To the BBQ readership,
this message came to my email this morning from “Project 2025 Take-Down.”
IF YOU HAVE NOT YET VOTED, PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU VOTE.
TRUMP’S HATE-FILLED RALLIES ARE PROJECT 2025 IN A NUTSHELL
The racist, misogynistic, anti-Black, anti-trans rhetoric will be the new normal if Trump Wins.
by TIFFANY TORRES WILLIAMS
NOV 4
I spent an entire dark and lonely weekend in April dedicated to nothing but reading Project 2025. I joke, but it’s not really a joke, that with the help of anti-anxiety meds and lots of long walks, I made it through the dystopian document.
Project 2025 is the conservative playbook dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation for the next Republican president. Though Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, it mentions him by name more than 240 times and references his administration more than 300. More than half of Trump’s allies, advisors, and administrators are among its 307 authors.
There is no way around it: Project 2025 is Trump’s plan for presidency if he prevails in tomorrow.
My methodology in reading and researching Project 2025 was simple: I used a notebook. Each page had a title: Women. Families. Workers. Unions. LGBTQ+. Racial Minorities. Educators. Academics. Climate. Every time I would come across one of those categories in the 920-page document, I wrote a quick summary of what it said and the page number where I could find it later to do more research.
I’m not saying all that work was for nigh, but I AM saying Donald Trump’s ties to Project 2025 are obvious — taking center stage at his rallies. Take his Madison Square Garden rally, where speakers disparaged everyone from women to trans Americans to racial minorities.
Trump and his surrogates are not just saying the quiet part out loud. They’re screaming it. Into microphones.
Here’s a sample of groups and American ideals Trump and his speakers are taking aim at that are also targeted in Project 2025:
IMMIGRANTS
Perhaps the most obvious link between Trump and Project 2025 (and Hitler) came from speaker Stephen Miller, who said “America is for Americans and Americans only”. Compare that to remarks made at a 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, when a speaker promised to “restore America to the true Americans”.
Miller, who runs America First Legal, contributed to the section of Project 2025 that speaks of weakening the system of checks and balances and rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants.
Trump’s opening act at Madison Square Garden was comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who continued to repeat Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets.” Schools in Springfield faced more than 30 bomb threats in the aftermath of Trump’s lie.
At every rally he’s hosted, Trump has bragged about “mass deportations at a level never before seen” and Project 2025 validates that terrifying future if he’s elected.
According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “Project 2025 calls for allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use ‘expedited removal’ — a process normally only used near the border, and one that raises significant concerns about due process — against immigrants found anywhere within the country. It would enable raids in sensitive zones like schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.”
Project 2025 dreams of militarizing our border, expanding immigration detention centers, criminalizing sanctuary cities, eliminating protection for dreamers or children whose parents crossed the border illegally who have been living in immigration limbo all of their lives, and forcing local law enforcement to work with federal officials to identify and deport people.
BLACK AMERICANS
Hinchcliffe also took aim at Black Americans, pointing to an audience member whom Hinchcliffe identified as Black and making fun of his hat. Then he pivoted, calling the man “one of [his] buddies. “We carved watermelon together,” he said, referencing a longstanding trope about the food Black Americans supposedly eat.
Project 2025 threatens civil rights gains for Black Americans. It will abolish affirmative action, weaken anti-discrimination laws, and dismantle the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It would remove health care protections, threatening to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and do away with social programs that benefit Black Americans and increase policing and remove civil protections. Black Americans are already disproportionately incarcerated. It even targets education that informs about the plight of slaves and the historical affect of racism.
LGBTQ+ Rights
During Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, Tucker Carlson took aim at trans people, claiming that the ability to transition genders was a “lie” perpetuated by Democrats.
Republicans have spent more money attacking trans Americans this election cycle than any other group, which is ironic considering that trans people make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. Trump’s campaign alone has spent more than $65 million on anti-trans ads. Not the economy. Not housing. Not lowering crime. Most of the ads end with saying, “Kamala is for they/them, but Trump is for you.”
He’s singling trans people out and endangering them. His presidency will be one where trans people cease to exist peacefully in all corners of the U.S. He is leveraging people’s hate to get more votes.
But if Trump gets his way, LGBTQ+ people will be threatened by more than Trump’s harmful rhetoric.
It would destroy non-traditional families like single-parent or same-sex households and prioritize families “comprised of a married mother, father, and their children.” It takes aim at federal policies that promote LGBTQ equality or that assist single parents. It wants to gut hard-fought protections for gay couples and eliminate the anti-discrimination laws that allow them to live in peace.
Trans people would be kicked out of the military, and calls trans human beings “ideology.” It also wants to criminalize pornography, and the document states that the federal government will define that however it wants. This is devastating not only for LGBTQ+ Americans, but also for teachers, librarians, school administrators, authors, artists, publishers, and parents.
The Media
Trump used a rally in Pennsylvania to wish it was members of the media who were shot instead of him.
“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don’t mind that so much,” he said, adding the press were “seriously corrupt people.”
Trump has always taken aim at reporters. Remember this moment this moment from a 2016 rally when he mocked a disabled reporter?
If members of the press weren’t in danger before, they certainly will be if Trump wins on Tuesday. Project 2025 argues that a new Trump Department of Justice should surveil journalists’ phones and emails to keep government officials from leaking information to the press. This happened during the last Trump administration when DOJ officials secretly seized the phone and email records of multiple journalists as they attempted to discredit the Russia investigation. Project 2025 wants the practice, which was banned under the Biden administration, to be even more vigorous the next time around.
The document even muses that reporters shouldn’t be allowed in the White House, complaining about the longstanding relationship between the president and the fourth branch.
“No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus, and the next Administration should reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.”
Project 2025 also calls for defunding public broadcasting and ending publicly supported educational media like Sesame Street.
WOMEN
Perhaps some of the most vile rhetoric at Trump’s rallies have been aimed at Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris calling her “the devil,” “the anti-Christ,” and claiming the person vying to become the first female president had begun her career as a prostitute.
But Trump’s threats have been toward women at-large in equal measure. He has said he will “protect women whether they like it or not.” I wrote for the Huffington Post about how the word “protector” is often used in evangelical culture to soften the patriarchal oppression that exists there.
As if we would EVER believe that the predator who infamously boasted to Billy Bush on “Access Hollywood” about forcefully groping and kissing unwilling women will protect us. Trump bragged to Howard Stern about strolling into Miss Teen USA dressing rooms to get a glimpse of the half-naked underage contestants. A jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, and another jury heard the testimony of Stormy Daniels, who said Trump cheated on his wife, Melania Trump, with her before covering up their affair with a $130,000 hush money payment.
We’ve seen enough of Trump’s history to know that he is no protector. And if it comes to pass, Project 2025 will mimic the sexism and discrimination that have marked Trump’s relationships with women.
Project 2025 will remove anti-discrimination laws that have helped women advance in the workplace. In fact, the document frequently demonstrates nostalgia for the halcyon days when women were barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen before the existence of no-fault divorce.
More dangerous still, the document states that Trump should force the FDA to declare abortion pills are unsafe. Medication abortion has been used safely for two decades and have been legal throughout Republican and Democratic presidencies. Medication abortion is the only way for many rural Americans to end a pregnancy.
Project 2025 will abolish abortion in the military for any reason, meaning women who are raped by male service members will have to give birth to their rapists’ babies.
Reproductive rights are under attack throughout Project 2025, which promises on page 6 that “the Dobbs decision was just the beginning.” So much for letting the states decide.
Fortunately, women are responding with the largest gender gap in voting history (or at least the last 100 years since women have had the right to vote). If recent polling in Iowa showing Harris with a 3-point lead over Trump is any indication, women will save this country from the devastation Project 2025 will cause.
The polling in Iowa looks good, but we don’t have a single laurel to rest on. This election is close enough to be decided by a few hundred votes. If you know someone in a swing state who is still undecided, please call them and warn them about the danger Project 2025 is to all of us.
Let’s wake up to a new dawn of U.S. democracy, one where we know that we brushed up against authoritarianism, and we prevailed.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!
