President Donald Trump talks to reporters from the Resolute Desk after signing an executive order to appoint the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration in the Oval Office at the White House on January 30, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed that Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now that Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann documented in a recent column.
Chris and I talk about Trump’s mobilization of Christian nationalist ideologues in the service of making the state subservient to big business. We also take up the remarkably supine Democratic Party response, and also possible sources of resistance in the courts, the federal government, and, most crucially, from outraged public opinion mobilized into protest.
