"There will be no rebuilding": Bracing America for the implementation of Project 2025

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Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was an extreme failure for the United States as both a nation and a country. He has open contempt for democracy and the Constitution. He is publicly promising and threatening (and putting in place the means) to rule as the country’s first elected dictator on “day one.” Trump, like other such autocrats and authoritarians, means what he says both literally and figuratively.

A country consists of a defined territory and borders, founding documents, laws and institutions. The United States failed to protect its democracy by putting an autocrat and his larger authoritarian populist movement and cadre of kleptocratic allies in control of its governing institutions — including Congress. This is a great failure of the United States as a country.

A nation consists of shared values and ideas, myths, narratives, stories and a sense of shared community and identity (and perhaps even destiny) that tie together a people. One of the tenets of America as a nation is a belief in American Exceptionalism. Be it a “shining city on a hill” or “the world’s greatest democracy,” Trump's return to power further undermines America's self-image of greatness. The United States has now been brought down to the level of being common, and just another of many examples across the centuries, of how a failing and sick democracy succumbs to demagogues, strongmen and authoritarians and their false promises of renewed greatness and easy solutions to complex problems.

To that point, the international democracy and human rights advocacy and watchdog organization Freedom House gave the United States 83 points in its annual ranking of freedom around the world. This is similar to countries such as Croatia, Panama and Romania. Mongolia and Argentina, for example, scored higher than the United States.

In total, the 2024 election and the extended Trumpocene embody a moral crisis and civic collapse for the United States. Donald Trump is a damning indictment of the country’s political culture.

"I think on the Republican side, there is no morality right now," former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger explained to Salon in a recent interview:

Is there room for it? Yes. I think there is still morality in the Democratic Party. One of the things that I've appreciated over the last four years is my new alliance with liberals, and what I call this is an alliance to defend democracy….. That's where we're at now. I think there is still morality left in the Democratic Party, and I think there has to be morality. Otherwise politics just becomes an exercise of power, which it generally is — but I still think it's driven by good people who go into it for the right reasons.

For many Americans — especially those White Americans who believed in the many lies of America’s inherent greatness and goodness, and that authoritarianism and fascism are something “over there” and not something with centuries of history in the United States in the form of such regimes as American Apartheid and Jim Crow, White on Black chattel slavery and other great crimes against nonwhite people — Trump’s return to power is shocking, unbelievable and a type of epistemic crisis.

James Baldwin spoke to these feelings in his 1965 essay “White Man’s Guilt”:

People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.

In an attempt to make better sense of our collective emotions (and tumult and upset) in these days before Trump’s return to power, reflect on the previous year and the election and what may come next, I recently spoke to a range of experts.

Cheri Jacobus, a former Republican, is a political strategist, writer and host of the podcast "Politics With Cheri Jacobus."

In retrospect, we all should have been more keenly aware of the fact that we are a 50/50 nation in modern presidential elections. The country is split down the middle. Not only does it make it "easier” or more "necessary" to cheat with the Electoral College but places our democracy and elections in severe jeopardy. Whoever the nominee of each party, and no matter their crimes, indictments, sins, lies, theft, treason, or apparent mental illness, they are a coin toss from the presidency from the get-go.

Once Merrick Garland allowed and facilitated Trump to skate on the worst acts imaginable not only against individuals but against our democracy and national security we were in deep trouble. The minute Trump was able to announce he was running for president it was clear it was to avoid prison. And Merrick Garland knew it. And enabled it.

"There will be no rebuilding. There will only be mass looting of our tax dollars, greasing of palms, favors to help the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the destruction of the middle class, further ensuring we cannot fight back. "

It also meant Trump was the presumptive nominee of the GOP, thus placing the nation in unprecedented danger AT THAT MOMENT. We failed to fully grasp it at the time.

Talk of a Biden landslide and later a Harris landslide was foolish. A razor-thin close race was already baked in at that moment. And so was the cheating, just as it was in 2016 when Trump and Putin's cheating worked and in 2020 when it did not, largely due to the pandemic and mailed-in ballots. It is nearly impossible to cheat unless the race is close, and in America, it has been close for many presidential elections.

Regrettably, few of us treated it as such or recognized the impact of the moment. We held onto the illusion (delusion?) that our democracy was intact, even though our Department of Justice and Merrick Garland had already by that time, ensured it was not. It was already slipping through our fingers like we were trying to hold onto a handful of water. "Disappearing" Trump's many crimes effectively took them off the table as impactful campaign issues for persuadable voters.

Since Election Day, we've seen our institutions that we already knew were floundering, now openly selling out to the coming fascism and the authoritarian Trump regime, with MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski groveling their way down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and beg for mercy and with ABC News and George Stephanopoulos settling a defamation case brought by Trump. The case was extremely winnable for ABC News, yet they groveled their way to Trump to beg for mercy — and, of course — access.

Trump and his administration and agents and other enablers will crash the Biden economy — one of the best in decades — to "rebuild" it again — except they will only keep the first half of the promise. There will be no rebuilding. There will only be mass looting of our tax dollars, greasing of palms, favors to help the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the destruction of the middle class, further ensuring we cannot fight back.

Randolph Hohle is a professor of Sociology at SUNY Fredonia and author of "Racism in the Neoliberal Era" and "American Housing Question: Racism, Urban Citizenship, and the Privilege of Mobility." He studies the nexus of racism and political economy.

As I look back on 2024 and what transpired with the election, more and more I feel disgusted with the Democratic Party. The party elites are afflicted with hubris and incompetence. It’s not often that I agree with Kellyanne Conway when she lambasted the Harris campaign for thinking endorsements from Dick Cheney and Elizabeth Cheney are a good thing while they leave so many winning political issues on the table (e.g., healthcare).

"I’m concerned that Republicans will implement Project 2025 and that it is going to trigger a recession similar to that of the early 1980s."

Biden no longer has the cognitive capacity to work anywhere, especially as president. He wouldn’t step aside. The Democrats didn’t hold a primary because party elites believed they knew better than the voters. They made it easy for Trump.

As for the outcome of the election, there is more clarity in hindsight. I think mainstream political analysts downplayed this notion of a “vibecession” because GDP growth (which was 3.1% in October 2024) was really good. The problem is we don’t feel GDP growth in everyday life. What we do feel is the impact of high interest rates on our credit cards, home equity loans (if you have one). We feel the Fed’s intended outcome is to increase interest rates to slow down job growth. Trump owns the domain of feelings politics: anger, resentment, outrage and even joy from revenge and winning.

I’m concerned that Republicans will implement Project 2025 and that it is going to trigger a recession similar to that of the early 1980s. I’m also bracing myself for having the news cycle revolve around Trump again. It’s mentally exhausting to follow and track the administration with the non-stop drama.

As for these being the “good times”? I agree. The Biden administration did some good things with the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. There are some good long-term investments in those acts. I don’t think we will see good policy for a while. Even if it’s just hyperbole, Trump’s obsession with immigration and the border is not a productive economic policy and doesn’t do anything for working people. Allowing the Big Tech robber barons to dictate a regulatory environment over AI, quantum computing, and energy won’t be good for the country. This is going to be a long four years.

Dr. Justin Frank is a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center and the author of "Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President."

2024 was a year of sudden hope that was just as suddenly dashed when Trump won re-election. The sudden hope was the almost ecstatic reaction to Biden’s decision not to run for reelection. While there wasn’t a lot of time to mount a campaign, Harris, I thought, did pretty well and surely won the enthusiasm of many people — just not enough, it turns out. As a psychoanalyst, it reminded me of the incredible gap that often exists between fantasy and reality, and how powerful fantasies and wishes distort and color genuine perception.

Trump’s return was surprising to me despite my full awareness of his very dangerous personality and mind. I was less aware of his ability to connect with so many people since I always felt his bluster was easy to see through. As the folk wisdom suggests, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. What was missing was the word “enough” – you can fool enough of the people enough of the time to get elected. And I don’t think it was just fooling people; Trump ran against a Black woman — meaning Harris already had two strikes against her when she came up to bat, but still almost won. I usually am much more mindful of America’s deep-seated racism and misogyny, but I lost sight of it along the way in the summer of 2024 and into the election. So I couldn’t believe the people who predicted a Trump victory. I’m also aware of the strength of “wishing makes it so” which led to my own denial of the genuine racism and sexism that looms so powerful in the privacy of the voting booth.

As I think about Inauguration Day, my first feeling is non-feeling. Apathy is a danger that has always been unfamiliar to me both as a psychoanalyst and as a political activist. But this time I feel resigned to bad news on a regular basis and don’t have the energy to respond to each Trump transgression. I will try to focus on those individuals and groups who are trying to do good work in defense of American democracy and human decency.

If we devolve into the nightmare that Trump’s return to power will mean for the country, we must try to keep a larger perspective. This means maintaining our relationships with friends and family and the larger community. We should strive to find those happy times amidst what will be so much darkness and pain.

It must be one we can put into a larger perspective. That perspective is not about “good times” but about healthy times with people who can keep their visions and ability to think and speak alive and well. Those happy times will be the fuel for us to endure.

Peter McLaren is Emeritus Professor of Education at University of California, Los Angeles. He is one of the architects of critical pedagogy and the recipient of numerous international awards for this work in education. He is the author of over forty books and his writings have been translated into twenty-five languages.

As I reflect on 2024, it remains nearly impossible to articulate the maelstrom of emotions that consumed me—a tumult of fear, anger, and despair, clashing relentlessly and offering no clear resolution. My friends, my colleagues, and I cast our votes for Harris, driven less by enthusiasm than by a profound disdain for the Democratic Party’s mishandling of crises, particularly in the Middle East. Yet the alternative — a vote for Trump — was utterly unthinkable as if only the most gullible or willfully ignorant could embrace the venomous rhetoric and unrelenting chaos he embodied. Trump’s candidacy and victory embody the decay of democratic norms in America. I was confident Harris would not just win but achieve a landslide in the popular vote, though the specter of the Electoral College still loomed like an ever-present shadow, injecting uncertainty into even the most hopeful predictions.

I clung to the belief that the majority of Americans would understand the stakes — that electing Trump again would mean dismantling the architecture of democracy and reassembling it into something menacing and unrecognizable. Surely, I thought, voters could see the obvious: Trump was a fascist. But then, like a lightning bolt, it struck me —most Americans simply didn’t care. The realization was crushing, a bitter truth about the apathy of my adopted country. Since immigrating to the U.S. in 1985 and becoming a citizen in 2000, I've believed in the resilience of the American electorate and its capacity to discern the dangers of demagoguery. By 2024, that belief was shattered. Surely, by now, they should have seen through Trump. But they hadn’t — or worse, they had, and it didn’t matter. And my native Canada looks like it is tilting right. A recent poll reveals that Canadians view Donald Trump more favorably than Justin Trudeau, according to the Abacus Data poll.

When Trump emerged as president-elect, a wave of horror swept over me, intensified by the moral cowardice of prominent liberals who capitulated to his orbit of oligarchs — trading resistance for complacency in a brazen betrayal of Timothy Snyder’s urgent warning: “don’t obey in advance.” Even more unsettling is the drift of self-proclaimed leftists toward the gravitational pull of right-wing populism, foolishly believing they could forge alliances with figures like Trump and the right-wing libertarians and techno billionaires who preside over a new feudalism in some shared crusade against “the establishment.” They seem blind to the destructive forces they legitimize in the process.

With Trump’s personalist rule and its cronies and incompetent nominees to run the administration and the looming betrayal of Ukraine by Trump in its war for survival and freedom against the Russian invaders, it feels as though the country stands on the brink of an uncharted precipice, every concession, every acquiescence, nudging us closer to the abyss. In the face of this chaos, I find myself desperately searching for any fragile foothold, any sense of stability, though none seem to exist. I haven’t felt this unmoored since the dark days of 2016.

When Trump spoke of a publicly televised trial for Liz Cheney over the January 6 report, my mind raced to darker places, conjuring the ghost of Roland Freisler, the venomous voice of the People's Court in Nazi Germany. The words seemed to echo from a shadowy past, where justice was twisted into a theater of cruelty, where the gallows were strung with piano wire on meat hooks. Of course, such horrors thankfully won’t occur in Trump’s administration. But can’t you see them slinking through the corridors of Trump’s mind?

It’s impossible to ignore Trump’s rise to the most famous poem in the English language, Yeats’s The Second Coming, looming over this moment in history, its prophetic lines reverberating with unsettling clarity. Trump’s rise appears as a chilling fulfillment of Yeats’s apocalyptic vision — a stark warning of what unfolds when history veers toward chaos and when the best lack conviction and the worst are consumed by passionate intensity. Trump, the “rough beast slouching toward Washington,” embodies the unraveling Yeats foresaw — a figure of disruption whose ascent marks a profound fracture in the democratic order. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Yeats declared, and the nation’s once-sturdy institutions now falter under the weight of authoritarian ambition and widespread complicity. The “widening gyre” foretells the polarization of society, the centrifugal forces tearing the collective fabric into ideological extremes. Meanwhile, “the blood-dimmed tide” surges forward in a deluge of disinformation, corruption, and violence, threatening to submerge justice and truth in the murky waters of a Trump-led America.

I won’t watch the Inauguration. I’m sure Trump will bask in his glory, proclaiming the crowd size is the largest in presidential history. And later I’ll follow stories about how world leaders sucked up to Trump. And there will be emails from friends and colleagues worldwide offering their condolences to me for having to live through more Trump years and offering their solidarity which I will appreciate.

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