Blogger Aaron Rupar, writing at “Public Notice,” sums up the goal of Project 2025, which is a lengthy tome describing the plans of the next Trump administration. The main goal, Rupar writes, is to abolish the 22nd Amendment—the one that sets limits for Presidents at two terms. Their hope: Trump for life. In recent days, Trump insisted that he knows nothing about Project 2025 or those who wrote it. That’s hard to believe since the authors served in his administration, and the project was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. There’s a photo of Trump shaking hands with Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, on the Heritage Twitter feed. Trump must have forgotten that he knows him.

Rupar writes:

Project 2025, the Republican plan to functionally annihilate not just the federal government but democracy as well if Trump wins in November, is an unceasing parade of horrors. 

Banning the abortion pill nationwide? Check. Rolling back protections for LGBTQ people? Check. Deporting literally millions of undocumented immigrants? Check. But amid each objectively horrible aim is an even more more insidious one: abolishing the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms. It’s an unvarnished, right-out-in-the-open plan to keep Trump in office well past 2028. 

It’s not as if this is genuinely unexpected. By July 2019, Trump had “joked” at least six times about being president for life. Floating that as a possibility, as Peter Tonguette did last week over at The American Conservative, is a great opportunity to show fealty to a candidate who values loyalty over all else. 

The American Conservative is a “partner” of Project 2025, along with such luminaries as Stephen Miller’s America First Legal law firm (currently suing everyone over the mildest of diversity efforts) and the Claremont Institute, which gave us Christopher Rufo and Moms for Liberty.

As Media Matters notes, the reasoning in Tonguette’s piece is dubious at best, but that doesn’t really matter. Project 2025 doesn’t rest on solid law, respect for democracy, or an understanding of history. It rests only on the notion that Trump should be allowed to exhibit raw, vicious, and unchecked power. 

Tonguette’s piece doesn’t even bother with the pretense that getting rid of the 22nd Amendment would strengthen democracy overall. Instead, the piece is predicated on the utterly unfounded notion that when the amendment was passed, no one could have foreseen that a president would be elected to nonconsecutive terms.

While Tonguette does mention Grover Cleveland, who every schoolchild learns did indeed serve two nonconsecutive terms, he seems to think that people were perhaps unaware of him when the 22nd Amendment was passed in 1951. Tonguette handwaves away the existence of Cleveland by simply writing, “In modern times, it is virtually inconceivable that any of the ousted one-term presidents would have seriously thought of running anew against the same opponent (now the occupant of the White House) who had bested them four years earlier.” 

It’s also inconceivable that millions of Americans would line up for a candidate who incited an insurrection, is facing 91 criminal charges, was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, and was just recently rich-guy panhandling to pay his massive bond to appeal his civil fraud penalty in a different case, but here we are. 

Embracing autocracy … for this guy?

Like many other projects of the modern Republican Party, a newfound loathing of the 22nd Amendment is wildly hypocritical. 

Though there were multiple unsuccessful pushes for presidential term limits before the passage of the 22nd amendment, the GOP House majority prioritized the issue after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death in 1945. No Republicans broke the party line during key congressional votes on the amendment, but they were helped along by southern Democrats who were mad that President Harry Truman continued FDR’s liberal economic policies.

To be fair, vaguely kicking around the idea of a third term has been standard procedure for a lot of two-term presidents, with President Barack Obama saying he thought he would likely have won a third election and President Bill Clinton saying he would probably have run for a third term if possible. However, the only serious push for a third term came from President Ronald Reagan, who said in 1987 that he “would like to start a movement” to repeal the amendment because it interfered with the right to “vote for someone as often as they want to do.” Reagan said he didn’t want this for himself but would press for it going forward, but like many things he said, that was somewhat less than truthful, as Republicans fundraised off the possibility of a Reagan third term starting in 1986.

Returning to Tonguette’s argument, it rests largely on his assertion that Trump is incredibly, historically popular, so he should get a third term. This, of course, ignores the fact that Trump is not actually that popular. He lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020. In 2016, Hillary Clinton trounced him by 2.87 million votes, while in 2020, Biden bested him by over 7 million.

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Project 2025 is about enshrining minority rule

Much of the post-2020 discussion from Republicans — the parts not about unhinged conspiracy theories — has centered around outrage that anyone could disregard Trump’s 74 million votes. It’s unclear what conservatives mean by that, save for that even when they have less support and don’t win elections, they should still run things. 

And that’s what Project 2025 is all about. Republicans want to permanently enshrine their minority policies into law despite the fact that what they want is broadly unpopular. Fifty-nine percent of Americans want abortion to be legal. Over half of registered and likely voters do not want to vote for someone who makes robbing transgender youth of health care their core issue. Nearly three-quarters of American adults want the government to take bold steps to fight climate change. 

Project 2025 is all about enacting minority rule in America immediately upon Trump’s election. To do so, Trump would first need to gut civil serviceprotections, which ensure that federal workers don’t have to adhere to the politics of any given president.

Trump tried this at the end of his term, issuing an executive order that would have made thousands of federal civil servants at-will employees. When he didn’t win a second term, he didn’t have time to implement it. Those apolitical employees — as many as 50,000 people — would be replaced with Trump loyalists. Power would be wholly consolidated in the executive branch. 

Of course, Republicans hate that the executive branch, currently led by a Democratic president, wields any power and have been engaged in a decades-long project to dismantle the administrative state. Conservatives on the Supreme Court are helping along nicely with this project. But that pendulum would swing the other way fast if Trump retakes power, at which point conservatives will again love consolidating all power in the executive branch because the administrative state will be completely beholden to Trump. 

Comparisons to historic fascist leaders once felt overblown, but with Trump declaring he’d be a dictator on day one of his presidency, those comparisons no longer seem so hyperbolic. However, Trump has much more modern analogs. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has thrashed that country’s nascent attempts at democracy, amending the constitution twice to allow him to stay in power as long as he wants. With his most recent victory last month in an election that was really no election at all thanks to widespread coercion and censorship, Putin may end up being ruler for life.

Then there’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. In the summer of 2023, he forced a vote to curtail the power of Israel’s Supreme Court, a project his conservative government had been pursuing for months because the court doesn’t vote in lockstep with his goals. There’s also the fact that Netanyahu, like Trump, faces corruption charges and needs to be sure the courts can’t take action against him.

And finally, there’s Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán has been the king of the culture wars in a way that Republicans can’t get enough of. In 2022, he gave a speech joking about gas chambers and warning against Europeans becoming “peoples of mixed race.” Unsurprisingly, this did not result in him getting disinvited to the Conservative Political Action Conference a short while later. Instead, Republicans loved his nationalist rhetoric so much that there is now a CPAC Hungary, where in 2023, Orbán complained about “the woke movement and gender ideology.” 

If you want a preview of what would happen in a second Trump term, look to Hungary, which now bans anything with LGBTQ content whatsoever being shared with minors, and where the constitution was amended in 2020 to define “family” only as “based on marriage and the parent-child relation. The mother is a woman, the father a man.” Orbán also hates migrants and refugees, saying that people fleeing from war in places like Syria are a threat to Christianity. He has said he will defend Hungary against “tens of millions” of immigrants. 

Trump’s vision for America is impossibly grim. It’s fueled by hate and disrespect for democracy, and the only way it can be stopped is at the ballot box in 2024, so that Project 2025 never comes to fruition.