The political upheaval caused initially by the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and subsequently by President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race has reconfigured the 2024 US presidential race dramatically. The media discussions after the first presidential debate, where Biden’s performance was widely considered to be terrible, became exclusively focussed on Biden’s age and declining health.
The assassination attempt on Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania moved the conversation to the dangers of political violence, generating some sympathy for Trump. In the process, a critical issue was completely sidelined: what would a second Trump administration look like? What should people expect if Trump, who has refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, comes back to power, a scenario that seemed the most likely outcome before Biden decided to withdraw from the race and Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the most likely nominee of the Democratic Party.
A document called Project 2025 provides a peek into what the second Trump administration might look like. Prepared by the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank in Washington, DC, it is seen as the most detailed view of what to expect if Trump is elected. Some of the ideas in it are so extreme and controversial that the Trump campaign does not want to be publicly associated with it. The Republican convention in the immediate wake of the assassination attempt was a good moment to turn a page on the controversy and pivot to a message of national unity and calm. The Trump campaign used the sympathy wave to briefly claim that Trump was interested in national unity and in lowering the political temperature. However, the core tenets of the second Trump presidential campaign, as reflected in Project 2025, remain deeply troubling.
The Republican convention: A high point?
At a confident and boisterous Republican convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination. Leading up to it, the US national media wrote that an emotional Trump appeared vulnerable and softer after the attack. They called him more relatable and anticipated a call for national unity and a sombre political tone in his convention speech.
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Trump started his speech by talking at length about the attack. He invoked fate, God, and the uncertainties of life. For a brief while, he used a different style of speaking—sombre, reflective and vulnerable—and called for national unity. But he soon reverted to his angry, rambling self, going on to deliver the longest convention speech given by a Republican presidential nominee.
A large part of the speech was focussed on the greatest “invasion” that the US is enduring in the form of unauthorised border crossings. He depicted migrants in the most dehumanising language: “They are coming from prisons. They are coming from jails. They are coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.” Trump invoked the iconic character of Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer who ate his victims, from the movie The Silence of the Lambs to describe migrants crossing the border. It was clear that Trump, even when finding himself in a stronger position and with an opportunity to reset his campaign tone, could not move away from a dark tone evoking “American carnage” and cities being taken over by migrant criminals and rapists, a hyperbolic statement completely disconnected from reality.
The assassination attempt
Many, including those in the Trump campaign, saw the assassination attempt as politically motivated, triggered by a history of strong liberal and Left rhetoric against Trump. Some prominent Republicans took to the social media platform X to lay the blame on the Left and the Biden campaign.
For example, Senator J.D. Vance, who was not then named the vice presidential candidate, said: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a well-known Republican member of Congress, wrote: “Pray for America. The left wants a civil war. They have been trying to start one for years. These people are sick and evil.” Similar comments flooded the airwaves and social media to create the impression that Trump was a victim of left- and liberal-inspired violence.
Highlights
- Project 2025, created by the Heritage Foundation, offers a detailed view of potential policies for a second Trump administration.
- The project calls for significant changes, including dismantling much of the federal bureaucracy, expanding presidential power, and removing terms related to diversity and inclusion from government language.
- It proposes strict anti-abortion measures and an unprecedented crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration, including mass deportations.
It came like a boon for a candidate who is not only known for his extremist utterances but who also effectively endorsed the violence unleashed on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked Capitol Hill to stop the certification of Joe Biden as President. Trump never accepted Joe Biden as a legitimately elected President and a large segment of Republican elected officials and electorate followed him in questioning the legitimacy of the electoral process.
A sense of victimhood, specifically the idea of violence produced by the Left’s rhetoric, is something Trump has found extremely useful after the assassination attempt. However, as law enforcement agencies began to dig into the gunman’s possible motives and his past, the story did not add up to reach the political motives that were initially attributed to the attack. The initial stages of the investigation seemed to suggest that Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman, might have been closer to the perpetrators of gun violence in US schools rather than a politically motivated assassin interested in left-liberal rhetoric.
Kamala Harris, who is set to fight the US presidential election as the Democratic candidate in 2024, with Joe Biden at a press conference in August 2020 when he was the presidential candidate she was his running mate. | Photo Credit: OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP
The FBI investigation and journalistic accounts suggest a young man not too interested in politics and without a history of strong political opinions. Crooks came from a suburban family with mixed political leanings. His mother is a Democrat while his father and older sister are Libertarians. He was a registered Republican and once donated $15 to a progressive cause. His friends from school and other acquaintances do not recall him talking politics or being passionate about political issues. He came from a family that owned multiple guns, including the AR-15 rifle used in the assassination attempt. According to a New York Times report, experts who study gun violence have said that Crooks looked closer to a 21st-century school shooter than a John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln to aid the political cause of confederacy.
There is no doubt that US politics has been deeply polarised and its social fabric frayed, but the assassination attempt has raised questions about the high prevalence of gun violence that the US political system, specifically the Republican Party, has refused to engage with. The ongoing investigation might still reveal some unknown aspects, but so far the incident does not fit the narrative that Trump supporters want to believe.
Project 2025 and the Second Trump Administration
With the choice of J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential candidate, Trump has tried to further cement his populist image as the saviour of the white working classes. Vance is seen as the ideological inheritor of Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) platform and a part of Trump’s attempt to further transform the Republican Party according to his vision. Project 2025 is a significant part of this transformation, where traditional conservatism has been blended into the MAGA platform.
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and his family greet supporters on July 28 in St Cloud, Minnesota. | Photo Credit: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images via AFP
Even though Project 2025 has been produced under the stewardship of the Heritage Foundation with the contribution of hundreds of conservative groups, there are a number of people from the first Trump administration who have played important roles in crafting the policies. A core policy proposal emerging from the document is a call for dismantling the “administrative state”. This umbrella term is used to demand the evisceration of the federal bureaucracy dealing with regulations on the environment, health, education and other important matters. It envisions a vast expansion of presidential power that includes ending the neutrality of the Justice Department.
Project 2025 implores the next Republican President to start by erasing terms like sexual orientation and gender identity; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); gender equality; and gender sensitivity. The project urges the next President to excise what it terms as the noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology from curricula in public schools. This demand about critical race theory and DEI has been explicitly articulated on the Republican platform as well.
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The project asks the federal government to do everything possible to ensure that women carry their pregnancy to the full term, no matter the circumstances, by excluding, defunding, and eliminating any other option. It calls for revoking the Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion pill Mifepristone, which is used in more than half the abortions nationwide. Despite its close proximity to Project 2025, the Trump campaign has tried to distance itself strategically from extreme views, such as the one on abortion, given the fact that such positions are not popular among women and the general electorate.
Raucous rhetoric on immigration
The project also calls for an unprecedented cut in both undocumented and documented immigration. It matches with the Republican platform of 2024, written by the Trump campaign, which states that the party is committed to implementing the largest deportation campaign in the history of the US. There are 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US, an overwhelming majority of whom are law-abiding, productive individuals and families. A large majority of them have lived in the US for more than a decade and built deep connections in their communities.
Trump invokes President Dwight Eisenhower in his speeches as his role model in planning a historic deportation. In a tragic and inhumane chapter in US history, the Eisenhower administration claimed to have deported 1.3 million undocumented Mexican labourers over a short period starting in 1954. Officially termed Operation Wetback, a racist slur used in the US for Mexican farm labour, the deportation campaign used the military to round up Mexican workers and even deported a significant number of American citizens of Mexican origin. Mae Ngai, an immigration scholar, wrote that a large number were deported using ships that a congressional investigation compared to an “eighteenth century slave ship”.
As the election campaign moves into high gear, Trump has to be pressed to take a stand on these questions, and the outcome will depend on how well the Democratic candidate highlights some of these extreme ideas at the core of a second Trump administration. Most of all, the fundamental relationship between the Trump campaign and the illiberal and authoritarian ideas in Project 2025 needs to be fully challenged.
Sangay K. Mishra is Associate Professor, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey.
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