Project 2025

year ago, Paul Dans was chief architect of what was shaping up to be the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term. Eight months ago, he was sent into MAGA exile.

Dans was the director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation when, midway through the 2024 presidential campaign, he and his program started to become a huge political liability for Trump. Democrats warned of Project 2025’s “radical” agenda, saying it would mean a ban on abortion, elimination of LGBTQ+ rights, and complete presidential power over federal agencies along with the elimination of some of them, including the Department of Education. At the Democratic National Convention, Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson held up a giant-size replica of the 900-page Project 2025 book and quipped, “You ever see a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Here it is.”

  Politico

And, apparently, Americans didn't give a shit. Or didn't believe it.

Dans became a sacrificial lamb. Pressured to resign from Heritage, Dans left in a fit of pique at the end of July, and he later criticized LaCivita and campaign co-head Susie Wiles for campaign “malpractice.”

Now Dans, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and works as a lawyer and government relations consultant, is letting bygones be bygones and says he’s delighted with the extent to which Project 2025 has, in fact, become the Trump administration’s playbook.

This week, in his first in-depth interview since Trump returned to the presidency, Dans effectively confirmed what Democrats were saying all along and Trump himself denied: There really is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing.

[...]

“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Dans said. “It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back. But the way that they’ve been able to move and upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.”

Minor point: Did he really say "road to hoe" or is that the author's (and proof reader's) ignorance showing? You don't hoe roads. You hoe rows.

We are going on our 250th birthday here in a little over a year from now. And the last 100 years have been a great diversion from the enduring constitutional structure of this great American experiment in democracy. That is, we needed to undertake a restoration of democracy by slamming the door shut on the Progressive Era. What happened dating back to FDR, but even before that with Wilson, was a way of thinking that an expert class would superintend life for the rest of us, that the common man didn’t have the sense to rule his own destiny. The entire artifice of the federal government had been built over the last 100 years in essentially a very anti-democratic manner.

So...switching parties in charge of doing that very thing to ultra-conservatives is the answer?

Our Constitution vests the executive power squarely and solely in the president of the United States. And over the last 100 years, these encroachments on that power were not only unconstitutional, they were anti-democratic and lacking in moral legitimacy in the sense that the people vote every four years for a president to put forward new policy, and if his policies are being impeded by an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy, that is a problem that needs reformation.

Rule by one man is democratic? AND constitutional? It's my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong - that the people elect representatives to check and balance any new policy put forward by the president they elect. And, the unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy - have you heard of Elon Musk and DOGE?

Dans is not only a dick, he doesn't even have the capability of reasoning.

The interview transcript is here.