There’s lots of talk about Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 to present a more sanitized platform for the Republican National Convention next week (which is…sponsored
by the architects of Project 2025). But Trump has promoted an authoritarian agenda for his second term
since the very moment he launched his campaign in November 2022. When he announced his run in Waco, Texas, he literally said the words
“I am your retribution.” The 90-minute speech focused almost entirely on punishing his political enemies — a move right out of the Authoritarian Playbook
.?
But there’s no need to go all the way back to 2022 for signs of his autocratic intentions.?
At his rally in Doral, Florida
on Tuesday, Trump’s speech ran the Authoritarian Playbook
gamut.?
- He promised to punish dissenters, saying that certain “woke generals up top” will be “gone so fast your head will spin.”
- The majority of the words that left Trump’s mouth scapegoated vulnerable communities. Trump described an “invasion coming through our southern border” of immigrants who are nothing more than “criminals and prisoners” who perpetuate the “plunder, rape, [and] slaughter of American suburbs.” He warned his audience that if millions of these immigrants “became citizens, Medicare and Social Security would be gone.”?
- Trump repeated what has become a signature promise to aggrandize executive power and politicize independent institutions by signing “a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.” Trump also promised to “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” (More here
on the autocratic impulse to abuse the regulatory and spending power of the government to control speech and bodies, and to undercut disfavored public institutions.)
- No need to read Project 2025’s 900 page roadmap to know Trump constantly peddles disinformation in service of corrupting elections. According to Trump, “[r]adical left democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020,” which means he and his allies are “not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024.” He took the Big Lie a step further by asserting that if the election hadn’t been “stolen,” then “Russia/Ukraine would’ve never happened, the October 7th attack on Israel would’ve never happened, inflation would've never happened…Think where we’d be if they didn’t rig that election. We’re not going to let it happen again because our country won’t exist.”?
- The speech was steeped in violence. Trump described the U.S. as “a nation where large packs of sadistic criminals and thieves are allowed to go into stores and openly rob them, beat up and kill their workers and customers, and leave with armloads of goods with no retribution.” Trump also warned that other countries are “sending blood thirsty terrorists, savage gang members, and child predators into the United States to prey on our people, to prey on you, to prey on everybody. They’re coming from South America…Asia, Africa.” The relationship between Trump’s racist fear-mongering and increased levels of hateful attacks have been documented time
and time again
.
Trump is clear about his intentions. Whatever he says about Project 2025, we know he’s speaking straight out of the Authoritarian Playbook
.?
