The media is finally paying attention to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, the 900-+ page blueprint for a second Trump term. Despite so many of his former advisors and officials contributing to Project 2025, Team Trump is trying to distance the campaign from it. Those concerned with this authoritarian fever dream are trying to distill Project 2025 into an comprehensible form.
Composed of four pillars, Project 2025 is a policy guide for a second Trump term; a LinkedIn-style database of personnel who could serve in the next administration; training for candidates dubbed the "Presidential Administration Academy”; and a playbook of actions to be taken within the first 180 days in office.
Last year, Fordham Magazine interviewed John Kilcullen, a 1981 Fordham University graduate who created the “for Dummies” book series. “My premise was that dummies are smart but are made to feel dumb by the techno, financial, and pervasive ‘babble’ across a wide variety of topics.” Project 2025 is so vast that it is difficult to fully comprehend the dangers within it. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has put together a Project 2025 for Dummies-like toolkit for understanding and explaining Project 2025.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s new toolkit is called “Your Guide to Talking About Project 2025.” While it doesn’t take on all of the Project’s issues, the toolkit provides significant entry points for having conversations about the harm a realized Project 2025 will cause. An AU email alert stated that the “toolkit will provide you with the resources you need to start a conversation about Project 2025 that will resonate with your audience and explain how the people you love will be impacted if it becomes a realty.”
We received permission from Americans United to reprint its toolkit.
What is Project 2025 and how does it connect to Christian Nationalism?
Christian Nationalists are the architects of Project 2025, a 900-page playbook for dismantling the federal government to advance their ultimate goal of toppling American democracy and installing a theocracy that takes away our freedoms and equality. While Project 2025 supporters hope that their playbook can become a reality starting as soon as January 2025, we know that this is also a long-term roadmap that they will keep pushing.
Christian Nationalism is an extremist religious movement that believes in the lie that America was founded as and must remain a Christian country, and that our laws and policies must ensure that white Christians hold onto power and privilege. Christian Nationalists want to impose their narrow religious beliefs on all of us, end LGBTQ+ rights, ban all abortions and control people’s bodies, and use the education system to indoctrinate our children.
How do I talk to people about Project 2025?
Christian Nationalism isn’t the same as Christianity. More Christians oppose than support Christian Nationalism, because it is against their faith and the principles of democracy.
STEP 1. Identify an audience. Who can you persuade?
Far too many people (76%) know little or nothing about Project 2025. Polling shows that the more people learn about Project 2025, the more they oppose it. Successfully warning even one or two people about the threat can make a difference and start a domino effect to raise awareness.
• Who do you know who cares about the issues Project 2025 targets (basically everything)?
• Who has a platform or megaphone?
• Which group chats and text messages include these people?
• Which public gatherings or meetings could you attend and raise awareness of this threat?
STEP 2. Elevate the threat.
Here’s a chilling slice of Project 2025: Within the first few pages of the playbook, its authors declare that LGBTQ+ equality, reproductive freedom, and diversity and equity must be erased as conflicting with Christian Nationalist beliefs.
And the published playbook is simply the public-facing part of the plan. Behind the scenes, we know that the architects of Project 2025 and their supporters are advocating for even harsher policies than what they’ve made public.
American theocracy has a name and a handbook: Project 2025.
America would be unrecognizable if Project 2025 is put into effect.
STEP 3. Connect the threat to your audience — this will impact them.
Project 2025 is coming for you, your family, your friends, your neighbors. Talk about the Project 2025 attacks that will most resonate with your audience. Tell a story about how people you love will be impacted if Project 2025 became reality. Of the options below, what do they care about most?
The toolkit contains breakout sections include the threat to Public Schools, Reproductive Freedom, LGBTQ+ People and their families, Racial Justice, and Immigrant Rights.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS: “In the Project 2025 future, fewer public schools will be welcoming communities where all children can learn, think for themselves, and thrive. There will be no Department of Education to ensure quality education, equal access, and protection of students who are LGBTQ+, Black, Brown or disabled. Private school vouchers will increasingly funnel resources that public schools desperately need into religious schools that would be free to indoctrinate and discriminate.”
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: “In the Project 2025 future, the federal government will make policy based on the narrow religious belief that life begins at conception and that abortion is not medical care, regardless of scientific or medical opinion. The government will end medication abortion, the most accessible form of abortion for most Americans that has been used safely in the United States for more than 20 years. It will take away the guarantee of access to emergency abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. It will ramp up “abortion surveillance” to intimidate pregnant people who need abortion care.”
LGBTQ+: “In the Project 2025 future, what Project 2025 calls ‘transgender ideology’ will be outlawed, so that transgender and gender non-conforming people will not be able to live as their true selves. The federal government will no longer enforce laws that protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination in education, workplaces, healthcare, and social services. The government will funnel taxpayer funds to organizations that promote the Christian Nationalists’ view of ‘biblically based’ family structures and exclude LGBTQ+ families from the definition of family.
RACIAL JUSTICE: “In the Project 2025 future, the federal government will, perversely, turn anti-discrimination laws against people who seek to fight systemic racism and advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. The government will deny that American history has ever been racist, in an echo of the times that Christian Nationalists used the Bible to justify slavery.”
IMMIGRANT RIGHTS: “In the Project 2025 future, a hundred thousand immigrants will be incarcerated. Immigrants will find it harder to get work authorization and contribute to the American economy. America will abandon families fleeing persecution and other threats to their lives, and the federal government will restrict immigration of people that it dislikes. The United States will be a white Christian nation trapped in its borders.”