Flooding the zone with shit.” That’s the phrase that Steve Bannon, the right-wing Rasputin and former Trump strategist, coined years ago for the technique we have seen the Trump administration deploy in the last week. The idea, as Bannon conceived it, was to unleash a firehose of disinformation, scandal, and intrigue at such an astonishing rate that neither the public nor the media would be able to remain focused on a single topic or transgression for long. Unfortunately, the first week of the second Trump administration was a masterclass in it: the Nazi salute, the talk of annexing Greenland, the “Gulf of America.”
Amid the chaos, Trump’s actual agenda was coming into view, fighting for visibility between the endless slew of other headlines. And what we have seen of that agenda so far looks a whole lot like Project 2025.
As a refresher: first announced in the summer of 2023, Project 2025 was an effort by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to create a blueprint for the next Republican presidency. An unholy amalgam of robber-baron-style industrialist wishcasting and Christian nationalist-adjacent moral enforcement, the blueprint laid out in Project 2025 was based on a maximalist interpretation of the unitary executive theory with the intent of allowing a Republican president to seize unprecedented authority in a manner which obliterates the separation of powers between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government.
At its core, Project 2025 is about enabling business interests to loot the economy and pollute the environment to their hearts’ content – the eternal conservative dream – but that’s a hard sell, so the authors wrapped it in several layers of culture war and identity politics to help it go down more easily. Woven throughout the 900-page document is a vision of the United States as a nation that is primarily, if not exclusively, white and protestant; the sort of pandering intended to keep the Republican Party’s white protestant base fed and happy, at the expense of everyone else, while their industrial stakeholders boil the oceans.
Last year, when the explosive reimagining of the executive branch started attracting headlines, Trump saw it as a liability to his chances of returning to office, and promptly distanced himself from it. The distancing was also a hard sell, though, given how many officials from the first Trump administration were involved in writing the document. Some Democrats attempted to wield Project 2025 against Trump well into the general election season, but it quickly became a second-tier issue.
And then he won, and confirmed what many suspected all along: that the distancing was an act. Eight days into his second presidency, Trump has already signed executive orders to begin the remaking of America along racial, cultural, and authoritarian lines – and it’s lining up perfectly with Project 2025. Now, the nation is starting the long and unpleasant process of living through the implementation phase.
The immediate assault on what the Trump administration is calling “DEI” is abhorrent – but it’s not shocking. Anyone who has cast half an eye toward the MAGA coalition in the last decade will have noticed that racial animus is the main tie binding it together. I’d waste several lines reminding you of the escalator speech, and Charlottesville, and all the other moments that led reasonable people to reasonably conclude that Trump is a racist knowingly pandering to other racists, but I’m assuming we can dispense with that. Nevertheless, the breadth of Trump’s week-one assault on racial equity was staggering.
Though the administration and the conservative movement are embracing the term “DEI,” referring to the kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings which have become common across corporate America in the last decade, the Project-2025-inspired executive actions Trump has taken thus far make it clear that their actual target is civil rights.
Project 2025 laid out a four-step approach to eliminating “DEI” (read: civil rights for non-whites). On the first day of his presidency, Trump enacted two of them: abolishing DEI offices and personnel, and ending the government’s participation in DEI programs. A week in, he expanded these orders to include the military.
At this point, we can reasonably expect that, with or without his Republican allies on Capitol Hill, Trump will undertake the third and fourth steps as well: amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and taking legal enforcement actions against any remaining “DEI” programs. And we are certain to see a further tightening of rules and laws about teaching America’s fraught history with race and racism – all in service of reifying the conservative and Christian nationalist conviction that there is an inherent connection between whiteness and Americanness.
Trump’s opening-week broadsides did not stop at Jim Crow 2.0, though: the conservative and Christian nationalist conception of America – the conception captured in Project 2025 – is not just of a primarily white nation, it’s also of a nation bound by an evangelical protestant version of morality and puritan sexual norms. In his flurry of executive orders, Trump took strides in that direction as well, targeting the queer community from day one.
On his first day in office, Trump ordered the federal government to stop acknowledging the existence of transgender people. Then, he banned transgender servicemembers from the armed forces. These actions are also perfectly aligned with Project 2025, which decrees that the government should “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” – despite the fact that they aren’t.
Continuing down this course, remaining aligned with Project 2025, we can expect the Trump administration to attempt to use federal power to curtail state-level civil rights protections for members of the trans community.
Despite the transgressions against decency, liberty, and biology described in the previous paragraphs, the power grab Trump executed on his seventh day in office was somehow even more shocking, not just because it showed how far he is willing to walk with Project 2025, but because of the implications it may have on his ability to enforce the racist and discriminatory orders issued in his first week.
On Monday evening, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which helps coordinate the president’s policies across executive branch agencies, posted a memorandum declaring that the president was pausing nearly all federal grants and loans. The move will have quick and devastating consequences: medical clinics, women’s shelters, cancer research, and countless other societal goods would be shuttered as a result. But the legal rationale animating the memo is even more stark than its consequences: in making this move, Trump has declared that he has the unilateral right to edit, amend, or pause appropriations made and approved by Congress. It is a dictatorial move in the truest sense of the word, and likely only the first salvo in what will become an all-out attack on the separation of powers.
Trump has attempted to assert this authority before – kind of. As journalist Lindsay Beyerstein pointed out, this is actually what Trump was impeached for (the first time): attempting to unilaterally suspend defense aid appropriated by Congress. This time, he’s not trying to nickel-and-dime the overstepping of his bounds. He’s leaning in.
This, too, is fully in keeping with Project 2025. In fact, apparently unaware of the many standard programs for stripping identifying metadata from PDFs, the version of the memo posted to the OMB website on Monday night contained metadata showing that it was authored by two Project 2025 contributors, Noah Peters and James Sherk. Sherk was named Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, but Peters has not been announced as a member of the administration. He is simply a Project 2025 guy who authored an official administration policy memo.
The last week has been a whirlwind, an assault on the senses, exactly as it was intended to be. The zone has indeed been flooded with excrement, and we can expect that it will continue to be. I don’t have a perfect answer for how we combat that, and I’m sure I will be wrestling with that question for years. It’s hard to know where to look, what to do, how to stop reacting and start building.
But Trump’s first full week in office did provide at least one handle to hold onto, one bit of real estate from which we can build for the near future: so far, he’s following Project 2025. If we want to get our minds around what he plans next, all we need to do is turn the page before he gets there. We can see what the future likely holds for education, or agriculture, or justice. We can see, perhaps most chillingly, what the future holds for free and fair elections. Whatever your area of interest or expertise or passion, it couldn’t hurt to find where in the 900-page document it’s addressed, and read up on what they have planned.
It’s not much, it certainly does not take the sting out of the horrors unleashed in the last week. But with the pace at which this administration has started keeping its terrible promises, we need any advantage we can get.
