July 30, 2025
On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.
“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.
When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.
So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”
And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.
From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.
It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.
But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.
The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.
Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission's approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.
Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”
On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”
The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.
Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”
EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.
As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”
Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”
But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.
Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Today Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”
Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. Tomorrow, the day before the August 1 deadline on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.
When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then.
And now the growing scandal around President Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.
Yesterday Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Guiffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. Today, a reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for?”
Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report on the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.
And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foundation-2025-policy-america.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/here-we-are-2
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/us/politics/generals-trump.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/28/trump-federal-employees-preach-faith-work-00480696
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5479240/columbia-trump-administration-settlement-details
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/business/media/fcc-skydance-merger-paramount.html
https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/supreme-court-puts-humphreys-executor-on-death-bed/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/climate/epa-endangerment-finding-rescind.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/27/politics/justice-department-official-second-whistleblower
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-emil-bove/
https://thehill.com/newsletters/the-gavel/5426300-trumps-tariffs-back-in-court/
https://www.wired.com/story/the-fbis-jeffrey-epstein-prison-video-had-nearly-3-minutes-cut-out/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvn7ee3539o
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/29/trump-epstein-virginia-giuffre-mar-a-lago-spa/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-jail-video-investigation/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/26/doge-ai-tool-cut-regulations-trump/
https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/who-we-are/history
Bluesky:
This is the darkest essay from HCR I've read, and that's saying volumes. But we have to acknowledge the darkness before we can respond effectively. Thank you, Prof. Richardson, for shining a light into these dark corners so the world can see.
Now is our moment—take action against this harmful government. Covering up a pedophile ring. Ignoring court orders. Blatant corruption. The poor, the needy, and children are being abused—by our government. In the streets we must protest outright crooks and the pedophiles until after their shooting us starts, until we go down or we oust tyrants. I made 54 protest signs, and will make many more to share. You will see something different in these signs! Help yourself to this second batch, and share them as far as you can.
https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/more-free-protest-signs?r=3m1bs