As she hoisted the giant book over her head, it looked like Mallory McMorrow might throw her back out.
McMorrow, a state senator from Michigan, had just introduced herself to the United Center crowd in Chicago on the first night of the Democratic National Convention.
“And this,” she said, dropping the vast tome onto the rostrum with a dramatic thud, “is Project 2025.”
Dutiful boos cascaded down as McMorrow explained what that document is: “A Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”
Several readers have been in touch in recent days, wanting to know more about Project 2025. Like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, it has undergone a recent, dramatic rise in name recognition, as increasing numbers of Democratic politicians warn people what’s in it.
So I reached out to one of those sounding the alarm.
North Coast U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman spoke with me Monday from Chicago, where he’ll be a member of several DNC-related panel discussions.
But Huffman’s biggest contribution to the convention may be the role he played in elevating the profile of Project 2025, which calls for a sweeping transformation of the federal government, including a dramatic expansion of Presidential powers.
Published in 2023 by the conservative Heritage Foundation, with help from 140 former Trump staffers, the 920-page MAGA magnum opus proposes a sweeping re-envisioning of the federal government, including a dramatic expansion of presidential powers.
Thusly fortified, warned McMorrow on Monday night, Trump could fire tens of thousands of civil servants — “intelligence officers, engineers, and even federal prosecutors” and replace them “loyalists who answer only to Donald Trump.”
Briefed on the project several months ago by the ACLU and Center for American Progress, Huffman left the meeting “extremely alarmed,” concluding that “the most important thing I could do was just amplify it as loudly as possible.”
To that end, he formed Stop Project 2025, a Congressional task force spotlighting what he describes as the “dystopian plot” for Trump to seize “supreme” powers to “dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.”
The job of raising awareness was made easier, Huffman added, “because those idiots wrote it all down.”
Project 2025 also calls for the dismantling of the Departments of Education and Homeland Security, and the creation of a militarized force to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
In its short life, the group has gone from “this little shadow project,” said Huffman, “to something that’s been fully absorbed into the Democratic Caucus, and the leadership, and all our messaging resources.”
Californians not immune
Blue state or not, he warned, Californians won’t fully escape the reach of this conservative manifesto, should Trump prevail over Harris.
The Clean Air Act waivers that have allowed the Golden State to set higher standards for air quality and public health — “that’s all gone in a second Trump administration,” said Huffman.
Disciples of the so-called “unitary executive theory” believe the president “can just can just ignore the limits of congressional funding laws,” said Huffman, “meaning that if California is budgeted a certain amount of money for our roads and bridges, a President can just withhold that, to leverage certain changes in policy.”
Under such rule, he said, “forget any notion of California being a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.”
While blue state residents might believe they’re immune from abortion bans and extreme immigration policies, Project 2025 is “riddled with strategies to impose all of that stuff even on a place like California,” said Huffman.
Another innocuous-sounding provision in the document would make independent agencies directly accountable to the President, under the unitary executive theory.
Those agencies would include the Food and Drug Administration, which a future President Trump could order to rescind its approval of abortion pills. Project 2025 also favors dusting off the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law passed in 1873, which would allow the administration to criminalize shipments of any supplies or equipment used in terminating a pregnancy.
Trump disappointed some conservatives Monday when he told CBS News he would not enforce the Comstock Act to restrict mail delivery of abortion medication.
Project What?
As the public profile of Project 2025 has grown, Trump and his campaign have worked ever harder to distance themselves from it. Trump wrote on Truth Social on July 11 that he “knows nothing” about the project and has “no idea” who is in charge of it — a spurious claim that has been challenged in numerous places.
(CNN identified 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)
Liz Burch is a pro-choice activist, Fulbright Scholar, and chair of the media and communications department at Sonoma State University.
“Of course not,” she replied, when asked if she was buying Trump’s claim that Project 2025 was all news to him.
“I’m not persuaded at all,” she said. “His agenda’s always been very clear, and he delivered for the Evangelicals” — by picking the Supreme Court judges which voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The looming restrictions contained in Project 2025 — banning medication-induced abortion, attacking contraception, imposing the principal of “fetal personhood,” thereby undermining in vitro fertilization — “keep us on the trajectory of what’s already happened with Roe v. Wade,” said Burch.
“I’m worried about my daughters,” she said. “It’s devastating to think their freedoms could be reduced like this.”
“We’re supposed to be one of the most advanced countries in the world, and the strongest democracy. The idea that American women have lost the right to control their own bodies — it’s just shocking.”
Come November, she said, “I hope Americans make the right choice.”
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy is writing the Political Pulse column on special assignment during the election season. Reach him at politicalpulse@pressdemocrat.com, at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.
(c)2024 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
