Project 2025 Aims to Break US Government & Ignore Climate Crisis if Trump is Elected
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Clean air in the United States comes from strong air and water quality policies enforced by the US government. The progress we’ve seen on renewables and electric vehicles has relied on US government support of various kinds. Having one of the best education systems in the world relies on support from the US government. Having a more open democracy than most requires US government workers following the law and doing their jobs.
This is all basic, right? No one would want to harm such progress and break these government agencies and policies, right?
Well, of course that’s not right. Some people do. And the threat of this actually happening has gotten more extreme than probably ever before. That’s one reason why a formerly longtime Republican and occasional CleanTechnica writer submitted a letter to the CEO (to me) asking that we not just allow political coverage, but go above politics to protect our democracy and society.
The underlying framework and program I’m referencing is “Project 2025.” Its aim, in short, is to disrupt and dismantle US government as much as possible. Recruiting videos from it have been leaked, and at one point, they are basically telling people that if they aren’t ready to go to extremes and risk their careers and social connections, they shouldn’t be trying to join the Trump administration if Trump is elected again.
In one leaked training video, Bethany Kozma, conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the first Trump administration, says: “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.” The Project 2025 people include many former and current Trump staff and connections. “A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign,” ProPublica writes. The leader of the project until recently, Kevin Roberts, has flown on a private jet with Trump, and Trump has echoed many of the plan’s aims. There are also connections to JD Vance. Apparently, JD Vance, Trump’s pick to run alongside him as a vice president candidate, is even deeper into this mindset.
On a right-wing podcast in 2021, when JD Vance was running for Congress, he was even more blatant about how another Trump administration should behave. “He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to ‘seize the institutions of the left,’ fire ‘every single midlevel bureaucrat’ in the US government, ‘replace them with our people,’ and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, one of the flames beneath this policy wildfire is a disgruntled, right-wing blogger who has inspired some of our newest and most extreme politicians. Here’s an extended quote from that article referenced above: “To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. ‘So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things…’
“Nearly a decade earlier, a Stanford law student named Blake Masters, asked by a friend for reading recommendations for a book club, emailed a link to a set of blog posts. These posts made an argument that was quite unusual in the American context, asserting that the democratically elected US government should be abolished and replaced with a monarchy. Its author, then writing pseudonymously, was Yarvin.
“Masters is now the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona. At a campaign event last year, according to Vanity Fair’s James Pogue, he was asked how he’d actually drain the swamp in Washington. ‘One of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE — Retire All Government Employees,’ Masters answered. You’ve probably guessed who the friend is.
“But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — ‘rebooted’ or ‘reset,’ as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a ‘startup guy,’ like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.
“To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume ‘absolute power,’ and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas ‘fascist‘ — a term he disputes, arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. ‘Autocratic’ fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is “monarchist.””
If you want to get even more freaked out, or basically how he lays out the plans for a coup and new “monarchy” (or authoritarian) government in the United States, you can read all the way to the end of that article.
Of course, Yarvin is closely connected to Peter Thiel, who is closely connected to both Elon Musk (they are both cofounders of PayPal) and Donald Trump. In 2009, Peter Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin believes that the fall of US democracy could be “fundamentally joyous and peaceful.” My level of shock is at around zero at this point.
Anyway, let’s get back to the recently released Project 2025 training videos.
As Jennifer Sensiba recently wrote, they even want to end the National Weather Service. Coming back to climate change, you can watch for yourself here or via the embedded video above, but one of the people guiding others on what to think and say about this claims, “Now, when I think about climate change, I immediately think of population control, don’t you?” This person also laments that the topic of climate change “has infiltrated every part of the federal government.” Almost like global heating is a truly dangerous, society-threatening crisis. The stuff they discuss here is often in deep-rabbit hole territory and sounds a bit confusing to normal people, as the topics they obsess on are not common concerns of most of us, and often aren’t even things the vast majority of Democrats think about, talk about, or propose.
“Project 2025’s 887-page ‘Mandate for Leadership’ document lays out a vast array of policy and governance proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education, slashing Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president greater power to control the DOJ and further restricting abortion access.”
There are also tips on avoiding public accountability. To resolve an issue or make a plan with someone, Tom Jones, who runs the “American Accountability Foundation” and used to be a Senate investigator, recommends: “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through, and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”
“Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have always been disingenuous,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The discovery that the vast majority of speakers in Project 2025 training videos are alumni of the Trump administration or have other close ties to Trump’s political operation is unsurprising further evidence of the close connection there.”
In short, if Trump gets into office again, RIP US government, RIP US democracy, and RIP climate.
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