I Spent the Past 9 Months Studying Project 2025.
With Trump as President, You're Going to be Living It.
I read all 920-pages of Project 2025 in one weekend. I sent my husband and kids to my in-laws’ house, so I could apply all of my concentration to reading.
Project 2025 is the right-wing playbook authored by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. It was published a year before the election to help a Republican president enact some of the most extreme conservative policies imaginable in the first 180-days of presidency.
Before I read it, I had heard about Project 2025 from a few friends who exclaimed, “Can you believe no one is talking about this? It’s so bad.” I wondered if their handwringing was hyperbolic and wanted to investigate it for myself. As I read, I took notes. I paced around my small home. I felt the anxiety rise like a tsunami, which is a reference more people will understand once Donald Trump fires all the climate scientists as Project 2025 directs him to do.
It was early April, a time when the landscape begins waking up from a sleepy winter. In rural Montana where I live, warmer weather and longer days melt mountain snow and beckon recreationists outdoors, but I didn’t leave my home. I couldn’t tear myself away from my computer or the spiral notebook I was using to keep track of the fanatical fantasies for Trump’s presidency.
Like my friends, I couldn’t believe no one was talking about Project 2025, so I set out to change that with the only tool available to me: Social media. I began posting graphics and videos about Project 2025. I started a newsletter called Project 2025 Takedown. I referred back to my trusty old-school notebook as I worked to educate followers about what I’d learned.
In my notebook, every page was its own category: Women, children, Black Americans, LGBTQ+ rights, single parents, immigrants, educators, scientists. Each category represented someone I loved. As I read and took notes, the pages filled with horrific outcomes for the people represented.
For example, under the page titled “LGBTQ+ rights”, I wrote that Project 2025 wants to delete the terms “sexual orientation”, “gender identity”, “DEI”, “gender equality”, “gender awareness”, “reproductive rights” from all federal documents. Project 2025 claims that First Amendment protections don’t cover transgender individuals. Deleting these words and phrases and excluding a group of citizens from constitutional protections will erase the identity of queer people and force them back into the closet.
On another page titled “Women” I made note of the claim, “The Dobbs decision was just the beginning.” Project 2025 directs the president to force the FDA to ban abortion pills and “protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.” So much for letting states decide on reproductive rights.
Project 2025 is rife with antagonistic language toward teachers. The document couches plans to dismantle public education in feel-good phrases like “parental rights” and “school choice. But really, Project 2025 will make it harder for families to access school meal programs. It weakens federal funding for disabled students. It threatens to throw teachers and librarians in prison for distributing pornography. I think we can all agree that students shouldn’t access Only Fans from the school computer lab, but that’s not what Project 2025 is referring to. Instead, it wants to ban any book conservatives find offensive, including those that depict non-heterosexual relationships.
Project 2025 attacks racial progress, criminalizing education efforts the right deems as “woke.” It attempts to purge the federal workforce and replace it with sycophants whose names are already gathered in a database on the Project 2025 website. Scarier still, it argues that Article II of the Constitution gives Trump unprecedented presidential power to act as a dictator.
Despite mine and other creators’ best efforts, Trump was elected in November and Project 2025 is our new reality. You will be astonished at how quickly these changes happen after Inauguration Day.
Now that I’ve spent the past nine months studying Project 2025, I’m a reluctant expert on the ways to mitigate the damage it will cause. Here’s what I’m doing to prepare for Trump’s presidency:
Investing in my local school district: When Trump breaks the Department of Education, it’s up to us to fill the cracks.
Getting my family’s documents in order: Passport. Driver’s license. Birth certificates. Insurance. When Trump guts the federal government, everything will start moving at a glacial pace. Plus, you never know when you’ll need to flee the country at a moment’s notice.
Limiting my news/social media consumption: I spent the past nine months reading some of the worst possible outcomes for the people I love. Now that I know what is potentially coming, I don’t feel the need to ingest every terrifying headline. I plan to check the news three times a day and trade the daily doomscroll for old-fashioned book reading.
Holding tight to my community (including my online community): Social media might be in absolute disarray right now, but I refuse to abandon the communities I’ve found there. We need each other now more than ever.
Practicing purposeful disengagement: I’ll protect my peace by intentionally withdrawing from practices, religious institutions, financial expectations, and individuals that are toxic or no longer serve me.
Cultivating more local shopping resources: Trump’s tariffs will inevitably make the price many products skyrocket, so I’m making a list of local outlets that share my values to buy goods and products.
What are you doing to survive the Trump presidency? Let me know in the comments.
I'm down here in Salmon and have just started a women's group called Women Who Care. We provide each other support and coordinate efforts to resist. We are a safe group, and will be working behind the scenes and not publicly. Started with 12, and now we're up to 30 after just two meetings. Our list is quite long and I expect more and more to join in. Pretty good for Salmon! Tonight we are all attending a school board meeting, the purpose of which is to discuss a HS English teacher displaying a pride flag in his classroom next to the US and Idaho flags. It's been there for four years. Now all of a sudden it's turning children trans and there is a bit of an uproar about it. We will show up in solidarity and many of us will speak with facts and intelligence.. Needless to say, the teachers are all in with us. That's what I'm doing! Thank you for all you do!!
I live in a high-rise senior and disabled apartment building, 14 stories in approximately 150 to 160 people. It is not a care facility, yet we find ourselves taking care of each other anyway. I have started a study group for project 2025 in which we will take it one section at a time as you did. We will start with housing and insurance issues because they are the ones that could be most immediately devastating to the resident here probably a little more than half of the people here have housing, subsidies, state, and federal. almost everyone in the building realize on Medicare and many have Medicaid.
We plan to network with others who are willing and able to resist inhumane policies and practices outlined in Project 2025. We plan to support organizations already fighting and network with other mini-communities to broaden and deepen the network.