The Assassination Attempt on Trump Shouldn’t Deflect From the Fascist Agenda of Project 2025

 

By David Starr

 

The attempt missed its target by inches. One or two more inches and Trump would have been assassinated. He was covered by Secret Service personnel, picked up and helped off the stage where he pumped his fist in the air. Trump’s followers loved it. Some chanted the ultranationalist slogan, “USA! USA! USA!”

 

Trump was nearly a martyr. That really would have riled up his followers, and they and the Republican Party would have incorrectly labeled him a hero. There would have been emotionally appeals to victimhood. But come to think of it, those things are either happening or will happen sooner or later.

 

Quoting Binoy Kampmark in CounterPunch, “Far from this being incredible, such acts of violence speckle and blood US politics.” Yes, despite the shock coming from some regarding the assassination attempt by Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican, the USA has consistently had incidents of violence in its history. Kampmark: “Candidates have been previously gunned down in cold blood. Presidents, whether going to the theatre or appearing in public motorcades, have been very publicly assassinated.”

 

Additionally, a World Socialist Web Site editorial states, “The attempted assassination is a concentrated manifestation of the crisis not only in the American political system, but the entire society.” 

 

Despite being a major incident, Crooks’s assassination attempt should not draw attention away from the fascist agenda of Project 2025. In Michigan Advance, Steve Corbin writes, “If you’ve not heard of Project 2025, it’s very worthy of your independent investigation. Project 2025 is a playbook specifically created for Donald Trump and his minions to use in the first 180 days of Trump’s 2025-2029 presidential administration. The far-right extremism-based Heritage [Fascist] Foundation proudly takes claim for facilitating the creation of the 887-page turning-democracy-into-an-authoritarian country document.”

 

The perpetrators of Project 2025 consist of 34 authors, 277 contributors, an advisory board of 54 members and over 100 conservative organizations. The project is intended to wreck institutions in the federal government that are beneficial and important to the public. Among the institutions: ending the Department of Education (DOE), ending the Department of Commerce (DOC), ending the F.B.I. (Hmm…), and ending the Department of Homeland Security (Hmm…).

 

Specifically, for the DOE, the intention is to “steal” billions of dollars for private religious schools and the use of voucher scams, ending the free school meals program, ending the Head Start program, and censoring books that provide details about slavery. Other mandates include: using the U.S. military to crack down on protests, ending diversity, equality and inclusion, ending affirmative action, banning abortion, forcing immigrants into concentration camps or deport them, and ending Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. 

 

Furthermore, kicking out federal workers and replacing them with Trumpite shills, and, for the Christian fanatics, ending the separation of church and state, put more power into the executive branch thereby ushering in a tyrant rather than a president, and making the Supreme Court more of a conservative tool to make “legal” decisions.

 

Jeet Heer asks a vital question in The Nation: “Should the United States remain a representative democracy, or should it become a right-wing autocracy?” Actually, the USA has had a degree of democracy where the capitalist establishment is not to be threatened. Of course, it would be worse with a right-wing tyranny. 

 

Through Project 2025, Trump would try to give himself wide-ranging powers in the executive. Politicians and officials who have “wronged” him in the past would be subject to “legal” action, such as military tribunals. Trump, in fact, would like these tribunals televised. And Trump would make sure his critics are jailed. 

 

Heer writes, “[T]he Trump agenda for a second term being prepared in Project 2025 by right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation involves a wholesale attack on guardrails of American democracy [whereby] Trump and his allies reshape the federal government so that it becomes the plaything of their whims,” rather than a government of rules and norms. 

 

The Heritage Foundation’s leader Kevin Roberts asserted, and Heer quotes him, that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” This makes it even more apparent that the right-wing has to be stopped from establishing a Unified Reich. Roberts would have made a loyal member of Hitler’s Gestapo.

 

Trump, meantime, said that he doesn’t know about Project 2025. Quoted in Rolling Stone, Trump claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

 

If Trump is criticizing what’s in Project 2025, then he knows something about it. Further, Trump implemented two thirds of it in his first year as “president.”

 

Among the perpetrators of Project 2025 are, according to E&E News: Stephen Moore, an advisor to the Trump regime who co-authored the framework of Project 2025; Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the regime, who was pathetically unqualified for the position (as other Trump appointees); Mandy Gunasekara, Chief of Staff of the EPA in the regime who provided a plan to downsize that department; William Perry Pendley, a regime Interior official who wrote the blueprint for Project 2025; and Bernard McNamee, a regime appointee who urged the next Trump regime to repeal President Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws and then increase domestic energy production.

 

The members of the Project 2025 team have shown a disdain for the left in general. But if they are pointing to Biden as being on the left, they apparently don’t know what the left is. Biden is a neoliberal/corporate/Third Way Democrat. And the right-wing mixes up actual leftists with neoliberals. 

 

It’s unfortunate that Trump has garnered even more sympathy from his followers after the assassination attempt. It was bound to happen. But if Biden is still running for the presidency, he’ll have to be even more direct, factual and coherent against Trump; and without his dementia getting in the way. If he isn’t up to the task, Biden should step aside and let Kamala Harris (for lack of a choice) to take the reins. 

 

It’s either going to be democracy or fascism in the USA.         

 

 

 


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