Project 2025: Revenge Fantasy Fulfillment
In 2023, I wrote that “Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy.” I wasn’t prophetic — I just read the source material where they tell you what they are going to do
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“Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy… It reads like a Soviet-era how-to manual on the total annihilation of the US government and any critics of the regime.”—Heidi Siegmund Cuda, December 16, 2023
In 2023, I reported that Donald Trump and the religious extremists he had aligned with created a blueprint for the total annihilation of democracy. The report was titled ‘A MAGA Hat and a Gun’ — Trump’s Violent Vision for 2025:
The title was taken from a quote written by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, which I cite in the article. I wrote how Project 25 “reads like a Soviet-era how-to manual on the total annihilation of the US government and any critics of the regime.” I noted how “Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy.”
I wasn’t prescient in any special way — I just read source documents.
I teased my report in Bette, and it eventually received two likes. At the time I posted it, I was under constant death threats, and I had turned off any ability to comment or like my posts.
My point in revisiting this today is despite Trump and his handlers telling you who they really are and what they really planned to do, Americans were distracted — unaware of the grave peril they would face if Donald Trump was reelected. The media dutifully parroted Trump’s lies that he knew nothing about Project 2025.
I am running my full report from 2023 today so we can see how the regime is checking off every box on its list of mass destruction of our institutions, freedoms, laws, and decency.
Here is my investigation:
'A MAGA Hat and a Gun' - Trump's Violent Vision for 2025
Heidi Siegmund Cuda investigates the hellscape Donald Trump and his network is proposing for America
DEC 16, 2023 Byline Supplement
On 25 March 2023, on the 30th anniversary of the Waco Siege, Donald Trump held his first campaign rally for the 2024 election.
The 1993 siege in Waco, Texas, occurred when federal agents raided a compound where a cult called the Branch Davidians had been compiling explosives and where children were routinely sexually abused. A 51-day siege at the Branch Davidians compound ended with a fiery inferno that killed 82 cult members and four ATF agents.
The siege inspired the modern militia movement, and Trump — being an experienced propagandist — walked onto the stage to the singing of the J6 Choir — prisoners arrested for their assault on the Capitol — while violent footage of that day played on a video screen.
An ABC reporter said he was so shocked, he called former Trump advisor Steve Bannon for comment and Bannon said, “We are the Trump Davidians.”
In other words, when people tell you who they really are, believe them.
“Since the Fascist years, authoritarians have used propaganda and their personality cults to change the perception of violence among their followers,” said scholar of Italian fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “Trump’s brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence. Trump's 2024 campaign is making that call to violence far more explicit.”
From the moment Trump came down the escalator, the brand was violent — he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue”, he said. In recent days, his words are more openly fascist — Trump said America’s outgoing top General Mark Milley “deserves execution”; he used the Nazi propaganda word “vermin” to reference his political opponents; and he declared on national television that he would be a dictator on “day one”. All this after leading a violent coup three years ago that many people seem to have forgotten about but for which he still has not been held to account. Despite 91 indictments, Trump remains free to parasitize his plans for 2025.
And it is prophesied in full color in Project 2025, a scorched earth hit-list of democratic institutions. Project 25 is a blueprint for Trump’s plans to finish the job he started when he began the attack on the US government from within.
Virgin’s Richard Branson once referred to Trump as the “revenge president”. Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy.
It reads like a Soviet-era how-to manual on the total annihilation of the US government and any critics of the regime.
Conceived by dark money think tanks led by the extremist think tank, the Heritage Foundation, the plan is nearly 1,000 pages and proposes a ‘unitary executive theory’ — neutering Congressional oversight and granting the executive branch almighty power.
Among the plan’s targets and objectives:
Dismantling the DOJ, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce
Giving the president complete authority over the Federal Communications Commission — the agency that governs radio, television, satellite, and cable in all 50 states, DC, and US territories (countries that do this are dictatorships)
Install “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices, while eliminating dissident bureaucrats
About 50,000 federal workers would be fired
Social media surveillance for hires
Eliminate three US Department of Energy offices
Shrink and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Outlaw “pornography”
Register teachers and librarians as sex offenders if they provide any sex education or non-approved material to children
Exclude critical race theory from all public schools
Exclude “gender ideology” from all public schools
Rule any affirmation of a trans child’s gender to be child abuse
Remove trans people from military
Destroy public sector unions
Demand loyalty to president by “flooding the zone with conservative hires”, according to Project 2025 director Paul Dans
And on and on it goes, a wishlist for the destruction of all things that make America, America. We were the country that fought for freedom from kings, we fought to end slavery, we fought the Nazis in World War II.
Silicon Valley technologist and co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast Joshua C. Fidel told Byline Supplement: “Project 2025 is nothing less than Trump’s Mein Kampf Volume 2. In it, he details his plan for the destruction of America. This is not rhetoric, this is not hyperbole. It is Trump’s step-by-step instruction manual for the murder of our country, its form of government, and its history. Understand this: Evil men will tell you what horrors they have planned, straight to your face, and normal people will disbelieve it, because they can’t fathom the audacity of monsters. It’s time America woke up to the threat on their doorstep.”
Atlantic reporter Tom Nichols wrote that if Trump emerges as president in 2024, “he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities.”
He said he “learned from the last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The President and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics.”
Investigative reporter John Mattes, who broke the Iran-Contra scandal as a young public defender in Miami, said the reason our democracy held on January 6 is because of the civil servants who took an oath to uphold the Constitution.
“When Reagan ran illegal operations, at least he hid them in the White House basement,” said Mattes, who is the subject of the new podcast Lawyers, Guns, and Money. “Trump wants to do the same, but will run them from the Oval office in plain sight.”
Despite the fear and loathing Trump is striking in the hearts of his critics and all who cherish democracy in America, Ukraine-based reporter Paul Niland encourages people to ask who is benefiting the most from Trump’s destructive plans.
“The fact that he is openly talking about taking revenge on his perceived enemies is in itself shocking… but quite apart from his domestic policy (if we can call it that) is the fact that Putin is rooting for his return to the White House, thinking that will help him to get away with what he has done to and in Ukraine. If Putin wants Trump for America, and Putin wants the destruction of America, the math isn't hard to do.”
Academic Brent Allpress, an open source intelligence researcher whose work on the impact of data mining of military personnel and churchgoers was featured in the documentary film People You May Know, and who gave testimony to the January 6 Committee, conducted an analysis of the leadership connections between Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation and the Council for National Policy (CNP). The CNP is a shadowy conservative organisation with multiple links to the Trump administration, fossil fuel interests, and anti-rights movements.
“Project 2025 is a CNP project,” Allpress told Byline Supplement. “A campaign is initiated at secret CNP meetings and one of the affiliated organisations is nominated to be the vehicle for the operation.”
Allpress said the CNP used the same tactics for the state level decertification operation in 2020, which was initiated at a CNP Action Inc session led by CNP Action Directors Ginni Thomas through Frontliners for Liberty, and Adam Brandon through his organisation Freedomworks. Executive members of the CNP signed a Conservative Action Project memo in December 2020 calling for states to appoint a fraudulent slate of electors.
“I uncovered an ominous CNP Action Meeting Session from November 2020 titled: Restoring Law & Order and Uniting the Country,” said Allpress, who is pushing to have the CNP forensically investigated for its role in J6. “We know from Washington Post reporting that Project 2025 includes a plan to invoke the Insurrection Act and effectively declare Martial Law. This is a seditious conspiracy to better plan and execute another coup attempt after decertification and the January 6 insurrection failed. Why? To put in place an authoritarian regime that will protect the long term interests of the extractive industries, obstruct climate action and maintain the oil, gas and coal carbon economy by force.”
Canadian academic and geopolitical analyst Dr Michael MacKay told Byline Supplement:
“Trump and the MAGA cult intend to end democracy and the American Republic as decisively as Hitler and the Brownshirts finished off democracy and the Weimar Republic.
“Backed by Russian active measures, Trump and his followers attempted a ‘burning of the Reichstag’ moment when they attacked the Capitol in the January 6 2021 insurrection. They were not as successful as Hitler and his followers were on 27 February 1933. But because the seditionists were never punished, anti-democracy and anti-rule-of-law forces have a strong chance of seizing power in the United States again. If that happens, it will be the end of the American Dream. The Spirit of '76 will be extinguished.”
To be sure, Project 2025 is a dire warning, but before we turn the lights out, it is important to remain clear-eyed and steadfast in defense of both democracy and reality. In my story for Byline Supplement — The Biggest Loser and Unstable Non-Genius — I used data to show that key Trump metrics are trending downward:
Democrats had key wins in 2018, 2020, and 2022.
In the 2022 midterms, his hand-picked Senate candidates lost in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, which trashed Republicans’ chances of retaking the Senate. His gubernatorial candidates in Pennsylvania and Arizona also lost. Trump-backed election deniers lost all the swing state secretary of state races.
In 2018, he led his party to a 42-seat loss in the House of Representatives.
And two years later – after a disastrous pandemic response – he lost to Joe Biden by more than 7 million popular votes, with five states he won in 2016 turning blue for Biden.
What Trump excels at is marketing, pageantry, pomp, smoke and mirrors — thumbs up photos with scantily clad women at his beach hotel Mar-a-Lago. A closer look reveals light fixtures askew, the kind of crumbling decay producers from “The Apprentice” noted at Trump Tower.
In a 2018 article for the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe wrote:
“The Apprentice portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. ‘Most of us knew he was a fake,’ (Apprentice editor) Jonathan Braun told me. ‘He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.’ Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, ‘We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.’”
With gag orders and legal woes at every turn, Trump is still using his marketing prowess to make America believe he’s great again. For him to admit to the reality of his situation, is for his base to see him for what and who he is — an emperor with no clothes, who wraps himself in the flag to sell a dark, ugly, and violent vision.
After a recent Trump photo op at a South Carolina gun shop to admire a ‘Trump 45’ Glock, Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote: “It was always going to come to this. A MAGA hat and a gun.”
As I review the reporting above — its mix of hard facts and the hope that remained we could still prevent the worst — it’s important to face what has already occurred in just the first 100 days of the regime.
Among the boxes checked:
Authors of Project 2025 have been given senior positions throughout the government, including the FCC and OMB ✅✅✅
Department of Education is being dismantled, higher education is under attack, with funding freezes; also funding freezes for Head Start and childcare, as well as cuts to food assistance programs ✅✅✅✅
Project 2025 promised an executive order to ban taxpayer funding for reproductive healthcare. ✅
Social Security and Medicaid is under siege, as drug prices go up ✅✅✅
This is obviously a short list, as we are witnessing attempts to delete all empathy, decency, and humanity from US shores, as well as any remnants from rule of law. Project 2025 promised to go after regime critics and Trump is delivering on that promise.
And as we just learned from our guest Russell Jones, a Byline columnist who explained how the National Health Services in the UK is also under siege, privatization kills.
This regime is comprised of murderers.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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