This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 5 episode of “Velshi.”
In July 2019, then-President Donald Trump offered his take on the constitutional limits of the presidency, telling a crowd of teenagers and young adults at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit in Washington that the Constitution gives him the right to do “whatever I want as president.”
Trump and the court’s conservative majority were in lockstep with each other but out of step with two centuries of constitutional precedent.
Five years later, in July, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on Trump v. United States and sided with Trump, declaring that presidents were immune from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” a term the court chose not to define.
Trump and the court’s conservative majority were in lockstep with each other but out of step with two centuries of constitutional precedent. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
And according to Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a second Trump presidency, the president should be a king, with every lever of government serving him alone. The blueprint vows to slash the federal workforce and replace what’s left of it with Trump loyalists. That’s because all sorts of policy laid out in this handbook would be impossible to implement without loyalty to a president and an administration — not to the Constitution — across the government, especially because some of its plans are so radical that pesky things like, say, expertise would simply get in the way.
Page 21 of Project 2025 states, “The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan ‘experts.’” It proposes achieving that goal by removing protections for thousands of career civil servants, often experts in their fields, and replacing them with politically loyal appointees who answer only to the president.
So picture, hypothetically speaking, a scientist who studies the effects of chemicals in our water being replaced with someone who has no scientific background but a solid track record of supporting Trump’s ideas.
Across the 900-plus pages of Project 2025, this strategy is spoken in code. On page 552, for example, it suggests, “The Director of the FBI must remain politically accountable to the President.”
“Politically accountable” is code for obedient. That’s what they want — an FBI that works at the whims of the president, arresting his political opponents, journalists, prosecutors, critics and even judges who don’t do their bidding.
Remember, one of Trump’s first big scandals as president was firing FBI Director James Comey for not publicly saying Trump wasn’t under investigation in the Russia probe. That’s according to the Mueller report.
“Political appointees,” Project 2025 code for “our guys,” are to replace civil servants at every level possible. This would leave Trump unchecked if he is enabled to go after his perceived enemies, which he has promised to do time and again on the campaign trail. In total, “political appointees,” aka Trump’s would-be goons, are mentioned in the massive book 99 times.
In the chapter on Homeland Security, on page 136, Project 2025 suggests that when a leadership role is vacated and the next person in line is a career civil servant, that person should be passed up for a political appointee.
On page 45, discussing the kind of person who should run the Office of Budget & Management, Project 2025 writes, “No Director should be chosen … who is not aggressive in wielding the tool on behalf of the President’s agenda, or who is unable to defend the power against attacks from Congress.”
“Attacks from Congress” should be the telltale sign here that no one involved in Project 2025 has any interest in a government of checks and balances. Congress is a co-equal branch of government, according to our Constitution. But according to Project 2025, Congress should bug off, too.
In the chapter on the State Department, it’s put more bluntly. Page 173 states, “The main suggestion here is that as many political appointees as possible should be in place at the start of a new Administration.”
In total, “political appointees,” aka Trump’s would-be goons, are mentioned in the massive book 99 times.
Transforming our federal government from groups of qualified experts to unblinking yes-men would mean serious breakdowns in our government’s ability to serve. For example, when Americans need crucial aid from federal agencies, the difference between civil servants and political appointees shows:
Just days ago, a former policy director on the National Security Council during the Trump presidency alleged that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California during its deadly 2018 wildfires. The official told Politico’s E&E News, “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you.” Trump wound up reversing his decision.
In the playbook’s forward, Project 2025 makes four promises for the next conservative presidency, the second being, “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” So the architects of Project 2025 must have been overjoyed when the Supreme Court assisted them in this effort, too, by overturning the 40-year precedent of the Chevron doctrine, which allowed federal agencies broad ability to interpret and enforce regulations.
With the administrative state weaker than it’s been in four decades, the time is ripe for the broad structural changes Project 2025 seeks. In concert with the Supreme Court’s summer decisions, Project 2025 could create a federal government that answers only to the president and a president who answers to no one.
This post is part of “Inside Project 2025,” an ongoing series on MSNBC’s “Velshi.” Each week, host Ali Velshi explores some of the most outrageous proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump presidency and explains how they could impact you. Read how Project 2025 would affect federal disaster relief, the gun crisis, the census and more.