The Weekly Sift

Trump designed Project 2025 to be deniable. But the Republican platform isn’t deniable, and it’s bad enough.

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Recently a lot of attention is being paid to Project 2025, which I warned you about last August. Project 2025 is a massive 900-page plan for the second Trump administration to hit the ground running next January, together with a database of loyal MAGA Republicans to staff it, and a process by which Trump acolytes can declare their fealty in hopes of landing a government job.

In essence, Project 2025 plays two familiar roles: The 900-page doorstop is a very detailed party platform, and the staffing database resembles what a presidential transition team might do — enlarged by Trump’s plan to “demolish the Deep State” by circumventing civil service requirements and appointing over 50K people, rather than the usual 4K or so.

What’s different about Project 2025 is that (by farming the effort out to a consortium of conservative groups headed by The Heritage Foundation), Trump has made the whole effort deniable. So if something in the 900 pages terrifies you, like that it will get rid of all the people in the Justice Department or the Pentagon who thwarted Trump’s post-2020-defeat coup, or that it reverses all the rules that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, Trump can tell you not to worry. It’s not his platform or his transition team, it’s those guys.

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. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.

Meanwhile, if you’re a MAGA cultist and you love the stuff in the 900 pages, Trump gives you a wink and a nod: Sure, that’s what we’re going to do, but I can’t say that just now.

In other words, Project 2025 is designed to be the mother of all dog whistles. Undecided voters are supposed to hear one thing, while MAGA cultists hear something else. If Trump has one superpower, it’s his ability to get people to believe that he’s telling them the truth and lying to the other guy.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts understands how the game is played:

No hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025 about the statement, because we understand Trump is the standard-bearer and he’s making a political and tactical decision here.

I’m not going to do an elaborate debunking of Trump’s Sargeant-Schultz-like I-know-nothing claim, because other people have done that. Suffice it to say that Trump knows a lot about Project 2025, he knows the people behind it, he has everything to do with them, and he agrees with what they’re saying, especially the parts that are ridiculous and abysmal.

But OK, Trump has his superpower and we’re being naive if we ignore it. Lots of people are going to believe his denials and accuse us of being afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome if we are skeptical. So let’s leave the details of Project 2025 for another day and consider the Trump plans that aren’t deniable: the draft platform for the Republican Party, whose national convention is meeting in Milwaukee at this very moment. I don’t think even Trump could get away with saying that he knows nothing about the Republican Party or who’s behind it, so let’s examine what’s in the party platform.

The platform is a 16-page document with a three-page preamble, ten pages of elaboration, and three pages of filler. The introduction culminates in “twenty promises that we will accomplish very quickly when we win the White House and Republican Majorities in the House and Senate”. The promises are in all-caps, as if they were Trump posts on Truth Social. Most of them probably were at some point.

Inflation. A number of the promises are deceptively simple, like #3 “End inflation and make America affordable again.” (I’ll spare you the all-caps.) I’m sure that when Democrats read this they immediately slapped their foreheads and said, “Why didn’t we think of that? We’ve been wondering what we should do about inflation. Why didn’t it occur to us to end it?”

So OK, how do Republicans plan to end inflation? That’s Chapter 1 of the elaboration.

We commit to unleashing American Energy, reining in wasteful spending, cutting excessive Regulations, securing our Borders, and restoring Peace through Strength. Together, we will restore Prosperity, ensure Economic Security, and build a brighter future for American Workers and their families. Our dedication to these Policies will make America stronger, more resilient, and more prosperous than ever before.

Most of this in code.

• unleashing American Energy means (as the preamble says) “drill, baby, drill”. It’s not about unleashing American wind energy or solar energy. It means producing as much fossil fuel as we possibly can and ignoring what that means for climate change.
• reining in wasteful spending is the same sleight-of-hand we’ve been seeing in Republican proposals since Reagan. It’s a fudge factor that makes their budget numbers work. In #14, they promise to “protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts”. #12 will “strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world”. #2 envisions “the largest deportation operation in American history”, which sounds like it might be expensive to pull off. Ditto for #8, which will “build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country” and #11 “rebuild out cities”. No specific examples of “wasteful spending” are given, and it’s hard to imagine cuts that could make up for all this increased spending. Spending rose in every budget of the first Trump administration (going from Obama’s last budget of just under $4 trillion to Trump’s last of $7.2 trillion), and would likely continue rising in a second. The platform also promises tax cuts (#6), so deficits should go up substantially, assuming Republicans haven’t ended arithmetic too.
• cutting excessive regulations means two things: In general, abandoning efforts to protect Americans from whatever rapacious corporations may decide to do, and more specifically, eliminating rules aimed at fighting climate change by cutting fossil fuel use.
• securing our borders appeals to the misperception (widespread among the MAGA base) that undocumented immigrants cost our government much more than they actually do. Trump’s plans to secure the border are an expense, not a savings.
• restoring Peace through Strength means letting Russia take Ukraine, ending the “wasteful spending” of supporting Ukrainian sovereignty.

And then there’s stuff that would drastically increase prices, like tariffs.

Republicans will support baseline Tariffs on Foreign- made goods, pass the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, and respond to unfair Trading practices. As Tariffs on Foreign Producers go up, Taxes on American Workers, Families, and Businesses can come down.

Trump has long pushed the bizarre idea that foreigners pay our tariffs. In fact, importers pay tariffs, which they pass on to their customers as higher prices. Do you buy anything made in another country? It’s price will go up 10%. To the extent that the government relies on tariffs rather than income taxes, the tax burden shifts from rich people to ordinary consumers.

How will this plan end inflation? It won’t. Gas and cars might be a bit cheaper, at great cost to future generations. Corporate costs might go down, but Americans across-the-board would be less safe from pollution and dangerous products. (And would those lower corporate costs mean lower prices, or just larger profits?) Government spending and deficits would continue to increase, unless Republicans got clever with the “no cuts” promise on Social Security and Medicare. (They might decide that ending cost-of-living increases in Social Security isn’t a “cut”, or that freezing overall Medicare spending isn’t a “cut”, even though it would mean less care and higher costs for individuals. I know I wasn’t going to mention Project 2025, but it wants to raise the retirement age, which wouldn’t “cut benefits” for anybody who still received benefits. But the platform explicitly promises “no changes to the retirement age”, which you should totally believe because Trump is lying to the other guy, not you.)

Climate and the environment. The word “climate” does not appear in the platform, because an underlying principle of the document is that climate change is not a problem and nothing needs to be done about it. But refusing to combat climate change has a strong implied presence in the document.

The glorification of fossil fuels is everywhere.

Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World — and we will soon be again by lifting restrictions on American Energy Production and terminating the Socialist Green New Deal.

Guess what? The US is still the world’s largest producer under Biden, and the Green New Deal never passed Congress. But carry on.

Republicans will increase Energy Production across the board, streamline permitting, and end market-distorting restrictions on Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal. The Republican Party will once again make America Energy Independent, and then Energy Dominant, lowering Energy prices even below the record lows achieved during President Trump’s first term.

Want to drill for oil in some environmentally sensitive area? No problem! And did I mention that the US is already energy independent, in that we’re a net exporter of oil and gas? And if you remember those low gas prices during the Trump administration, you might also remember that they happened during the Covid lockdown, when nobody was driving. And “market-distorting restrictions” means subsidizing sustainable fuels.

I didn’t mention one of the Republicans’ ideas for lowering housing prices:

open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction

Look around your neighborhood and see if you can spot any federal lands you’d like to build on. None? But mining companies have their eyes on lots of federal lands.

Republicans will revive the U.S. Auto Industry by reversing harmful Regulations, canceling Biden’s Electric Vehicle and other Mandates, and preventing the importation of Chinese vehicles.

Those “harmful regulations” are things like CAFE standards to increase gas mileage. And of course Republicans don’t want you driving an EV, which Exxon doesn’t profit from. Cheap Chinese EVs should be a genuine debate, because while importing them would cost American jobs in the auto industry, it would also speed the transition away from fossil fuels. But it isn’t an issue in this campaign, because Biden also wants to keep them out.

Social Security and Medicare. We’ve already talked about how a Republican administration might get around its promises not to cut these programs. But something nobody talks about is how undocumented immigrants prop them up: Many immigrants work under fake SSNs, which means that they pay taxes but will never collect benefits. Legal immigrants tend to be much younger than the general population, so they pay taxes now but won’t collect benefits for many years. So Trump’s deportation plan will harm all our pension funds. But the platform makes it sound like money flows in the opposite direction.

Republicans will protect Medicare’s finances from being financially crushed by the Democrat plan to add tens of millions of new illegal immigrants to the rolls of Medicare.

I have no idea what plan they’re talking about, and I doubt they do either. Another bit of cluelessness is

corrupt politicians have robbed Social Security to fund their pet projects

I blame both parties for this bit of rhetoric, which goes back to Al Gore’s “lockbox” promise. The federal government has been running deficits, and the federal trust funds have been investing their money in government bonds, as many private pension plans do. Unless the US reneges on its debt (something Trump has hinted at from time to time), nobody is “robbing” Social Security.

Culture wars and education. The platform promises to end “political meddling” in our schools and “restore Parental Rights”, but we can see what this really means by looking at Ron DeSantis’ Florida. Florida education is full political meddling, including a law listing ideas that can’t be taught in Florida schools. And “Parental Rights” means rights for conservative Christian parents, which come at the expense of the rest of us.

So if you want your child to learn real American history rather than rah-rah propaganda, you don’t have that right. If you want a library stocked with books from a wide range of views, including books that help non-White or LGBTQ kids make sense of what they’re experiencing, tough luck. Moms For Liberty said no, and they have the final word.

The platform also calls for ending tenure for teachers and “allowing various publicly supported Educational models”, which means using public money to support conservative Christian schools.

Republicans will support overhauling standards on school discipline, advocate for immediate suspension of violent students, and support hardening schools to help keep violence away from our places of learning.

“Hardening schools” is a euphemism for making them more like prisons. Republicans refuse to do anything about our gun problem, so instead we’ll turn our schools into armed camps. (And of course no armed teacher or school guard will ever flip out and start killing students.)

Republicans will ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda. We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars.

“Leftwing propaganda” and “inappropriate political indoctrination” means recognizing that racism is still a problem in America, or that families take many different forms these days.

Republicans will champion the First Amendment Right to Pray and Read the Bible in school, and stand up to those who violate the Religious Freedoms of American students.

Conservative Christian teachers will be allowed to indoctrinate their students, but non-Christian teachers won’t have similar rights. Teachers who use the Bible to teach critical reasoning skills rather than Christian dogma will find themselves in deep trouble.

We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.

But of course they’re also going to cut federal spending on “Leftwing propaganda”, no matter what a liberal state might want its kids to learn. States rights are for red states, not blue states.

Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party

But we’re also getting rid of tenure.

All sorts of phrases in the platform advocate returning to the Dead White Guys tradition in education: “Western Civilization”, “Classic Liberal Arts Education”, and so on.

Immigration. In several places, the platform frames desperate families arriving at our borders as an “invasion”, which is to be met with force and fortification.

We will complete the Border Wall, shift massive portions of Federal Law Enforcement to Immigration Enforcement, and use advanced technology to monitor and secure the Border. We will use all resources needed to stop the Invasion— including moving thousands of Troops currently stationed overseas to our own Southern Border.

Nonviolent solutions — like funding more immigration courts and judges, so that people who arrive here with legitimate asylum claims under our laws and treaty obligations can have their cases handled promptly and won’t have to wait around here or elsewhere — are not mentioned. That was a big piece of the bipartisan immigration bill Trump had his allies in Congress torpedo a few months ago.

The platform also promotes the myth of “Migrant Crime”, as if crimes by migrants were somehow different or more virulent than crimes by American citizens. They aren’t.

And then there’s “the largest deportation program in American history” and “sending Illegal Aliens back home”. That’s millions of people working millions of jobs. Restaurant workers, crop pickers, teachers, nurses, programmers, and probably people you know whose paperwork you never thought about. Your mom or grandpa might have to go to a nursing home because home health aides will suddenly be in short supply. You or your spouse might have to quit working, because child care will be hard to find.

And how do you do an operation of this size without making its processes automatic and inflexible? Where do the millions of people go? To detention camps while we find countries to accept them? How do we keep those camps from turning into hellholes, staffed by people who get off on having power over helpless human beings?

But that’s one thing the platform doesn’t say.