How Project 2025 Is Rewriting America - Phase II

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Before we dive into today's episode, I want to take a moment to talk about choices.

People organize themselves into societies, and those societies choose various ways to make decisions.

In America, we opted for a form of democracy, the ability to choose the leaders who decide for us, or sometimes to directly voice our opinions about how stuff happens.

Yet, despite 249 years of grueling practice, the right to vote remains under constant attack.

One of the most pernicious attacks is known as voter suppression.

That's when they create obstacles to a citizen's ability to register, cast a ballot, or have that ballot counted.

This battle for the soul of our democracy is so important to me that in 2018, I founded Fair Fight, an organization dedicated to combating voter suppression and protecting voting rights.

I launched Fairfight in part as a response to voting irregularities that impacted my own campaign for governor of Georgia.

But its mission is not about the outcome of any single election.

Look, no one has the right to win an election, but every eligible American should have the right to vote and have that vote count.

With that simple mission, Fair Fight has worked to stop the steady, methodical, cynical right-wing assaults on the bedrock of our shared values.

We work in communities, on campuses, and when necessary, we take our work to the courts.

Well, this month, Fairfight went back to court to challenge an insidious effort to intimidate Georgia voters, particularly black, brown, or first-time voters.

Their goal, well, to prevent them from casting a ballot.

And why does it matter?

Because Georgia has become the GOP lab for experiments in voter suppression.

What happens here definitely doesn't stay here.

And here's what happened.

Ahead of the January 2021 Senate runoff, a Texas-based right-wing organization called True the Vote orchestrated the largest known mass voter eligibility challenge in Georgia's history.

How'd they do it?

Well, True the Vote provided volunteers with lists of voters from the U.S.

Postal Service's National Change of Address database, folks they flagged as ineligible to vote.

Now, if you've ever changed apartments, you know how the system works.

Well, these anti-voter advocates use this database as evidence of ineligibility, even though the database can be outdated.

And despite the fact that people who file to change their address can still be properly registered to vote, True the vote used this sleazy, shady practice to file more than 250,000 formal challenges in 2021.

Voters received notifications questioning their right to vote based on a convenient system designed to forward their mail.

Imagine trying to cast a ballot and being pulled out of line because your right to vote has been challenged or seeing your name posted publicly online with with the accusation that you are ineligible to vote.

And just in case the humiliation didn't do the trick, True the Vote also announced it was recruiting former Navy SEALs to monitor polling places, and they even offered a $1 million bounty for reports of voter fraud.

Now, luckily, most of the accusations were dismissed by local officials here in Georgia, but the damage was done.

The sheer scale of these baseless challenges disrupted local elections, burdened underfunded officials, created rampant confusion, and intimidated voters who had done nothing wrong.

Then, in March of 2021, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a man who built his political career on being one of the nation's most effective architects of voter suppression, well, he opened the floodgates by signing SB 202 into law.

SB 202 allows unlimited voter challenges, which means that any person's voter registration can be challenged as ineligible by anyone at any time.

Look, voter suppression isn't new to America, or sadly, to Georgia.

Both parties have treated those they considered undesirable voters as somehow criminal for exercising this fundamental constitutional right.

Both parties have abused their power to block access to the polls or scare voters away at the moment their power is the greatest.

But right now, in this century, voter suppression is the strategy of choice for Republicans.

Brian Kemp and Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis and True the Vote are the ideological descendants of those who have long opposed voting rights for all citizens, regardless of race or gender.

And across the country and now in the halls of Congress, Republicans are passing laws designed to make it harder for people to vote precisely because they know that an engaged citizenry threatens their power.

They know that democracy must deliver for its people and that the list of obligations is made with the casting of that ballot and the accountability that follows.

In the fight against tyranny and autocracy, we cannot forget the basics, the ability to choose our leaders and pick our positions, to vote our values.

I am proud that Fairfight has returned to federal court, this time to oppose coordinated mass voter challenges and end the ability of bad, cowardly actors to use this tactic to intimidate and overwhelm voters.

And while Fairfight awaits a decision on the case, there are going to be those who point out that we may not win.

So why bother?

Well, I'm here to remind us of the obligation to fight anyway, because fairness demands it.

And now, on to the subject of today's episode.

In the lead up to last year's presidential election, warnings about Project 2025 were everywhere, on TikTok, during political rallies, and in the news.

Voices across the political and ideological spectrum sound as the alarm about a radical, detailed, and sweeping 900-plus page blueprint for implementation during Donald Trump's second term.

This map of mayhem promised to remake the United States into a Christian nationalist nation, ruled by a theocracy and suborned by billionaires and tech moguls who could pick their deity.

Fully implemented, Project 2025 will strip Americans of their bodily autonomy, endanger and dehumanize immigrants, erase history and DEI, and take a sledgehammer to the government programs we rely on, thereby plunging Americans into a complicit stupor.

In fact, at the BET Awards, Taraji P.

Henson even paused her monologue to deliver a stark warning, quote, the Project 2025 plan is not a game.

Look it up.

Well, just four months into Trump's second term, Republicans have already delivered on too many of Project 2025's promises.

But what we've seen is only the beginning.

As we grapple with what they've already broken, we have to get ready for what's next on the agenda.

And more importantly, we have to know so we can stop their march to destroy America.

To understand what's to come and how we prepare, this week's guest is a Project 2025 expert, Atlantic staff writer David A.

Graham.

His new book, The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America, is available wherever books are sold.

David Graham, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Okay, so in grad school, during the 1996 presidential campaign, I first read the Mandate for Leadership.

It was this quadroneal manifesto that was published by the Heritage Foundation that one of my professors recommended I read.

I was getting my master's in public policy, so it seemed like maybe I should listen.

And I read it.

I was a little terrified, but it was like, okay, interesting.

Well, fast forward to 2025, and a lot of people have probably heard the name Project 2025, and they know that it has had incredibly harmful consequences, but they may not be clear on its origin story and what it actually involves.

So based on what I just told you about 1996, can you tell folks about how the Mandate for Leadership is connected to Project 2025?

Can you describe its origins, authors, and what it's trying to get done?

Yeah, definitely.

Let's start with the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank, sort of social conservative think tank that dates back to the early 70s.

And they were pretty small throughout the 70s.

And then in the lead up to the 1980 election, they produced this document called Mandate for Leadership.

And the idea was to sort of provide a blueprint for the Reagan administration that would be not what they thought of as the same old republicanism.

You know, they were sick of the Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, sort of what they saw as moderation.

And so they put together this very detailed document, and it became really influential for the Reagan administration.

By Heritage's count, the Reagan administration did 60% of the things in there in the first year alone.

And it kind of made Heritage's name and made them a player in right-wing circles in Washington.

So fast forward to the present day or to 2022, actually.

And they put out these reports basically every four years.

Not every cycle, but most cycles since then.

But heritage wasn't quite the same force as it had been.

And the think tank decided they wanted to sort of get back in the game.

And so they gathered a bunch of right-wing thinkers,

including a bunch of alums of the first Trump administration, to put together a plan for the next conservative president, whether that was Trump or somebody else, so they could be ready on day one with both a bunch of policies and then also a lot of ways to achieve them and the personnel they needed to make those things happen.

So when you think about

the core mission of Project 2025, what are the four core goals and

how

notably have they started implementation in this first four months?

Yeah, they lay out four goals.

And one of them is to restore the family as the center of American life.

One is to dismantle the administrative state, so basically to take on the civil service.

One is to protect America's bounty and borders and

money, they say.

And then the fourth one is to restore the blessings of liberty.

So as you can tell, those are both a little bit vague and also kind of, you know, couched in their kind of jargon.

I see it as kind of a two-step process.

The first thing is they want to take over the executive branch.

They want to seize a ton of power for the president that the president hasn't historically had.

And they want to take power from Congress in particular.

And they want to do all these things then to implement this vision of society they have.

And that's when they talk about putting the family at the center.

They have this very traditional conception of families with men who are breadwinners and women who are at home, children who fit gender norms.

And they want this biblically based idea of the family to be how America operates.

And so that's what they're aiming for.

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What made you take on the analysis and this deep dive into Project 2025 as your mission?

When I first read it, I guess I first encountered it in 2023 and then started reading it in 2024 during the campaign.

And I actually didn't read it cover to cover then.

And, you know, these documents, as you were saying, they're around and I sort of think of them as a common thing.

And they're like basically wish lists.

Some of those things are going to happen, but a lot of them aren't.

And so I didn't take it all that seriously.

I read the bits and pieces that applied to particular policy areas that I was thinking about.

And it was only after the election that I read it.

cover to cover.

And that's when I started to grasp what a complete program it was and how integrated it was and how they had something different in the sort of methods they were laying out.

And that made me think that it was something that maybe other people hadn't understood either and that they needed to grasp to sort of see where things are going and maybe get a little bit of mooring in the crazy first few months of the Trump administration.

So, you know, we've seen the outcome of the

slash and burn, the takeover of small agencies, the physical occupation of certain agencies in this country.

We've seen how this document has been a blueprint.

Can you talk about the ways that Project 2025 itself has been able to leverage legal methods to reshape how we understand America?

Yeah, I think they're really clever about this.

And it's, you know, the people who wrote this document are folks who have spent a lot of time in government and have thought a lot about it and sort of how to attack it from the inside.

So, you know, they have this sense of how to use the laws and how to attack what's there.

I think a great example of this is the attack on independent agencies, you know, things like the FCC, the FCT, the FEC.

And these are all, you know, they're established with leaders who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

And they're established to sort of operate independently, although within the executive branch.

And that goes back to 1935, when Franklin Roosevelt attempted to fire leaders of these agencies or of the FTC in that case.

And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that.

These are independent.

And what they want to do is get the Supreme Court to overturn that.

And so they have been, they're trying to get basically a test case there.

It's the same thing with impoundment.

They want to keep, you know, they believe that Congress can set a ceiling for what the president spends, but that the president doesn't have to spend all of it.

And they want to get a test case to Congress to overturn the 1974 law that prevents that.

So there's a real like

sense.

They believe that the Constitution, the Constitution is on their side even when the law isn't.

And they're looking to challenge that everywhere they can.

Okay, I love the framing you just said.

They believe the Constitution is on their side even if the law isn't.

Can you talk about how that reconciles with what we've long believed in as sort of small D democratic principles of America?

Yeah, I mean, they claim, and this is another example of sort of the interesting ways they approach this, and

it's a little bit chilling.

They think that what they're doing is more small D democratic.

You know, they look at this and they say, well, the president is elected.

Why are there these bureaucrats in the executive branch who the president can't fire at will why can't the president fire the head of an independent agency um and i think it's a it is an attack on checks and balances i mean the the center of the democratic system in this country as i understand it is that there are checks and balances and that no one branch has unfettered power it's not enough to simply say that they can be you know a president can be turned out of office after four years.

You need to have other branches that check them.

And what they're doing is systematically taking taking this power away from Congress and to some extent away from the courts as well and giving it to the president.

I mean, I served in the state legislature.

I know people in Congress.

And one

issue that is baffling to me is that I've never known elected leaders to so aggressively concede their power to something else and to someone else.

Can you talk about how Project 2025 and its progenitors, how they

have helped engineer the sort of unilateral surrender of Congress to this worldview.

It's really remarkable.

And they say that this is a plan for any Republican president or any conservative president, but it's just hard for me to imagine that any other Republican could have had the kind of success with it that Trump has simply because no other president has managed to cow Congress as fully as Trump has.

You know, you've got these Republicans who are simply afraid to contradict him on anything.

And it's interesting because one of the critiques they lay out in Project 2025 is that Congress, they think, has been, has given up too much power.

So they say, you know, Congress can't pass, hasn't patched a budget for years.

It's giving up

the power to declare war to the White House, all these things.

But instead of saying, so how can we re-empower Congress?

They say, great, how can we then empower the executive branch more?

How can we grab more things for that?

And I maybe naively thought that Republicans in Congress would be a little bit more zealous in defending their own power, but instead they have simply gone along with it all.

And I mean, I think the one example that cuts against this is that it underscores just like how

much power they have that they're refusing to use, which is in the first couple of weeks of the administration, Russell Vota attempted to impound funds from Congress, blocked executive branch agencies from spending money.

And just a small handful of Republican senators spoke up and said, hey, wait a second, that money is allocated to our states.

You can't do that.

And the White House promptly folded.

So the moment they do speak up, they have a lot of power, but they're clearly afraid to do that.

And I also think it serves a purpose for them where they want to cut spending, but they are afraid to take tough votes to do it.

They want to cut social services, but they're afraid to take tough votes to do it.

So they're happy to let Trump do the things that they would like to do, but just don't have the courage to do.

So one of the ways I've watched Project 2025 explode is the

surging notion of this Christian nationalist nation as a given.

And

as you explore, you know, one of its core goals is promoting heterosexual marriage where men and women fulfill what the authors would like to dictate as biologically predetermined roles, where the man is the provider and the woman is the at-home caregiver to a large family.

And that's given rise to pronatalism.

It's given rise to the new commission that the president has convened on religious liberty.

You just have so many manifestations.

And we even saw that Roger Sorvino, a former HHS and Justice Department official and the author of Project 2025's chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote that government should support organizations that promote, quote, biblically based social science reinforced definitions of marriage and family.

Can you talk a bit about why this is their first goal and why it is central to their practical outcome?

I think for them, it is the most important thing.

And, you know, they are people who work in politics and have political means, but what they're really aiming for is this vision of society.

So, Russell Vogt, who is the head of the Office of Management and Budget now and is kind of the intellectual architect of this,

you know, he says, I'm a Christian nationalist.

Sure, like the left likes to use these labels and sometimes they're not fair, but I think that's right.

I'm a Christian and I'm a nationalist.

And they feel that the America that they know and love is being taken away from them.

And, you know, they speak in these really apocalyptic terms.

They talk about, you know, we're in the late stages of a Marxist takeover.

And so all of these things, I think they see the way as fixing it is to.

go back to some sort of imagined past.

It's sort of like the 50s, although with much lower taxes.

And it's a weird vision, but it's where they want to go.

And so, you know, they think that if they can use the, they want to use the government for all these things to get these things done.

We've seen conservatives, obviously, who feel strongly about the family and feel strongly about these sorts of, you know, traditional gender roles for a long time.

What I don't think we've seen is a right that is quite so willing to use the power of government this way.

I mean, it's like a big government sort of conservatism, or not even conservatism, but a big government right-wing vision.

And they want to use the government to push these things and to make them happen.

And so that means using every department of the government, you know, the labor department, the education department, although they also want to abolish it, the Department of Health and Human Services, all of them to make sure that, for example, if you're receiving welfare programs or other assistance, it's coming through faith-based organizations or you're getting tutoring on this biblical-based vision of the family.

If you're getting housing assistance, it's going to come through the same thing.

Obviously, they want to ban abortion.

That's an important part of it.

And they want to put religion at the center of so many things in American life.

They don't.

limit things explicitly to Christian religion, but most of it is built around that idea.

It's a sort of, they're willing to tolerate other religions, but they really, you know, they are very Christian and it's what they believe in most of all.

So, I'm going to take two pieces that you've raised, and we're going to start with

the Office of Management and Budget.

You mentioned Russell Bog,

who is the chief implementer of this.

And, you know, as a grad student, I actually interned for OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, and it is one of the most powerful agencies that very few people have ever heard of.

So, can you talk a little bit about what OMB does and why controlling it is so essential to Project 2025's success?

It is so easy to miss.

And a lot of it is in that name.

They manage and they deal with the budget.

And it's traditionally the people who run OMB are some of the smartest people who work in the government.

But they're usually not flashy ones and they're usually not ideologues.

They're people who are just really, really good at understanding how government works.

And in some ways, Russell Vogt is like that.

I mean, he spent a ton of time in government and he understands it very well, but he has this very ideological vision.

He describes it as like being the air traffic control center for the government.

So they deal with personnel in the executive branch.

They put forth the annual budget policy.

They push policies and guidance to agencies.

And his view is that in the past, OMB has been too much a conduit from departments up to the White House.

So, you know, cabinet agencies send what they want to the White House and the White House kind of convenes it all.

And he says, no, we should be using this to push the president's priorities.

So we should be pushing things down to all of them.

And we've seen that in the first few months of the the Trump administration, just a flurry of guidance and memos coming from OMB to departments telling them what to do.

So that he is, in a lot of ways, running the federal government from OMB.

So David, over the weekend, and we're recording this on Monday, the New York Times had a fascinating and disturbing probe into the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther, which is ostensibly designed to suppress pro-Palestinian protest and what it classifies as anti-Semitism.

Yet it has been criticized for incorporating anti-Semitic tropes into its rhetoric and for not really being about protecting Jewish communities at all.

How does this project align with or dovetail with Project 2025's goals?

And how do you think about this combination?

I did read that.

I thought it was a really useful look at another one of these.

And I think it shows both of these, both Project Esther and Project 2025, show how

people at the Heritage Foundation are thinking really carefully about how to implement these things.

They're thinking way ahead, not just about what to do, but how to do it.

Another thing that stuck at me from that story was the fact that most of the people involved in that, even though they're using anti-Semitism or accusations of anti-Semitism as the basis,

are not Jewish.

It's not about that.

It's more about culture war and it's about seizing power.

So they see places where they can seize power and where they can

work to attack dissent from the left, where they can attack institutions like universities that become centers for dissent and systematically undermine them.

And I think that is a big point of connection between both Project Esther and Project 2025.

You point out very effectively in your book just how

carefully Project 2025 has taken what we see as our protection, which is the Constitution, and they are using that very Constitution to strip Americans of their power, of their agency.

And, you know, on his first day in office, Republicans led by Trump attempted to end birthright citizenship, which is a right guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.

They're still pressing that issue in the Supreme Court.

There is Steve Bannon on every show that will take him talking about how Trump can run for a third term, directly contradicting the 22nd Amendment.

There is through Project Esther an evisceration now of the First Amendment, most of the pieces of it.

And so, talk a bit about how you see their reconciliation of this contradiction and how the American people are either being taken in or need to resist and respond.

I think that

they believe that these things are necessary to save the America they want.

And so, you have Russell Vogt talking in another forum about how we're living in a post-constitutional moment.

And then he said, again, after Trump was convicted of those multiple felonies, don't tell me the Constitution is in force.

And so they've convinced themselves that because of some sort of threat that they see, they can circumvent

these protections, that

there's something more important than the Constitution.

And I think that's a vision that is chilling to a lot of people.

I think they also understand that what they're doing is not necessarily popular.

When

in the summer of 2024, when people started hearing about Project 2025, Heritage did a poll and they found something like 17% favorability in battleground states.

We've seen that again.

People simply don't like these things.

And

when they put together their report, they said, you know, we need to get as much as we can done in the first hundred days,

in the first two years before the midterms, in these four years, because they know that there's going to be backlash.

There's going to be people pushing back.

People are going to react poorly to this and they want to sort of move the baseline.

And so they know they're not going going to get all of it, but they want to move as far as they can.

And I think they're thinking on a really long time scale.

So for them, Trump is a really important vessel, but they're thinking well past Trump to changing society permanently.

Well, I want to put an even finer point on it.

We know in 17 years, the United States is projected to be a majority, minority nation where no racial group holds 50% plus one in the population count.

And while we've been discussing Christian nationalism as core to Project 2025, I think it's important that we recognize recognize that this is being spearheaded by white Christian nationalists in particular,

and that they had quite a lot to say in the Project 2025 about our nation's racial makeup and about dismantling racial equality.

And you've got the attacks on DEI, the assault on the U.S.

Census in 2030, which is the last one before this racial tipping point.

Can you talk about how Project 2025 should shape how we understand not just what's to come from this administration, but from a Republican Party that is suborning this behavior.

Aaron Ross Powell, there's this fear of wokeness, which they don't really define, and DEI that goes throughout

the whole report.

It sort of permeates everything.

And then we see a bunch of manifestations.

So, on the one hand, they do want to dismantle DEI programs at the base level that we've seen these sort of orders.

But I think that is very much just kind of the tip of the spear.

So, there is, as you say, they want to take over, make the census much more politicized so they can get the count they want for 2030.

They want not only to deport undocumented immigrants, but they want to slash legal immigration as much as they can.

So to maintain things sort of with the same racial makeup and sort of build a wall around the country.

And then once they've dismantled the sort of first level of DEI programs, there's so many other things that they want to do to cut back on the civil rights movement.

So it's everything from taking, for example, taking the voting rights section at the Department of Justice, which has historically gone after voter suppression cases under the Voting Rights Act, and use it instead to prosecute bogus claims of voter fraud that Trump has pushed.

They want to take the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and reorient its work towards, for example, anti-Christian discrimination in the workplace, not towards traditional gender discrimination and race discrimination.

So they want to sort of subvert the very bodies that have been created to keep the gains of the civil rights movement in place and use them, in fact, to their ends, which is a I mean it's not just demolishing them but in fact turning them around

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Well, we know another part of the project, and to your point about this long-term vision of America, is that if you're going back to 1950 that predates Medicaid.

It predates Medicare.

It predates many of the advancements that we've made as a country in providing access to social services.

And now we're watching Republicans propose these massive cuts and these significant changes through the current budget and tax package that's working its way through Congress.

The bill is going to propose Medicaid cuts that will lead to at least 8 million people losing their coverage, possibly more.

Millions more who will have to pay a lot more for their health care.

It also includes a massive cut to food assistance, which services so many children in this country.

It repeals most of the clean energy tax credits.

And across the board, it attempts to roll back anything that goes to

Americans who need help.

Can you talk about how Project 2025 perceives these communities and how they are influencing this budget and tax bill.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: There's this weird contradiction because, on the one hand, there are places where you can see they're trying to grapple with the kind of somewhat more populist rhetoric that we've heard from Trump or from J.D.

Vance or from Josh Hawley.

So, there's like this fitful attempt to deal with a more worker-friendly workplace.

But then, in other places, they simply want to dismantle anything.

So, they have gone through all these places, and they, you know, I think you can look back through history.

There's animosity towards the Inflation Reduction Act and things Joe Biden did.

There's animosity towards the Affordable Care Act, although they understand that they can't simply repeal that for political reasons.

There's animosity towards programs that Bill Clinton did.

There's animosity towards the Great Society programs.

There's animosity towards the programs from the New Deal.

It goes all the way back.

I mean, there's even an attempt to get rid of the civil service, as we know, which dates back to the 1880s.

They want to reduce Medicaid by cutting what states get.

They want more work requirements on anything.

I mean, there's very much a sense that people who are getting a lot of these benefits are takers, and they want to either

move them off the government payrolls and either have people provided for by

faith-based organizations or simply to sort of fend for themselves.

And I think that's

a real continuity with the right previously.

We're seeing the same things that a lot of conservative think tanks have advocated for on these for a very long time.

But I think they're more important to push them right now than they have been in the past.

Is it overstating to say that Project 2025 wants America to become a Christian theocracy?

I think they might dispute theocracy.

I think that's a, you know,

I struggle with it.

It feels, I mean, there's so many times when I think about things that are in here and I describe what's in Project 2025 and I think that I sound alarmist to myself.

And then I remember, no, I have read this all and I have, I know it's in here.

I spent a lot of time studying this.

I think that it's, I think that's probably a fair description.

I mean,

they want this to be a Christian nation.

They want Christian values to permeate the government and to permeate policy.

I'm not sure how else we would describe that.

Well, I raise that because what's in this legislative package that's moving,

it's not just this codification of how little they respect those who need access to the social service system.

It also revives HB 4945, which would designate nonprofit organizations that oppose certain Republican orthodoxies.

It would designate them as terrorist organizations.

It would impose an excise tax on foundations that donate their resources to support charitable outreach, but wouldn't impose the same tax on megachurches.

Can you talk a little bit about, if this is a theocracy in training, why this bill that is moving is key to Project 2025's ultimate agenda?

This is an example of how they have thought hard about about where the government can be marshaled to their purposes.

So, the things you're citing there are great examples.

You want to empower these faith-based organizations.

You want to empower big churches.

You want to give them a bigger role in the government.

But you want to make sure that other organizations that might be similar

or that might do similar things don't have the same benefits.

You want to crack down on areas of resistance.

So, for example, if that's nonprofits that

advocate for progressive causes, or if it's universities, for example, you know, endowment taxes being a big part of this.

You're using all these powers to selectively go after the people who are not on your side and to lift up the people who are on your side.

And that helps create

a broader society that supports the kind of theocratic goal you're going for.

So we recently had Rachel Maddow here, and she talked about the second 100 days.

And you too in your book very, very thoughtfully remind us that we've only seen 100 days of this and that they have a very real intention to get as much done as possible before the midterms.

So I want to use the balance of our conversation to talk about what should Americans be paying the most attention to as Project 2025 continues to unfold.

I think it gets a little bit more complicated from here because so much of the first 100 days has been a little bit more, I mean, it's hard to track, but it's been a little bit more focused.

There have been the executive orders we've seen, which go on a lot of things, and there's been this assault on the bureaucracy, laying off civil servants, trying to convert them to political appointees, trying to close departments, trying to close agencies like USAID.

These things are all,

you know, they're spread across a lot of agencies, but we can see what they're doing.

They're trying to slash the federal government.

And in the meantime, they are getting their appointees into other parts of the government.

Trump is, you know, appointing new people to these jobs all the time.

And many of them are coming through this program, this database that Project 2025 created of identifying and training people who could work in the administration.

Once they get into departments, they're going to start trying to move the policies that Trump wants there.

And there are just so many of these things.

They have a plan for every department.

They're often fairly detailed.

And so it's everything from dismantling every environmental regulation practically you can think of.

It is pushing abortion restrictions.

It is changing regulation through these independent agencies.

So we're going to have to to keep our eye on a lot of balls because they're going to be doing these things that require staffing and they're finally getting that.

And so that's what I'm looking for next.

What can we do?

How can we respond?

How do we prepare?

Please save us.

I struggle with that.

I feel like I've spent so much time thinking about the way it works that I haven't necessarily spent as much time yet thinking about what happens next.

I do think the first thing is to understand what will happen.

And I think

people who oppose a lot of these things have been caught off guard a lot, understandably, partly by the pace.

But I think it's helpful to read the plan.

They gave us their playbook, and now we need to read it and understand where they're going.

You know, I think we've seen that popular will does matter.

Doge has become another vessel for Project 2025.

They sort of pointed Elon Musk in the direction they wanted, and we saw that became incredibly unpopular.

And now Musk seems to be on the outs, and Doge seems to be slowing down a little bit, although certainly not entirely.

So keeping attention to these things and speaking up about them, I think is really important.

We've seen that the courts are really important.

You know, Congress has not had a lot of sway, but courts have finally started to stop Trump when these things come through.

And so paying attention to the courts and helping to defend the rule of law and defend the importance of the courts, I think, is really important.

And then the third thing I say is, you know, building ahead.

It's important to keep track of what's going on.

Some of these things can be reversed if they're through executive orders.

But I think that

there's going to be permanent changes to the way the government works.

And so what I think that people who oppose Trump need to do is think about what their vision is and start planning in some of the same ways.

How can we empower Congress?

How can we think not just about what we want, but how we're going to achieve it?

And what is the vision of government that we want going forward?

It probably won't be what we had in 2021 or in 2015.

It's going to need to be something new.

And so, I think creating that positive vision is a really important thing now.

Well, David, I think you have your new book.

Once this one goes into paperback, you should be writing the next one.

But until then, thank you, David Graham, author of The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America.

Thanks for being here, and thanks for scaring us and giving us a little bit of hope on what to do next.

Thank you.

Project 2025 isn't simply a blueprint for those who would destroy the America we love.

It's also a roadmap that lets us prepare ourselves for what's to come.

By understanding their goals, which they've laid out, we can leverage our local governments, our civic organizations, and ourselves to push back.

They don't have the element of surprise, just the illusion that they have more power than we do.

So this week's toolkit is simple.

Be curious about Project 2025, starting with David's book.

Share this episode widely with your resistance community and don't respond with fear and hopelessness.

As Representative Diapaul said last week, hopelessness is the tool of the oppressor.

This knowledge is in fact our power.

So let's use it.

And now we're going to take some listener questions and feedback.

Here to help me with that is our producer, Farah Safari.

Hi, Stacey.

Glad to be back.

Glad to have you.

Thanks for taking the time.

Of course.

Well, I wanted to start by saying that listeners really responded to the episode that you did with Rachel Maddow.

People especially love the section where you and Rachel talked about Social Security being in trouble and being at risk.

A few of our listeners have really been thinking about their retirement and their access to their Social Security benefits for themselves, their family members, and other loved ones.

And your conversation shined a much needed light to this issue.

Through reading these comments, there were a lot of questions about what can we do to stand up for Social Security and support our loved ones and neighbors who are afraid of losing it.

Fair, thank you so much for the question.

And thank you to all of the listeners who wrote in or called in.

So let's start with just knowing about Social Security.

There is a website, it's ssa.gov, and I've been there before because I have two elderly parents.

You can go to that website and make certain that anyone who's eligible for social security in your life has a login ID.

That's incredibly important because what you can see is how much you're entitled to, what information they're missing for you, and it gives you a pretty good record right now of what you should be able to expect.

And for a lot of our elderly citizens, they don't quite know how to navigate it.

So make sure you're offering to help.

So the first thing is know what you need to know.

The second is that we have neighbors who don't necessarily understand what's happening in the political space.

And now isn't the time to scare them, but it is time to inform them.

The thing that terrifies politicians most is when people show up and say, I'm holding you accountable.

And when I say terrify, A lot of politicians want to hear from you.

A lot of your elected officials want to hear.

But the ones who are more likely to do things things you don't want to do are the ones who want you to stay quiet.

So we've got to show up.

And that doesn't just mean calling Congress and the House and the Senate.

We should do that.

But it's also about talking to your city council members, your county commissioners, talk to your mayor.

Make sure you're talking to your state representatives because they can also reach out to your congressmen, your congresswoman.

They can reach out to your senators.

Every layer of government is responsible for supporting our loved ones and our neighbors.

And every single elected official should think that it's their job to protect Social Security.

And then at the most basic, show up.

Make sure you reach out and call someone who is afraid and just check in on them.

Make sure that if somebody is struggling with food, you know where the local food bank is.

Make certain if they need access to transportation, which may be cut, that you're thinking about how can you help move them around.

We have to remember that before we had Social Security, before we had power, we had each other.

And that's how we get through this by remembering we have each other.

We deserve the rest of it, but we can never forget what we've already got.

I think that was so beautiful.

And something I've been reflecting on a lot during this time is like how much we need community and support during this time, in this era.

So I really love the last part of your answer where it's just like rely on each other and other people.

Thank you.

So this week's listener question comes from Tanya Lee Hawk, who is a participant in your recommended reading series, and they're thrilled to be reading On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder and has been incredibly inspired by the book.

So Tanya Lee says, I'm fascinated by language and how it impacts society at large.

So I'm curious why we continue to refer to it as presidential power instead of presidential leadership.

It certainly would take some of the wind out of Trump's sails and others.

It could reset expectations for the position more clearly.

I don't think there's anything wrong with shifting the language from presidential power to presidential leadership, but the real issue is presidential.

Whether we call it power or leadership, it's who is wielding the power, who is creating the leadership that we've got to be most concerned about.

And so I think that our responsibility is to remind people of what is at stake and that the people were the ones who gave this power and this leadership to this person.

Part of the the way we shape language is by using the words that can deflate, but also using the words that can remind us of where we stand in the order condescende, in the order of power.

And in this case, we have the responsibility to tell folks who didn't show up and vote that this is what happens, not in a way that harangues them or says you're responsible for this, but in a way that says we get to pick.

We get to decide who is our leader.

We get to decide who holds this power.

And it's by voting in the presidency.

It's by voting for those who hold these levers.

And so I think that the shift from power to leadership is a good one.

I think a stronger one is the reminder that the presidency is a gift given by the people through an election.

And we have to remember that it is our power and our leadership that changes the future.

Thank you so much, Stacey.

That's it for this segment.

Thank you, Farah.

I appreciate you bringing these questions.

And thank you to everyone who took time to write in, call in, or to leave a comment.

We'd love to hear it.

If you've learned something from this episode of Assembly Required or previous podcast, tell a friend and share your favorite episode.

And wherever you go to find us, make sure you like and subscribe.

In an age of algorithms, your voice helps others make their way to our feed.

And if you like what you hear, rate the show and leave a comment.

And please continue to tell us what you've learned and solved or want to hear about next.

You can send an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail, and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

Well, that wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts, and our associate producer is Farah Safari.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroat, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Muntha for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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