A scary vision for our neighbours - From the cluttered desk with Keith Roulston

Senior citizen though I am, I do not think our world is slipping backward. Oh sure, there are some things from our past I’d prefer to restore, like dynamic main streets in our towns, but mostly I think we have advanced amazingly far from our past.

 

And that’s where I’ve never understood the MAGA movement in the United States: Make America Great Again. I sense Republicans forget how good they have it. When was America greater than it is today? Back in the 1950s, when we feared nuclear war with the Soviet Union, so much that we had drills where we hid under our desks in a futile effort to protect ourselves from nuclear fall-out? In the days when southern states had two sets of drinking fountains: one for whites and another for Blacks?

 

America may be far from perfect - as is Canada - but it has come so far from the past. Yet, led by Donald Trump, many Americans yearn for a return of a past way of life. His vice-presidential pick, J. D. Vance, wrote the forward to Project 2025, promoted by the Heritage Foundation as a proposed 900-page agenda for a renewed Trump presidency. Trump denies knowledge of it, but it was co-created by a large number of former advisers from his first-term government from 2016 to 2020. It would radically alter the standing values of America.

 

The document sets out four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation's sovereignty and borders, and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.

 

Project 2025 proposes, for instance, that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control - a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory”. The policy would give the president dictatorial control to decide policies.

 

Under Project 2025, job protections for thousands of government employees would be eliminated. They could then be replaced by political appointees.

 

Project 2025 labels the FBI, (a respected organization) as a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization”. It calls for drastic overhauls of this and several other federal agencies, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education.
Under immigration, the document calls for increased funding to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and combining it with other immigration enforcement units in other agencies, creating a much larger and more powerful border policing operation.

 

On climate, the document proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to “stop the war on oil and natural gas”. Carbon-reduction goals would be replaced by efforts to increase energy production and energy security.    

 

Its economic advisers suggest Trump should slash corporate and income taxes and abolish the Federal Reserve.

 

Project 2025 proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, and using existing, but little-enforced laws to stop the drug being sent through the post. 

 

It suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should “maintain a Biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”

 

The document goes on and on and on, proposing a U.S. that is radically different from what Americans enjoy today; perhaps a reason Trump denies knowing about it despite the many connections to his campaign. This is not an America that most voters want.

 

More attention has been paid to Project 2025 by Democrats than Republicans. Several speakers at the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC) held copies of the document. This is not surprising, since Americans need to realize that a vote for Trump might usher in an America in which few  of them want to live.

 

Many Democratic Party veterans who attended said the DNC was the most remarkable convention they had ever attended. It reflects the lift that many Democrats experienced when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and threw his support behind Vice-President Kamala Harris. It provided a positive drive against Trump, who seems even more dedicated to massive changes in the U.S. after he lost the 2020 election (something he refuses to admit).

 

If Democrats win the November election, Trump has already suggested it will only be because they cheated him. After experiencing Jan. 6, it’s hard to imagine what he and his supporters might do. Here’s hoping, given the fear of Project 2025 and their support of Kamala Harris, voters are so supportive of her that even Trump won’t be able to challenge.