7 Questions I Hope Debate Moderators Ask about Project 2025
How Will Trump Respond to Scrutiny about Aligning with Authoritarians?
As Biden and Trump prepare to face off in their first presidential debate tonight, I can’t help but be reminded of all the bungled presidential debates of recent years’ past. Eager to play up the drama and draw viewers, CNN, which is hosting the debate in Atlanta has called it “the most fateful presidential debate in US history.”
It’s up to them to ensure tonight’s showdown is worth watching.
CNN is right about the event’s significance, but only if its moderators do their job and hold Trump accountable for the vision MAGA conservatives have painted for the country if he’s in charge.
This presidential election will determine whether or not we are a democracy or a dictatorship. Project 2025 spells out what will happen if Trump wins: Tens of thousands of federal employees will be replaced by unscrupulous yes men who will let Trump and his twisted administration do whatever they want to the American people. Hard-fought health care rights for women, trans individuals, and people who live in poverty will go away. Our country’s already-broken immigration system will be decimated, sending inflation into the stratosphere. Our basic fundamental rights to privacy and freedom will be decimated. Need I go on?
So it’s incumbent upon CNN to hold Trump’s feet to the fire when it comes to Project 2025, whose authors have called “the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.”
Here’s what I would ask Trump if I were moderating:
1. Would you honor the presidential limitations that are outlined in the Constitution?
Project 2025 states that Article II of the Constitution gives Trump unprecedented power to act as a dictator.
Trump himself has said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Is this what we want in a leader? A man who subverts our checks and balances system and only serves himself? CNN needs to get Trump on record saying what we all know — he doesn’t care about the well being of America. Only enriching himself.
2. Will you protect a woman’s right to choose?
Of course, we know the answer to this question is no. Biden is expected to not only unequivocally support an individual’s right to have agency over their own body, but also hammer Trump on his vicious lies about women choosing abortion in the 9th month of pregnancy.
Project 2025 not only declares that the “Dobbs decision was just the beginning.” It also wants to eliminate mifepristone and misoprostol, which are used to end a pregnancy at home. We’re seeing the consequences of Trump’s last presidency and the way he treated women’s reproductive care, and it isn’t good. Let’s not give him another chance.
3. Would you attempt to purge the federal workforce and replace them with the individuals being vetted on the Project 2025 website?
As we speak, MAGA right-wingers are collecting names in a database of potential sycophants. They want to eliminate as many as 50,000 federal employees and erase entire departments, like the Department of Justice and the Department of Education. Extremists learned during the last Trump presidency that he was ignorant and ill-equipped to lead the country into the dangerous territory they wanted. Now they want to get the barriers out of the way. Those “barriers” are tens of thousands of Americans who have dedicated their life to public service. They don’t deserve to lose their jobs to all the king’s men.
4. Do you plan to turn government offices against U.S. citizens and federal workers?
Trump has talked about utilizing his new Justice Department to go after some of his highest-profile critics in a second term.
“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them,” Trump has said.
5. Will you protect LGBTQ+ freedoms?
People I know are most willing to credit Trump with limited attacks against queer Americans, but even if there’s some validity to that opinion (which I don’t think there is), Trump himself doesn’t need to directly sign laws against queer folks in order to harm them. During his first term, Trump installed hundreds of conservative judges that have stripped civic protections from LGBTQ couples, parents, and individuals.
Project 2025 takes those attacks even further, threatening to force queer service members back into the closet, removing trans health care, forcing people to become subject to junk science “conversion therapy,” banning evidence-based health care for trans youth, on and on and on. Read GLAAD’s synopsis of Project 2025 to learn more.
6. Will you uphold the far-right’s attacks on education?
Nearly every reference to education in Project 2025 contains the words “woke,” “leftist progressivism” or some other word or phrase they use to disparage learning. They’ve threatened to throw teachers and librarians in jail for “pornography,” however they define that.
7. Will you honor the separation of church and state model that our founding fathers established at the start of this country?
The attacks on separation of church and state have come fast and furious in recent weeks. Conservatives accuse secular lawmakers of ruining the country and plan to impose their interpretation of Christianity on private citizens. For example, in the Project 2025 chapter about Health and Human Services, the author writes that the United States “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
SIDENOTE:
I’ve seen Biden speak in person as recently as two weeks ago. He starts out slow and subdued, an obvious disadvantage when debates are won or lost within the first half hour. But the more he speaks, the fierier he gets, the stronger he appears. So the more bombastic and unhinged Trump appears, the better for Biden, whose wit and combativeness seems to be activated by tormenters and assholes. Maybe their behavior activates memories of the playground bullies that he wouldn’t back down from in grade school when he battled a speech impediment.
Remember Marjorie Taylor Green’s heckling during the State of the Union. Biden’s brilliance sprang to life, using it as a moment to criticize Republican inaction in at the border. Earlier Republicans reneged on a bipartisan deal to address illegal border crossings after Trump urged them to vote down the deal they’d struck.
"If my predecessor is watching — instead of playing politics and pressuring members of Congress to block this bill, join me in telling Congress to pass it," Biden said in his speech. "We can do it together."
Who wants to watch the debate tonight with me? I’ll be in chats with my thoughts.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!
I did not watch the debate, but did Project 2025 come up?
Do you think it would be more effective to ask “how” instead of would you/would you not? I sense that a yes/no framing could allow him to say yes and get away with it.