The most important thing to know about the Republican master plan for government — Project 2025 — is that it is profoundly weird. Before the document even begins to list all of the absolutely outrageous ways that Republicans will dismantle every good thing in government, it maintains a creepy focus on controlling how people build families, how people are dressing, what we’re reading, and what plumbing we’re packing in our pants. It ascribes a host of ills to single motherhood, criminalizes being LGBTQ+, and suggests using the tax code to force us all into their rigid notion of the “right” family. If Project 2025 were a person, he (and it’s absolutely a “he”) would be the sort who sells out the community he comes from for book and movie deals, manages to insult both women and cats whenever he talks about either, and can’t be left alone with your living room furniture.
In short, Project 2025 is J.D. Vance turned into a policy guide.
Once you see it, it’s impossible to miss. Everything disturbing, distressing and off-putting about the Republican vice presidential nominee has a corresponding policy in Project 2025. Vance treats women like we’re all supposed to be grateful breeding machines, and Project 2025 wants to strip the words “gender equality,” “abortion,” and “reproductive rights” out of everything the government produces, from rules and regulations to grants and legislation. Vance can’t stand up to white supremacists for the sake of his wife and kids, while Project 2025 gives those same people carte blanche to erase Black and LGBTQ+ histories, weaponize funding from the Department of Education if anyone, anywhere refuses, and destroy any efforts to increase or promote diversity in public or private spaces. Vance can’t stop having opinions about how the rest of us should live our lives, and Project 2025 would make every personal decision of every person in the country subject to a Christian Nationalist executive branch.
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If you’ve been wondering why anyone would pick a man who can start a feud with Jennifer Aniston just by opening his mouth to be on the GOP ticket, Vance’s fluency in the bizarre and controlling language of the Christian Nationalist base answers that question. He may not be charming, or insightful, or pleasant, or competent, but Vance can throw out red meat and do billionaire bidding with the best of them. And his inexperience is a feature, not a bug: Should circumstances require his leadership, Vance doesn’t need anything more than a signature and the ability to nod because the plan is already written.
The only problem, of course, is that the blueprint for this Christian Nationalist vision of the country is wildly unpopular. Policies like the weaponization of the Justice Dept., the hollowing out of election infrastructure, and the death of expertise and civil service keep getting low scores with the broader electorate. To avoid the natural consequences of trying to implement a vision of government that most people reject, Trump and his team have tried to have it both ways: pretending that Trump has no idea what Project 2025 is, and winking to the base that they will get everything they could ask for with a Trump victory in the Electoral College. Like so much of the duplicity and deceit that comes from the convicted felon atop the GOP ticket, this effort to hoodwink a significant portion of the nation almost worked. And then J.D. Vance started talking.
Every new controversy gives up the game, and puts the spirit and intention of Project 2025 on display. It will be a government full of men like J.D. Vance — the kind of men who think their opinions about your life and choices should have more impact than your own. It will have Vance’s same contempt for people who disagree, but with the force of law behind it. It will snatch away choices and limit our autonomy and rights with all the smug cruelty of a man who thinks people without children have no investment in a healthy society. And like Vance, a Project 2025 government will ignore boundaries and accumulate power, no matter what the cost.
Trump and Republicans have tried so hard to convince us that this campaign is all business as usual, hiding the extremism they plan to usher in if we are foolish enough to let them. But picking the woefully inadequate and unprepared Vance is a reminder of a fundamental political truth even Donald Trump’s lies can’t obscure: Personnel is policy. And we can guess how bad the policy is going to be when the personnel is like J.D. Vance.
