The Heritage Foundation and the men behind Project 2025 are certainly warming to the task of dismantling the American administrative state, exactly as they promised. A tracker is keeping tabs on progress and claims the Trump administration is nearly halfway to meeting all of the 317 goals set out in the ‘mandate for leadership’, with 1240 days to go before his term is supposed to end. A total of 116 have been completed, while another 63 are in progress. All six objectives for overseas aid have already been met 100% for example. Objectives for The White House are 92% complete.
Work on others, like ending research on foetal stem cells, hasn’t started yet, but no doubt the vaccine denier and head of Human Health, Robert F Kennedy Jr. will soon get around to it.
The America we knew is being broken up with noisy jackhammers and recast as a lawless, pariah state on a par with Soviet Russia. Indeed, one might imagine the old USSR as a template with a cabal of oligarchs making up the rules as they enrich themselves beyond their wildest dreams. Russia has never contributed anything to improving the planet and actively worked to undermine progress towards peace, more democracy, or even basic democratic accountability. The US is now doing the same.
Some things are almost laughably straight out of the Kremlin playbook. The latest appointment to the post of ensuring election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security is a woman who tried to overturn the 2020 result in Trump's favour! They are not going to relinquish power easily. He is marshalling the army and sending troops into Washington, DC, and other Democrat controlled cities on the pretext of restoring law and order, the catch-all reasoning of dictators down the ages.
What is surprising (to me at any rate) is how clear and specific they were about what they wanted to achieve. Trump, if you remember, said on his Truth Social platform during the campaign that he knew nothing about Project 2025, and he disagreed “with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
That was another lie, as we now know. He is indeed closing whole agencies, firing tens of thousands of federal employees, and replacing senior civil servants with his own sycophants and MAGA loyalists.
Bearing all this in mind, and referring to congressional leaders and others who are watching the disaster unfold in silence from the sidelines, someone recalled a quotation by Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1775. At the time, he was in Philadelphia as a delegate to the Continental Congress, where he helped draft the Declaration of Independence. Among his surviving texts is this quote: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
There are an awful lot of people who ought to know better than appease men like Trump, but instead are willing to forego their own power in order to placate the vindictive Trump, allowing him to trample over the Constitution that he was swearing to uphold just eight short months ago. These are mostly Republicans who are doing nothing to stop the carnage, but many Democrats are doing far too little to oppose him.
To reinforce the same message that appeasement doesn't work, Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard University has penned a piece for the online publication Foreign Affairs: Warnings From Weimar, Why Bargaining With Authoritarians Fails. It's well worth a read.
It's about men like Von Papen, Paul Hindenberg and others who helped Hitler into power in 1933 in the mistaken belief they could control him and the forces that he led and represented.
One, Ludwig Kaas, leader of Germany’s establishment Center Party, actually helped Hitler get the infamous Enabling Act through the Reichstag in 1933 when the Nazi's lacked the necessary two-thirds majority, telling colleagues: “We must preserve our soul, but a rejection of the Enabling Act will result in unpleasant consequences for our party.” The act passed, 444 to 94, opening the path to Hitler’s dictatorship. Kaas was a Catholic priest at the time.
Before that, in the mid-1920s, Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the mainstream right-wing German National People’s Party, helped Hitler to national prominence by giving him a platform to help his own campaign to get Germany’s obligation for paying World War I reparations overturned. He thought he could use Hitler.
By 1933, Hugenberg realised his mistake, reportedly telling a fellow conservative: “I have committed the greatest stupidity of my life; I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in human history.” It was by then far too late. Hugenberg had given Hitler what he needed most: respectability.
And this is the final paragraph of Ziblatt's article which hits the nail on the head for me:
"Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him.
"This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions. In the end, however, those who empower an autocrat often surrender not only their democracy but also the very influence they once hoped to preserve."
We have been warned.
