for training teachers in charge of CSE.

Milei banned the use of gender-inclusive language in public services and put a Catholic lawyer, Ursula Basset, in the foreign ministry to review all the country’s positions on gender and climate change.

The OpenDemocracy report goes on to highlight – “At the G20 meeting, Argentina ended up in a more extreme position on gender than Saudi Arabia or Russia.”

And there is another hint of what is coming to America. When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures.

In the last days of the US election campaign, a similar message was spread by billionaire Elon Musk, who put more than $100m into Trump’s campaign and who would be, according to Trump, his “secretary of cost-cutting”. Such cuts, Musk warned, might cause “temporary hardship”, but they were necessary in the path to “long-term prosperity”.

In 2001, an American president followed the playbook of a right-wing think tank called The Project For A New American Century. It caused chaos, dramatically failed, and destabilised the world order. In 2025, an American president will follow the playbook of a right-wing think tank called Project 2025.

 

 

 

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