Project 2025 Is an Heir to Project 1925

Almost everyone hated Project 2025 before the election, so Trump lied about it.

Illustration by Abdelafatah Mukhtar

Is it mere coincidence that the master plan to destroy the American Republic, freedom, and democracy and establish a dictatorship is titled Project 2025, the year that is the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Volume One of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his master plan to establish his dictatorship over Germany? Or is it meant to celebrate that anniversary?

The ideology of authoritarianism and the techniques to dupe people into it has many forefathers. For Donald Trump, the source, at least in terms of direct influence, appears to be almost entirely Adolf Hitler.

Die große Lüge

… the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)

In 1989, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, told her lawyer that her husband kept a book of Hitler’s speeches, My New Order, in a cabinet by his bed and read from it “from time to time.” Trump confirmed that he had a copy of the book of speeches. He has often said that he never read Mein Kampf, which is likely true if it is taken to mean read the whole book, which runs to over 700 pages. He hardly ever reads anything, particularly books, and most especially long books.

That, however, does not mean that he did not absorb Hitler’s insights on how to lie effectively and fool the public. Trump has obviously internalized the above excerpt from Mein Kampf explaining the “Big Lie.” Read it again. It explains almost everything about Trump’s tactics and his contemptuous view of those who follow him. His infamous 2016 comment, “I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter” is rooted in his confidence that Hitler’s strategy works.

The Big Lie that Concentrating All Authority in One Man Is ‘Conservative’

Project 2025 is the braindead child of Russell Vought, who pronounces his surname “Vote.” That seems pretty Hitlerian itself for a man who is fully committed to stopping people from voting. A profile of Vought in the New York Times last Monday says “he had laid out steps to achieve the long-sought conservative goal of a president with dramatically expanded authority ….”

It is very much worth noting that calling a plan to concentrate power in the one man “conservative” is an unnoticed instance of the Big Lie, in this case long routinely joined in by almost all the mainstream media.

This Big Lie makes evil, anti-American people and ideas sound mainstream, doing even more harm than most of the other Big Lies by the radical right.

Almost everyone hated Project 2025 before the election, so Trump lied about it.

A poll taken about six weeks before the 2024 election found that among voters who were aware of Project 2025, only 4 percent said they liked it and 1 percent were “strongly positive” about it. . Even among self-identified MAGA voters, only 9 percent liked Project 2025. “It was the least popular of all the subjects tested” in the September 2024 poll.

Socialism, at 18 percent positive, was four-and-a-half times more popular than Project 2025.

Given such disapproval, Trump simply employed the Big Lie, claiming in July 2024 on “Truth Social” (itself a prime example the Hitlerian tactic of calling things the opposite of what they are; Trump’s social media platform would accurately be named “Lies Antisocial”) that he knew nothing about or who was behind it, immediately contradicting the assertion that he knew nothing about it by saying “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal”:

Now, though, Trump is all in on Russell Vought and Project 2025, referring on Thursday to “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”

The Sun King is Trump’s Fever Dream

Whence cones the horror that is rapidly destroying the American Republic and overturning the vision of 1776? The genealogy is longer than that given in Genesis. A project to create a miniseries similar to Roots tracing the ancestry of the evil currently engulfing us — maybe it could be titled The Gulf of America — would become a maxi-series. It would need to go all the way back to so-called “prehistory” to find the origin of the belief that women are inferior to men, which became the template for the oppression of other categories of humans classified as subordinate. (I’m doing that in my current book project, but I won’t attempt to get into it here.)

So we won’t take it back to the writers of the second creation story in Genesis or Hesiod’s introduction of Pandora, stories written from a perspective similar to that of Andrew Tate today.

Before we get to the most direct influencers in the twentieth century, it is worth mentioning in passing one figure from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because he was so clearly what Donald Trump longs to be, and he represented an even more extreme version of what the American Revolution was against.

Louis XIV, who reigned over — or, as he saw it, was — France from 1643 to 1715, was the epitome of absolute monarchy. His famous statement (which like many famous statements, he may never have uttered in quite the attributed words, but certainly reflects his worldview), “L’État, c’est moi,” The Sun King must have accepted the science that had sent Galileo before the Roman Inquisition. Louis saw the universe revolving around him as the sun at the center. Trump, who presumably wouldn’t know Louis XIV from Gambino Family mobster Louis Ferrante, certainly wants everything revolving around him. And the man who ordered a gaudy ballroom built on the White House grounds was following, probably unknowingly, Louis XIV’s commissioning the construction of Versailles. had the highest noblemen at Versailles serving him. Think of Trump’s cabinet meetings with the members competing in pathetic obsequiousness.

The United States was born in a revolution against a monarchy much less absolute than that of Louis XIV. Pointing out that undeniable — well, undeniable by anyone who knows history and does not engage in the Big Lie, two qualifiers that leave out Trump — fact drives home just how extraordinarily anti-American Trumpism is.

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The Nazi Theorist Guiding the Trump Takeover

The people around Trump aren’t even making much of an attempt to hide what they are doing or that they are using the playbook that Adolf Hitler used in 1933. The principal source of the ideology that the people around Trump who are rapidly pushing the United States into fascism is a name with which few people have been familiar.

As Heather Cox Richardson pointed out early in September, many on the American extreme right, including Vice President J.D. Vance and his billionaire puppetmaster, Peter Theil, are enthralled by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt defined democracy as the opposite of what it is — not individuals deciding for themselves what they want but subsuming the people into a mass for whom the Leader speaks and acts. To achieve this uniformity, all opposition must be eliminated — through enforced silence or worse. Once the Leader had gained the powers of the state, he would do everything possible to divide the nation’s people and use the power of government to crush anyone who opposed the Leader.

Sound like what is happening right now in any country with which you may be familiar?

In 2024, Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in typical Trumpian fashion, by attributing what they are doing to their opponents, saying of Democrats, “these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power. And the goal here is to get back in power.” Schmitt said that the way to overcome the restraints of a constitution and the rule of law is, in Richardson’s words, to “exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law.”

Schmitt wrote that a “state of exception” or emergency “is principally unlimited authority,” and spoke of the sovereign as rightfully having total power whenever he wants it. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

Trump, presumably getting Schmitt’s ideas through Vance, Stephen Miller, or another aide, since he never reads himself, has adopted the approach, though at the moment he seems to be delegating the total power in the Trumped-up “state of exception” to the man he denied knowing last year, Russ Vought.

“A real democracy requires,” Jennifer Szalai writes in the Times piece, as [Schmitt] chillingly put it — a full decade before Hitler became Germany’s chancellor — ‘elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.’ Then it could dispense with liberalism, with all of its onerous rules and procedures, which only served to thwart a homogeneous people’s will.”

That is to say that DEI is bad and its opposite, call it UIE — Uniformity, Inequality, Exclusion — is good. That is, of course, an inversion of the vision set forth in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

At the Versailles-like Cabinet meeting In late August, Trump declared, “I have the right to do anything I want to do — I’m the president of the United States.” Anyone who accepts that assertion does not believe in the American vision of self-government. That un-American number includes six members of the United States Supreme Court in the aptly named 2024 case Trump v United States. That title will likely someday be used for a full history of the Trump era.

Schmitt titled his approval for Hitler’s death squads, “The Führer Protects the Law.” That is what Americans are facing right now. It is the darkest time for the nation since the Enslavers’ Rebellion, aka Civil War.

I’ll close with a statement from Abraham Lincoln during that conflict. It seems to speak directly to us in the current time of extreme crisis. In his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln was speaking of the Emancipation Proclomation that he would make a month later:

“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

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We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

During the fiery trial in which we find ourselves, will at least a small number of members of Congress of the party that still bears the name of the one Lincoln led but has completely reversed what it stands for rise up, show some courage against a tyrant who is rapidly destroying the nation Lincoln preserved, and help to save the last best hope of earth?

Robert S. McElvaine is an emeritus professor of history at Millsaps College and the author of eleven books, most recently, The Times They Were a-Changin’ — 1964: The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn. He writes Musings and Amusings on Substack.