When she lifted the large book above her head, it looked as if Mallory McMorrow was about to throw her out again.
McMorrow, a senator from Michigan, had just introduced herself to the audience on the United Center in Chicago on the primary night of the Democratic National Convention.
“And this,” she said, dropping the large tome onto the lectern with a dramatic thud, “is Project 2025.”
There was a hail of dutiful boos when McMorrow explained what the document was: “A Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”
Over the past few days, several readers have reached out wanting to learn more about Project 2025. Like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, this project has gained dramatic notoriety recently as increasingly Democratic politicians warn people about its contents.
So I contacted one in all those that raised the alarm.
North Coast U.S. Representative Jared Huffman spoke to me Monday from Chicago, where he’ll take part in several DNC panels.
But Huffman's biggest contribution to the convention could also be his role in raising awareness of Project 2025, which calls for a sweeping overhaul of the federal government, including a dramatic expansion of presidential powers.
Published in 2023 by the conservative Heritage Foundation with the assistance of 140 former Trump aides, the 920-page MAGA magnum opus proposes a comprehensive redesign of the federal government, including a dramatic expansion of presidential power.
Empowered in this manner, McMorrow warned Monday evening, Trump could fire tens of 1000’s of officials – “intelligence officials, engineers and even federal prosecutors” – and replace them with “loyalists who are accountable only to Donald Trump.”
Huffman had been briefed on the project by the ACLU and the Center for American Progress several months ago. After the meeting, he was “extremely disturbed” and concluded that “the most important thing I could do was to promote it as loudly as possible.”
To that end, he founded Stop Project 2025, a congressional task force that’s spotlighting what he describes as a “dystopian plan” for Trump to seize “supreme” power to “dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish the system of checks and balances, undermine the separation of church and state, and push through a far-right agenda that violates basic freedoms and disregards the public will.”
The investigation was made easier, Huffman added, by “the fact that these idiots wrote everything down.”
Project 2025 also calls for the dissolution of the Departments of Education and Homeland Security and the creation of a militarized force to deport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.
In its short existence, in keeping with Huffman, the group has grown from “this little shadow project to something that has been fully absorbed into the Democratic Caucus, the leadership and all of our communications resources.”
Californians not immune
He warned that Californians, whether it’s a state with a Democratic majority or not, wouldn’t give you the chance to completely escape the influence of this conservative manifesto if Trump prevails against Harris.
The Clean Air Act waivers that had allowed the Golden State to set higher air quality and public health standards – “that all went away under the second Trump administration,” Huffman said.
Supporters of the so-called “unitary executive theory” imagine the president can “simply ignore the constraints of Congress's budget bills,” Huffman said. “That means if California is allocated a certain amount for our roads and bridges, the president can simply withhold that amount to push through certain policy changes.”
Under such a rule, he said, “you can forget the idea that California is a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.”
While residents of Democratic states imagine they’re resistant to abortion bans and extreme immigration policies, Project 2025 is “full of strategies to impose all of these things even on a place like California,” Huffman says.
Another harmless-sounding provision within the document stipulates that independent agencies are directly subordinate to the president under the idea of the unitary executive.
Those agencies would come with the Food and Drug Administration, which a future President Trump could order to revoke its approval of abortion pills. Project 2025 also advocates reviving the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law passed in 1873 that will allow the federal government to criminalize the shipment of any material or device used to terminate a pregnancy.
Trump dissatisfied some conservatives on Monday when he told CBS News he wouldn’t implement the Comstock Act restricting mail delivery of abortion drugs.
Project What?
As Project 2025's public profile grew, Trump and his campaign team increasingly sought to distance themselves from it. Trump wrote on Truth Social on July 11 that he knew “nothing” in regards to the project and had “no idea” who was liable for it – a baseless claim that has been challenged in quite a few places.
(CNN identified 140 former Trump administration advisers who were involved.)
Liz Burch is a pro-choice activist, Fulbright scholar, and director of media and communications at Sonoma State University.
“Of course not,” she replied when asked if she believed Trump's claim that Project 2025 was completely recent to him.
“I'm not convinced at all,” she said. “His agenda has always been very clear, and he delivered for evangelicals” – by selecting the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The looming limitations of Project 2025—banning medication abortion, attacking contraception, enforcing the “humanity of the fetus” principle and thus undermining in vitro fertilization—“keep us on the course of what already happened with Roe v. Wade,” Burch said.
“I'm worried about my daughters,” she said. “The thought that their freedoms could be restricted in this way is devastating.”
“We are considered one of the most progressive countries in the world and the strongest democracy. The idea that American women have lost the right to control their own bodies is simply shocking.”
In November, she said, “I hope Americans make the right choice.”
To reach editor Austin Murphy, who writes the Political Pulse column on special project during election season, you possibly can reach him at politicalpulse@pressdemocrat.com, austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter at @ausmurph88.
(c)2024 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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