To wrap up our series on Project 2025, Kate, Leah and Melissa are joined by NYU’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present to share her perspective as a historian on the Heritage Foundation’s terrifying plans for the country.

TRANSCRIPT

[AD]

Show Intro Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. It’s an old joke, but when an argued man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they’re going to have the last word. She spoke, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

Kate Shaw Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We are your hosts. I’m Kate Shaw.

Melissa Murray And I’m Melissa Murray.

Leah Litman And I’m Leah Litman. We’ve spent the last few weeks talking about project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to essentially dismantle American government should the Trump campaign succeed. Today, we’re going to wrap up the series with a full length deep dive into parts of project 2025 we haven’t yet discussed, but also attempt to synthesize some big themes in the 900 Banana Republic pages we had to read.

Melissa Murray And to do that, we are joined today by a very special guest, my colleague at NYU, Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Ruth is a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU, and she is also the author of the terrific book Strongmen Mussolini to the present. Hopefully, listeners, you’ll understand why exactly she is the perfect guest to join us to wrap up project 2025. Ruth also recently published a terrific piece in The New Republic called The Permanent Counter-Revolution, and it is all about project 2025. So, Ruth, thank you so much for joining us on Strict Scrutiny.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat I’m really pleased to be here. Such an important topic.

Kate Shaw It is, and you are the perfect guest, as Melissa said, to help us break it down. So this is the final segment in our project 2025 coverage. If you are looking for more, do definitely check out Ruth’s terrific New Republic piece, which refers to project 2025 as, quote, a plan for authoritarian takeover of the United States. Like pretty stark. And you can check out our previous episodes with project 2025 analysis. Let me just briefly take through them. The first provided a quick overview of project 2025 and the initial section on seizing the reins of government. Then we covered the general welfare, i.e. Social Policy section, with Jon Lovett subbing in for JD Vance. I was not on that episode, but it was brilliant and hilarious and it covered a lot of policy, including brief discussions of one of the economic plans in the project. Then on our state of the uterus episode, which is what we called our annual retrospective on the Dobbs decision, which overruled Roe versus Wade. We talked about project 2025, plans for ushering in a new era of reproductive injustice. And finally, in our most recent episode, we talked with Ben Rhodes about project 2025. Truly terrifying and in some ways underappreciated foreign policy aspirations.

Leah Litman So, continuing with previous patterns, Donald Trump has more recently continued to try to distance himself from project 2025. Now, there is audio from Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and author of the foreword to project 2025, saying that this is a tactical political decision by Donald Trump.

Clip Well, I think it’s the sign of a great leader who understands he’s in a terrific political news cycle. He’s run a really good campaign from start up to this point. And it’s the left’s mis mischaracterization of project 2025 had become a liability. I think we’ve seen that really turn around in the last few days since that statement. So no hard feelings for many of us that project 2025 about the statement, because we understand Trump is the standard bearer and he’s making a political tactical decision there. What is the relationship between the the nominee and and project 2025? Well, the on one level, it’s good that President Trump and his campaign distanced their campaign from anything else, right? I mean, they they’re trying to win an election. Also, legally, it’s important for people to know that project 2025 is independent of of any candidate. We’ve put this together for any candidate to lean on. But secondly, to the heart of your question, our relationship with Mr. Trump and his advisers remains very good.

Melissa Murray And here are some more clips. These are from Russell Vought, who is the former head of the Trump OMB and one of the authors of project 2025. Here, he’s discussing the very close relationship between project 2025 and Donald Trump. Even if Trump doesn’t want to admit it.

Clip What do you hear ten more times from the rally? The president, you know, distancing himself from the left’s forgive me project 2025. Yeah. And you’re not worried about that? Okay. He’s running against a brand. He is not running against any people. Okay. He is not running against, any institutions. It’s interesting. He’s, in fact, not even opposing himself to a particular policy. He’s been at our organization. He’s raised money for our organization. He’s blessed it from the. You know, I remember walking into our last day in office and told him what I was going to do. So he’s very supportive of what we do. The presidents actually come up with, a strategy that works so long as you are giving people like me and the government the ability to block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for fetal tissue research. But what I told people is he had the most pro-life record ever. I’ve never seen him take it to stand in the way of a pro-life initiative that actually was real politically and with momentum.

Melissa Murray Ruth, what do you make here of the Trump camp’s naked posturing, telling us that project 2025 is a fever dream and they have nothing to do with it, while assuring the project 2025 camp that, in fact, former President Trump is very much with them and will be all about them if he is elected in November.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat I think all of the back, which is, you know, easily, refuted, because Roberts himself has said that one of the goals of project 2025 is, quote, institutionalizing Trumpism. But this backpedaling is a testament to the, effectiveness of, you know, commentary of the press and kind of exposing, project 2025 for the plan to convert America to an autocracy that it really is. And it shows that instead of staying silent, it’s really, really important to, to speak out about, these plans because you see the result that they realized that, these things are not, in fact, a popular and in fact, the whole rationale for, wanting America to become a autocracy is they’ve taken these extremist positions that are very unpopular with the majority of Americans, and they don’t, intend to rely on the popular vote, to, have a mandate to govern. That’s what I talk workers. So it’s been very, very important that so many of us have spoken out and expose this for what it is.

Kate Shaw This is also very gratifying to hear, because we ended up kind of blowing up our plan for the summer in order to do a lot of extra programing on project 2025, but it just felt urgent to do it. And it does feel like I mean, obviously we’re a very small part of the ecosystem, but in a lot of quarters there has been really sustained attention. And I think it is you’re seeing the effects somewhat borne out in the attempt to backpedal, but no one should be deceived. Right? It is just about, I think, concerned about the political consequences of this dawning awareness of what the plan really looks like, rather than any substantive space between Trump and his closest allies and the agenda set forth in project 2025. So as we’ve noted, we have covered some of the major parts of the policy agenda on previous episodes, but we’re going to talk about some of the things we haven’t yet covered. But there are definitely some high level themes that have already emerged.

Leah Litman Yeah. So again, having had to go through this 900 plus page document of just terror, two interlocking and I think mutually reinforcing themes stood out to me. One is consolidating political control, you know, in the president over the entirety of the federal government and eliminating any independence, you know, of government employees. And the second is then using, you know, this weaponized regime of government to go after political adversaries and quell dissent. So, you know, just going to tick off like some examples that I think are indications of both of these themes. One is they propose abolishing the ten year term for the director of the FBI and essentially making the FBI director accountable to the president, you know, thereby making it easier for the president to give orders to the FBI director about what and to do and what not to do. They also want to overrule the Supreme Court’s decision in Humphrey’s executor. That was the case upholding independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and thereby ending independent agencies so that every agency is led by someone subject to presidential removal.

Kate Shaw People who listen to this podcast will know that overruling Chevron was sort of at the very top of the conservative legal agenda, and they have now done that. And what is now at the top, I think, at least in the context of Supreme Court cases, is overruling Humphrey’s executor, which would throw into question the constitutionality of every independent agency. Hugely important parts of the federal government. And there, you know, isn’t a case. It’s going to let them do that, at least that they’ve agreed to hear already this term. But that is very much in the near term kind of plan, both in project 2025. And I think that we’re seeing play out in litigation right now. And I think related is they clearly want to either limit or eliminate entirely the civil service. So clear out career civil servants is something. We talked to Ben Rhodes at some length about. And they want to replace those civil servants with political appointees. They would do this in the foreign policy agencies and departments, and I think they would do it more broadly. And in addition, and relatedly, they would eliminate the firewall between the white House and the Department of Justice, you know, inaugurating an era of complete political control over the criminal apparatus of state, something we’ve really never had.

Melissa Murray But we saw a little bit of the effort to strip away the independence of the DOJ during the first Trump presidency. But this is a full scale plan to make the DOJ the public defender’s office for the new president, Donald Trump, if he is elected so.

Kate Shaw And prosecutor’s office for his enemy, enemies.

Melissa Murray Well guess are. There I look. It’s a full service department at this point. So project 2025 proposes using the DOJ to go after government offices and entities engaged in what they call discrimination. We might call it Dei efforts, but they call it discrimination. They’re also interested in getting rid of any governmental entities that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people or entities that would restrict election denialism or restrict the propagation of Covid misinformation. So it is both going to be for the president, like a defense arm, but also a prosecution arm to go after all of these other entities in government that we rely on for science, for protecting vulnerable groups, the whole thing.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat But I think, this is exactly what authoritarian states do. It’s called autocratic capture. And they, often start with the judiciary and the civil service, which they see as interrelated. And you purge, anyone who’s not going to be loyal to this expanded executive. There’s also, you know, parallel movements to expand the the power of the executive, the direct control that he or she has, and also often remove term limits. But, what Russ Vought said, which is, while ago, I think, to the New York Times, which really caught my eye, is that they were looking for pockets of independence to seize. And I, I study language very carefully. And the word seize, like so much of project 2025. You know, rhetoric is, is the language of autocratic capture. And they want to again create, a judiciary, create, federal agencies, those that will still exist, that are free of, independent civil servants and full of loyalists who will just do the bidding of the executive. And the other, point I want to make is there’s been a lot of talk about abolishing federal agencies, from the EPA. They’re very Department of Education. And I think, as I say, in my new republic, peace, from fascism onward, the goal is to destroy one thing, to create something else. And so on the one hand, fewer federal agencies means, a cabinet, an executive cabinet, a presidential cabinet that has fewer people in it and more room for the kind of informal cronies who, like, whether they’re oligarchs, we can call them different things from different contexts, but, more exercise of informal power by, radicals and loyalist super loyalists.

Leah Litman Yeah, it’s basically like replacing all of government with more Jared Kushner’s and turning government into what is now, you know, the, Republican Party, which is led by Donald Trump’s daughter in law. Right. Like that is what their vision is for the federal government. And, you know, I just want to highlight two additional examples of the prosecutor’s office vision for the federal government, where they plan to basically, again, use the apparatus of the federal government to go after perceived political opponents or dissidents. One was especially terrifying, which is they envision using the Department of Justice to restrict voting and suggests referring election matters to the criminal division within DOJ. And project 2025 highlights, as an example that they don’t think ballot curing that is allowing people to correct their ballots. They don’t think that’s allowed when it’s not specifically authorized by the legislature. So they could try to go after people. All right, who enable that to happen. It also notes disapprovingly that in the 2020 election, DOJ didn’t investigate, you know, state’s election guidance, including Pennsylvania. So again, they are envisioning deploying the federal government run by Partizan loyalists to make it harder for people to vote and to throw out votes.

Leah Litman [AD]

Kate Shaw Ruth, can I ask you to comment on this sort of question of what we’re seeing the centralization of power, the personalization of power as all just an extension of this charismatic president figure and the kind of elimination of these pockets of independence. You said this is what authoritarian regimes do. Like we’re in the march towards full throated authoritarianism. Do these kinds of efforts fall like, are these the sort of early steps that we are seeing? Would you would you describe these as, you know, the things that happen midway to like the end of democracy?

Melissa Murray I’d like to know if we’re already on the way to a dictatorship.

Kate Shaw I know we’re on the way. I just want to know.

Leah Litman If the frog is being boiled.

Melissa Murray Where are we?

Leah Litman Is it dead? Like how how many degrees off from being dead is it of American Democracy?

Kate Shaw Just in broader kind of historical and global context, would you say?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat I think that, so the way that Roberts and Company see this is.

Kate Shaw And wait just make clear you’re talking about Kevin Roberts, not John Roberts, only because our listeners might think, you know, this approach, maybe I’m bored with much of this, but they themselves are not authoring the document.

Melissa Murray What is the line between a Kevin and a John? That’s really the question here?

Leah Litman Well, although Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have authored the calls to overrule Humphrey is very true. So, you know, there is some overlap.

Kate Shaw But in terms of what Kevin Roberts and his cohort would like to say, yeah, please go on.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat The way that Roberts and company see this is in relation to what Trump 1.0, as they like to say, could not do. And they learn from that that not only not enough was done last time and but much more damage was done than many Americans perhaps are aware of. And the damage that was done would allow the project 2025 and Trump, you know, conglomerate to come in and pick up where they left off. But project 2025 is not just a set of policies. It’s also a method and a vision of timing. And the timing would be a kind of blitzkrieg because they have this fantasy, you know, they call the civil servants. They’re now training and vetting an army. Here we go again with the language of autocratic capture, the language of war. And that’s where Kevin Roberts forthcoming book.

Melissa Murray Is, the one with the foreword by JD Vance.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Yeah.

Melissa Murray Just checking.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat And he says the revolution will be bloodless if the left allows it to. So they intend to have to do what? Actually Steve Bannon, a lot of this comes from Steve Bannon, the language of dismantling the administrative state. They intend to have, you know, hundreds of executive orders to be realized starting day one. And they talk in their literature about this army ready to deploy day one. I study crews. So I, I’m very, you know, looking at that with great trepidation. So it’s about a method of seizing power as well as a plan to really, create the legal basis for autocracy, the bureaucratic basis for autocracy, but also that the end of that, the end game of that is what we might call a cultural shift, too. And that’s where counter revolution comes in. White Christian domination and the end in the most radical of them, of, separation of church and state. So a kind of, classic, you know, far right, Christian autocracy that persecutes non-whites, sends women, you know, deprives women of rights, the things that we’ve seen in Orban’s Hungary but would be hugely souped up. That’s their vision to do this quickly, because Kevin Roberts said in an interview that the Trump presidency got a slow start last time, and we intend to correct that.

Melissa Murray The difference between what they did in Trump 1.0 and what they propose for Trump 2.0 is largely a question of timing, as you said, Ruth. But when they came in and Trump 1.0, they weren’t actually expecting to win, so they weren’t necessarily prepared. That’s why this playbook exists, because they want to be prepared. And this is just the first 180 days. This is just the first six months. There’s probably going to be more. And I think maybe that’s where the Christian nationalism might come in. But they’re basically telling us they won’t fail twice. They failed the first time because they weren’t ready. Now they’re getting ready. Is that a fair assessment, Ruth?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Yeah. One of the things that disturbs me the most is that they recently the Trump campaign recently declared their official transition team. But project 2025 has been operating for years already, with well over 100 organizations. In a way, as a shadow government, that’s the way I’m actually thinking about it now. It’s it’s thousands of people, millions and millions of dollars, over 100 organizations, all acting as a kind of. Transition team for shadow government. And the reason I’m using that phrase is that they have so much power now, as they’re seen in the eyes of foreign autocrats, that when Viktor Orban comes to the states and this has happened twice now, he does not go to visit the white House because that’s part of delegitimizing the Biden regime, as they call it. Where does he go? He goes to Mar-A-Lago, which is the ring of Trump, and he goes to heritage to see Kevin Roberts. And so they’re already being treated as a kind of government in waiting. And Trump is like, a president in internal exile who has been wronged. And so that’s that’s relevant as background for the idea of as soon as they get into power, they’re going to move quickly because they’ve been planning this for years. Like very concretely, that’s what that’s what’s scary. And I have to say, highly unprecedented. This isn’t even in, to go back to your question, most, like Viktor Orban has been in power over ten years. And so unless it’s a coup situation, if they come in through elections, they consolidate their power gradually, and it takes them a while. Same with Turkey to get to the condition of autocratic capture that, for example, Orban’s. And now they’ve studied all of these foreign experiences and they are planning something different, which is why project 2025 is so well developed so early.

Melissa Murray Okay, well, that is truly chilling. With that in mind, why don’t we go through some of the specific proposals that we haven’t covered in earlier episodes of this disaster, Peace Theater, as we’ve taken to calling it? Let’s focus on three categories. So one project, 2025 faux populism, economic policies, the tax policies that are outlined here. And then we could have, a potpourri, if you will, of other assorted fascist policies that are proposed in project 2025. So why don’t we start with the faux populism? Okay.

Kate Shaw So to begin with, the faux populism of the project and kind of what the economic policies of project 2025 actually are, here’s just like a rundown of some samples one, the project proposals include denying health insurance to under-resourced Americans by imposing work requirements on Medicaid, the federal health care program for low income Americans.

Melissa Murray And that’s basically a way to undermine Obamacare, since many Americans comply with the Obamacare requirement for health coverage by being eligible and getting Medicaid.

Kate Shaw And then it also has a ton to say about labor.

Leah Litman Yeah. So we are going to rattle off a bunch, to give our listeners a sense of the scope of, you know, their vision. So project 2025 proposes limiting the National Labor Relations Board authority in several ways. One is it would say the NLRB only has authority over higher revenue employers, meaning workers for smaller employers. Right. Don’t enjoy the labor protections under federal law. It would also limit the definition of protected concerted activity. That is, it would allow employers to penalize employees for some of what the NLRB has said under President Biden is protected organizing and unionization and the effort to really, you know, strike back at striking workers came up during the failed Trump Elon Musk Twitter live stream when Trump praised Elon for firing striking workers, which you can hear here.

Clip I mean, I look at what you do, you walk in and you say you want to quit. They go, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that’s okay, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone.

Melissa Murray And that’s not all. Project 2025 proposes limiting overtime pay. Or, as they put it, quote, less a relaxed overtime trigger, end quote, which means that it would allow overtime pay only for more than 45 hours a week of work, rather than the traditional 40 hours per week, or for only more than 80 hours every two weeks, rather than for more than 40 hours every week. So this means if one week you work 55 hours, and the next week you work 25 hours, you wouldn’t get overtime pay. Like even the math is fascist here. I mean, it was really terrible. It also proposes cutting wages. It calls for the repeal of the Davis-bacon act, which requires contractors on public works project to pay the prevailing wage for local workers doing similar work, and it would allow employers to decertify unions at almost any time, rather than in the limited period before a contract expires.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat This war on labor is extremely important because although it’s too, reductive to say that, authoritarianism is about, assuaging economic anxieties because that. Takes away racism and misogyny. However, in many, many cases, it is reaction to moments of newly empowered worker causes and labor rights. And we’re in a moment right now. We are actually in a moment, where labor is having a huge renaissance. Unions are having a renaissance, and not just in the United States. And, one of the pillars of project 2025 is privatization. And another is deregulation. Because the one of the big picture things that’s relevant. And I’m so glad you’re talking about this horrible. So populism is that authoritarianism, in its essence, is fewer rights for the many voting rights, worker rights, reproductive rights and more liberties for the few. So that’s what deregulation is about. And and Trump 1.0 rolled back over 100 regulations just in the area of, you know, environmental food safety allowing plunder because the end game is to allow the oligarchs, the cronies, the big capitalists of the billionaires to plunder without any controls on them. And you see how people like Peter Teal, who backs, Vance. You see how Vance fits in perfectly here because he is the embodiment, supposedly, of, you know, the populism, but he’s actually the embodiment of faux populism. And there the world is full of these people now, including Mr. Chainsaw Harvey, a Malay in Argentina who posed as being for the people. And, what was his job before that? He was the advisor to the biggest billionaire in Argentina for many years. So it’s very important to, I think we need to call out in the two months before the election these exact things that you’re saying that will affect the, the the lives and livelihoods of everyday Americans, because Trump has done a huge con in addressing himself from 2016 on to this, these people and, they’re obviously we know they’re misinformed, but, this is part of the authoritarian playbook from fascism onward.

Leah Litman In that spirit, wanted to highlight kind of two other categories of the weird faux populism. So one proposal buried within project 2025 would put kids to work, like in the mines. So I’m going to read the following quotes from the Quote Hazard Order Regulations section of the project. Quote. Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs and then describing government regulation of hazardous workplaces. It says that results in worker shortages in dangerous fields, and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job, and quote therefore proposes allowing the Department of Labor to change its hazard order regulations to permit teenage workers under more circumstances. It’s like, guess what, fellow kids under project 2025. Not only will you have the opportunity to give birth against your will, you and your baby can work in a mine for shitty pay. Terrific.

Melissa Murray I was going to Harvard, but what I really wanted to do was smelt. I mean, it’s absolutely ridiculous. But in addition to being very much anti-labor, Anti-worker project 2025 is also weirdly very hostile to veterans. And again, I really wonder what JD Vance, a former veteran himself, might say about this. So project 2025 claims that, quote, efforts to expand disability benefits have caused an erosion of veterans trust in the VA. The veterans apparently yearn for fewer benefits. That’s that’s what they’re telling us. So, obviously, I guess it also faults the Department of Veterans Affairs for addressing, quote, adverse health outcomes thought to be the result of veterans exposure to airborne toxins during the global war on terrorism. Again, like I didn’t realize that was controversial, that they had been exposed to these toxins and we might need to address it. And veterans benefits.

Kate Shaw As Ben Rose noted on our Foreign Policy segment in our last episode, project 2025 also wants to privatize VA health care, which is, you know, actually, right now a very successful government provided health care program that would be disastrous for veterans health care. And it’s, you know, part of a larger deregulatory project, but one where it just feels like the public should be exercised over the obviously anti veteran effects that implementation would clearly have.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Yeah, I think and many people are mystified why Trump keeps doubling down and is insulting of the military because a third of my books on military coups have sold a lot, written a lot about how autocrats treat militaries. Part of this is his private rage that U.S. military would not act like the way, as he said to General John Kelly, that how Hitler’s generals. Acted with him, they obey him. And then Kelly had to remind him that there was actually huge, like, you know, resistance attempts against Hitler because he was, so, dysfunctional as a leader and was losing the war. But part so part of this is Trump’s private like, main megalomania control thing. The other is this ruthless, neo liberal, mentality that sees veterans as, if they need something for their service as a huge drag on the economy. And the thing about this is it’s it’s it’s hard to get in the heads of these people because it’s very bleak. They, they truly think in the aggregate they don’t really care about human life. They don’t recognize honor and valor. And they think, and when you think in the aggregate, you think about population displacements. What Trump in 2025 want to do with the numbers 10 to 15? Or Trump even said 20 million people. That’s like old school dictator Hitler. Stalin in scale, 15 million people. It’s more than the population of Sweden. So I think in the aggregate, they also think in the aggregate in terms of costs. And this was the this was experimented in the case study in my book of chilling where, you know, the Chicago school and they implemented, neoliberal economics, and captured the military. But the other thing I wanted to say about the military, I’m still formulating my ideas on this, but, Vance and Trump and others have been very clear that the proper place of the American military is the proper attitude is and nonintervention in the future they should withdraw from NATO. They should let autocrats run free, meaning XI and Taiwan, Putin and Ukraine, wherever else the you wants to go. This means. And unfortunately, there’s also a lot of talk about turning at least part of the military or other militarized bodies onto the American people, a kind of, militarized police state. And that is, of course, what happened in a lot of the military tests that I’ve studied, that the military was asked not to, have campaigns abroad, but to police at home. And so if you see the military like that, you’re talking about, an active military that is smaller. And then another reason these veterans are just a big drag. Who needs them? It’s a terrible, disrespectful, totally dishonorable way of thinking, but it seems to be quite prevalent, sadly.

Leah Litman [AD].

Leah Litman So also regressive is, you know, the tax policies of project 2025, which we haven’t yet talked about. So project 2025 proposes creating a simple two rate tax system of 15 and 30%. As Steven Rattner has explained, you know, this would lower taxes on the highest income brackets. Those are the income brackets for the average emotional support billionaire, coincidentally enough, the project also explicitly calls for reducing the corporate income tax rate. Also a handout to corporate interests.

Kate Shaw It would fully repeal the subsidies that were in the IRA. And all recently passed subsidies, repeal deductions related to educational expenses, capped the amount of untaxed benefits to workers that employers can offer as deductions. You know, removing an incentive for workplace benefits. You know, you earlier made a point about how one way to understand this entire portion of the report, or maybe the report more broadly, is it is clearly designed to restrict the freedom of the many and enhance the freedom or the liberties of the few. And and yet and you earlier said that it seemed as though the public actually was starting to notice and care. And that was the reason for some of, you know, the attempt to sort of distance himself from this proposal. But, you know, I guess, how are they getting away with suggesting that this is a populist agenda when it contains everything that we have been talking about?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Because these people are shameless. They. It’s the same reason that in Poland, the former prime minister who was, you know, voted out by, the Democratic, Civic Coalition, he, talked a lot about, you know, Poland has to be a fortress against immigrants, and they’re taking our jobs. And, you know, we have to be nationalist. Well, who was he? Turns out he was the representative for Santander and other foreign banks in Poland. And I mentioned Milan. All of these people, are these folk populists, and they don’t really care if what they say makes no sense. All they care about is rhetoric is claiming to represent the people as as Trump does. And, they also hope or calculate in that most Americans are not following the news. They’re not going to be informed about these small details, which in reality are everything I myself have have seen much less about these extremely important and devastating economic outcomes or proposals, versus some other things. And one of the issues when you have a project of this scope is it’s really hard to keep up with it all. And this is also one of the problems with having somebody in office or still active like Trump, where it’s a scandal every day. I lived in Italy during Berlusconi and it nobody could keep up. There were too many corruption trials, too many things going on. So I would imagine that, this, this area, it seems to be one of the least messaged. And that’s very useful. I myself will now, devote myself to spreading the news about these things, which I have not talked about adequately before myself, because sadly, there is a very, sinister reading. You can see that I spend a lot of time, in the heads of these awful people. And it’s the parallel is also why are why do they pursue public health policies that spread disease? Why do they want to have a population that’s impoverished and full of disease? In some in areas of Florida now, there are mask bans. You’re not allowed to wear a mask. And of course, we know DeSantis Florida has been a test case for many of the things that you’ve mentioned. Including remember that he was the first to have the election integrity, police who were trying to make people not vote and actually, you know, prosecuting them if they did vote on bogus grounds, mostly African-Americans. So there is a way that the impoverishment of the people, you know, you always have to ask, who is that serving? Who does it serve to create a population that is enmeshed in misery and sick?

Melissa Murray Finally, Rusholme. We’re going to tick through a grab bag of other utterly ridiculous, yet completely terrifying policies and plans that project 2025 proposes. I think of this as Pol Pot potpourri, if you will. So just a true grab bag. We have alluded in past episodes that project 2025 proposes eliminating, for example, the Department of Education. This was something that Donald Trump raised during his failed or maybe hacked live stream. Not really. Hack, definitely failed live stream with Elon Musk. Scott, let’s roll that tape.

Clip And what I’m going to do one of the first acts. And this is where I need an Elon Musk. I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up Department of Education.

Leah Litman Also, just a callback to something we flagged on our Lovett episode. There literally seem to be calling for the demolition of the United States and global economy. You know, proposing to abolish, government control of monetary policy, thereby allowing unregulated currency that is run by finance pros, and then limiting the Federal Reserve Board’s mandate so that the agency only focuses on stabilizing the dollar, not, you know, thinking about interest rates or encouraging full employment, because who needs jobs anyways? Then there are the plans to destroy the planet on top of the economy. You know, it calls for the Environmental Protection Agency to revisit the, quote, national plan for visibility by 2064. As if, like the people yearn for dirty air and smog they can’t see through.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Well, this goes back to the imperative of allowing plunder by the very rich. And, you know, so it terrorism can work differently in different countries. But, in the American version, we now have, the entry more publicly of the billionaires who are extremely dangerous people, from Musk to Peter Thiel, precisely because of the power they wield and the destructiveness of their propositions. Musk and teal are, kind of I see them as very close to fascists in that when I talked before about the end game as, creating the circumstances for a cultural shift to have, kind of white Christian civilization, you with teal and musk, it’s almost like a return to apartheid conditions, almost economically, except that the mass of people would be, in extreme, distress. And here we add in the toll of having no regulation of the, of environmental policies. The, you know, Flint, Flint, Michigan could become many other cities. And adding to what I said before about, you know, disease. And then you add in abolishing the Department of Education and what they want to do there is privatize, and privatization, obviously, there’s the neoliberal agenda, but private. But abolishing public school means taking children out of multi-faith, multi-racial environments. So here again, we have a, kind of, big plan to shift the culture in a, in a, in a fascist direction.

Kate Shaw And just to say another word about kind of plunder. But like, with, on the planetary scale, I mean, project 2025 has tons of details we don’t have time to delve into, but that are, broadly speaking, about facilitating the plunder of literal earth. Right. So limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate new pollutants from existing sources, blocking states from enacting greenhouse gas emission standards, because federalism ending all policies that address the, quote, perceived threat of climate change. I mean, it is pretty terrifying stuff that has existential implications for us as a species and this planet we inhabit.

Melissa Murray It also has a very Gorsuch’s mom has got it going on kind of flavor to it. That is a deep cut for true fans of the podcast. Let me tick through some of the stuff that’s related to energy production. Like that’s been a big watchword for this forthcoming election. This whole drill, baby drill again, another sort of plunder forward kind of element. They have really big plans for the Department of Energy. The tldr is that they want to restore fossil fuel production. They are happy to overheat the planet. And as Kate suggested, basically do fuck all to end or limit climate change. They really want to ensure the reliability of the electrical grid. And their some genius proposal to do that is to limit the influence of progressive alternative energy sources and other environmentally friendly measures. But the one that I really want to focus on, which is just, again, absolute brainiac stuff, is they want to disable the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates nuclear power development in this country. And instead, they would like to facilitate the privatization of nuclear power generation so the same finance pros who brought you crypto can now have government blessed authority to split atoms, right? What could go wrong?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Yeah, but this is all what for example, went Orbán does and again what would happen here because of the size of our country, the power of our country, it would be exponentially more dangerous, existentially dangerous to use the word that you used is allowing, the few to have. To have their fantasies of of total control, realized. And. And that’s so. Plunder is actually the word to use, both in terms of the army of civil servants to review what we’ve been doing. The day one, they’re like, you know how, Kevin Roberts thousand self is a kind of cowboy wear cowboy boots. These are these are kind of crusader marauders who want to have their way. And I write in strongman, which is the first book to put a chapter in masculinity along with corruption and violence and propaganda, because, of course, there’s many women collaborators, enablers doing this, too. But it’s this idea that, you know, the natural born male should have no impediments to the realization of his will to plunder female bodies, labor force, the economy, the environment. And Trump is the embodiment of all of that. And so, it’s it’s a very bleak it has bleak outcomes and history. That’s why I wrote Strong Men is to show with the outcomes how it works and what the outcomes have been. And it’s very distressing to see such an articulated, plan so advanced. And in theory, and with so many people invested in it. And so one question is, well, what if what if they don’t get into power? What the heck are they going to do with all of this stuff that they’ve been, developing? And that is perhaps a question for the future.

Leah Litman Another, very demure, very mindful aspect of project 2025 plans for the planet. Is there promise to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its six main offices, including the 154 year old National Weather Service? Apparently we are not supposed to track weather or environmental hazards anymore, which sounds amazing. You know, NOAA provides free weather forecasts and satellite observations and life saving information about hurricanes, heatwaves, atmospheric rivers and other extreme events. But obviously it’s all part of the deep state, so it has to go well.

Melissa Murray But yeah, that’s a really good point. And it relates to what Ruth just said. I mean, like this question about plunder spans like all of these different areas, women’s bodies. But I mean, even like literally having Al Roker tell you the weather is an imposition on their ability to sort of capture everything, even information. So there is a plunder of the sources of scientific sources for which we rely because.

Kate Shaw They want information about, like what hurricane might be imperiling their like lakefront properties or oceanfront properties or whatever. But they all have the means to get all of that privately. It’s the broad dissemination at no cost to the rest of us that they seem to object to.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Well, also, if you’re trying to convince people not to believe their eyes and ears, it’s an early Trump, quote about climate change. You have to be having, you can’t have them knowing that it’s actually 110 degrees. Yeah. Fooling around with statistics has been, a staple of authoritarianism, whether it’s communism or fascism, since the very beginning. The whole like whistling. He was making the trains run on time. That claim depended on, concealing statistics, of when trains weren’t running on time.

Leah Litman So we are getting toward the end of this wrap up, segment on project 2025. But I do want to note the concluding section of project 2020 five’s policy agenda, which is called onward. And in that section, they discuss how the Trump administration instituted 64% of the Heritage Foundation’s 2016 mandate document. So just imagine if 64%. That is almost two thirds of the crazy shit we have been going over the last few episodes gets instituted in the first 180 days of a second Trump term. That is what is possible. Well, can.

Melissa Murray I ask a question related to that, Ruth? I mean, the way Leah just put it, I know our mentions are going to be flooded with the men’s telling us that we are hyperbolic harpies and that this is all and nothing burger, and we’re stupid for calling attention to it.

Leah Litman We should be more mindful, more demure.

Melissa Murray More demure.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat You didn’t have the right guest on then.

Melissa Murray Which is why we call you Ruth. See, you invalidate our concerns. Do we need to calm the fuck down, or are we justifiably alarmed? And should more people be alarmed? Are there any historical analogs that you could identify that might shed light on this moment, and should inform how we respond to what are presented as very normal policy proposals, but are absolutely batshit crazy.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat You know, in a way, there’s so much written about how, social media and our current information environment is, can be destructive or harmful for democracy, but we also have much more information about what the bad actors are planning. I mean, now they’re choosing to make that information public. That’s another question is why are they choosing to make it so public? That is because they want to normalize these ideas. And part of Trump’s, you know, M.O. has always been to get that stuff out there so that people think, well, yeah, maybe, maybe I do want a dictator, you know? Yeah, maybe I don’t want to vote. What a drag to vote. You know, he’s always done this, but, we have all the information we need, and we have still a free press. And we have people like myself who are just loan agents who are out there warning the public, writing our books, doing all their stuff, going on TV. And we have to double down because, people don’t know what is coming. And the lesson of authoritarianism is it’s only when it’s too late people realize that they should have paid more attention. And this is a situation where we have all the information we need. We truly do our most of it. And the and we can act on that and, make sure that people are informed when they vote.

Kate Shaw So I think that’s a perfect place to leave it. We basically have the information we need. It’s just a question of what we’re going to do with it. Thank you so much, Ruth Ben-ghiat. You are now an honorary member of the Cassandra Club. Does that does that sound fair ladies, I am unilaterally.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat I love it.

Kate Shaw I supported her, and I think as more so it says, destined to know the truth. And hopefully this time to be believed. Ruth is the author of a terrific book, Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present , and it is a banger available at all bookstores, including bookshop.org. And once again, Ruth, thank you so much for joining us today.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Thank you.

Leah Litman [AD]

Kate Shaw Strict Scrutiny is a Crooked media production hosted and executive produced by Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and me. Kate Shaw. Produced and edited by Melody Rowell with help from Bill Pollack. Michael Goldsmith is our associate producer. Our interns this summer are Hannah Saraf and Tess O’Donahue. Audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landes. Music by Eddie Cooper. Production support from Madeline Herringer and Ari Schwartz. Matthew DeGroot is our head of production and thanks to our digital team, Phoebe Bradford and Joe Matutsky. Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny on YouTube to catch full episodes. Find us at youtube.com. Slash at Strict Scrutiny podcast. And if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Strict Scrutiny in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. And if you want to help other people find the show, please rate and review us. It really helps.

Leah Litman [AD]