> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.
It’s important to remember that while the President issues the orders, there are other actors behind the scenes writing them for him. They have goals that go beyond a single man considering ideological crimes.
I'm not sure how important that is to remember. The president is issuing the orders. The president is chief executive of the country.
The president can't pawn off responsibility to some White House staffer or think tank. An executive order is the president's order.
Is it useful to look at the people who wrote or lobbied for the order? Perhaps if you want to want to understand the context of an order. But none of that context mitigates the president's responsibility for any order. At the end of the day, it is a single person exercising their sole authority to issue executive orders.
Oh, no, it's super important. If this was some deranged nutto writing and issuing orders, it'd die with him. But he's just the face of it all, and the thing that scares me the most is that all the enablers and puppet masters are already planning and laying groundwork for when Cheeto Jesus drops dead. We've already lost the battle, let's not lose the war.
> the enablers and puppet masters are already planning and laying groundwork for when Cheeto Jesus drops dead. We've already lost the battle, let's not lose the war.
Their success in some way is tied to trump right now. Nobody else seems to captivate his base in the same way, and they've made most of this about a man and less about a movement. So it's entirely possible this dies when he does.
Depends how the next generation of MAGAs works. The republican party is full of them who are backing Trump all the way. The only opposition seem to be bond traders.
The great thing about wannabe dictators is they don't allow the new generation the space to grow and take over, so there's no clear line of succession (Vance doesn't have it yet)
But the democrats seem completely at a loss, and the mid terms are only 18 months away.
The civil war between the competing factions behind the scenes when he kicks it should at least make for some good entertainment. So we have that to look forward to.
I expect it to make the film Death of Stalin look like a depiction of an amiable, staid, and sensible process purely in service of the public good, by comparison.
Do you really believe that there were no enablers and puppet masters before this administration? Serious question, and this has nothing to do with claims that Biden was mentally unfit for the office.
Even if there were, what is your point? It seems to me that lot of people have never heard of “two wrongs don’t make one right” and resort to whataboutism as if they are making some thoughtful comment. And no, “just asking questions” isn’t a great point either.
My view (maybe shared by GP) is that while Trump deserves a lot of the blame, he's just a figure head over the rest of the republican party.
It's not like Trump is sitting on the toilet writing executive orders or tweets. These are initiatives championed by the elite conservative leadership, they just have a convenient "bad guy" that the rest of the country can focus their hatred on.
Don't think for a second that Vance wouldn't continue digging the same holes if Trump dropped dead.
> My view (maybe shared by GP) is that while Trump deserves a lot of the blame, he's just a figure head over the rest of the republican party.
Exactly this.
Debated at length in the 2016 election cycle and onward since. The Republican establishment didn't (and doesn't) love Trump as a politician, but they love that he puts them in power, and they have been trying to figure out how to reproduce that kind of popularity in a candidate since (and largely failing). He's the best bet of the far-right folks behind the scenes to implement their policy, and he doesn't give a shit about all that stuff as long as he can enrich himself.
The one silver lining is the bit about not being able to reproduce his popularity - which I assume is why they've all been so aggressive in trying to remake the federal government. They've got until the midterms to grab all the power they can. It seems likely they will face a backlash and a lot of seats will swing, so their focus is on removing the teeth from congress, while state level actors try and push through enough new laws that they can prevent loss of seats in the midterms.
They have more or less done it already. Most districts are firmly in control of republicans. The congress is bound to the desires of the extreme right wing. Even the threat of impeachment is now a laughing matter from Trump after 2 such attempts going to nothing.
Yep - they just have to elect enough candidates who will let Trump run amok. The majority doesn't need to agree with Trump, just enough people to avoid voting (a much smaller number). That's what we're seeing now.
Then they just have to keep that small number of people in power through whatever means. Even if congress swings enough to have anti-Trump votes, he'll just ignore whatever Congress says, and force it into the courts (which are packed increasingly with Trump friendly judges). That's how it happens.
It doesn't reduce the responsibility but means that this is a wider agenda, not just something Trump comes up with, and so it doesn't end even if Trump is deposed.
I'm pretty sure with Trump this time around it is much less the case. In his first admin there are endless stories of the "Adults" in the room keeping him in check.
This time around he was sure to only fill his cabinet with yes men, so no one could keep him reigned in.
Frankly I haven't seen any attempt to counter this type of opinion. Do you have any counter-arguments against whatever the Trump administration is doing right now to the US government and its citizens being out of the Project 25 playbook?
[edit] Downvote all you want, but please tell me why I'm wrong.
I don't see how you can so easily dismiss discussion of P2025's role in this administration as just Reddit stuff.
Around 30 of this administration's cabinet members and agency heads are the authors of the parts of P2025 that covered the subject of the cabinet position they now hold or the agency they now head, and their actions are closely following the plan they laid out in P2025.
Trump has no idea what he is doing, it has been very clear in interviews.
In the first admin, it was the adults in the room, the thing is, it's not yes men this time...it's the villians in the room. Trump is being handed EOs that he doesn't have a clue about.
For all the talk about P2025 and denial of any relation to it, they have done roughly 50% of the actions in the project already with more on the way. ~2/3rds of all his EOs have been in the plan. Virtually everyone related to the project is now in the admin - the head of the FCC literally wrote the 'FCC' section and boy is it an attack on everything the EFF holds dear.
I think what is notable is that it seems to have gotten more bold - the plan called for reducing USAID, not killing it for example.
> Trump is being handed EOs that he doesn't have a clue about.
Probably like every president before him.
No president like CEOs can know everything about the organization they head. They are mostly the face and mouthpiece, and depend on chiefs and VPs to tell them what needs to be done according to the agenda that CEO or president has put forth.
Definitely, Biden certainly as well.
I would argue that this is mostly a modern thing. EOs were far less common in the past and I would argue that far younger presidents often were far more in control of their admin. At the very least, they understood the paper they were signing.
Exactly. Trump is practically illiterate and is being handed things to sign. His original ideas that were pushed back on by his advisors in his first term were a different sort of idea, things like, "Why can't we just force that country to do what we want, we're the USA, we're the most powerful, we could just bomb them."
I just want to clarify that you're responding to someone who is saying that there are "people behind Trump" - not his "advisors" aka "yes men" but rather people with lots of money and influence, but behind the scenes. This might be Peter Thiel or Curtis Yarvin or The Heritage Group. I'm not sure, and it's hard to know that for sure. But it's a bit of a separate concept from the actual Cabinet Members and what may have put checks on him in his first term.
I've seen many people draw a comparison between Trump and Hitler (because of course - people compare everybody to Hitler).
But what I don't think people remember is that a guy like Hitler didn't just show up and "make a dictatorship". He was an opportunistic guy who showed up when Germany's democratic, constitutional republic was weakened by a poorly-functioning congress, and most of the actual power was concentrated in the executive branch. When the time came, Hitler wasn't the one who passed the Reichstag Fire Decree allowing him to suspend the freedom of the press and jail his political opposition. That law was passed by president Hindenburg.
Hitler didn't create a dictatorship. He was handed one on a silver platter - by an ailing 85 year old man with too much power.
"It’s important to remember that while the President issues the orders, there are other actors behind the scenes writing them for him. They have goals that go beyond a single man considering ideological crimes."
All dictators/authoritarians have a whole layer of very capable people under them that will implement orders from above without thinking about ethics or morality. But they will do a good job. Hitler had people like Himmler and Speer, Stalin had Beriya and many others (don't know names). The interesting thing is that these people will also do well in democracies. A lot of ex-nazis in Germany turned into good democratic people (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Filbinger). You also have these people in companies where for example layoffs are done in the most humiliating way.
Every American owes it to themselves to familiarize themselves with the project and its aims, because a number of its authors are the ones wielding power right now.
Once I stated reading that dashboard (a couple of weeks ago) I could not stop. It's a real page turner. My favourite moment (spoiler):
> Abolish the Federal Reserve and move to a "free banking" system.
Don't let that reveal dint your interest. In the Handmaids Tale such a long list of horrors would have bored the reader, but in the Administrations blueprint for the USA that already has 41% of the items off in just 100 days it's riveting reading.
I can resist pointing out another highlight for me:
> Lessen child labor regulations to allow "teenage workers" to work "inherently dangerous jobs".
In sure Project 2025 is sustained to become a true classic.
It's insane to me how many people argued with me that Project 2025 was democrat propaganda to smear Trump. Both online here on Hacker News and in person.
The thing is, people are expecting that campaign promises are pointless blathering. That's what led many people to believe it will be just the same this time.
No, this happens all too often and was successful too many times to bee random. Moderate republicans used this as a tactic for decades. They always claim the thing that is happening is not happening, they always claim that opposition is paranoid.
This is just people who want republicans to win and either support the project or who do not care about whatever one way or the other protecting the party.
No, they were arguing these things are so obviously bad and wrong, Trump would never actually do these and these aren't his platform. They're just conspiracy theories by Democrats to slander Trump. So many people and news orgs kept repeating Trump's lies about how he doesn't know anything about Project 2025 and its totally unrelated to what he wants to do.
> It’s “real” in the same way as Steele Dossier was real.
> As far as I can tell it’s just a smear device along the lines of “when did you stop beating your wife”, or fake “dossier”, or “Russian collusion”
And even if you were dumb enough to think "this is just puffery, he wouldn't do things this terrible", why are you voting for the guy arguing he's going to do terrible things?!
They're fully aware of Project 2025 because they have been paying 100% full attention to people like Trump who have been claiming they never heard of it and that it was Democratic propaganda. So they know exactly what it is because we told them so, we told them so, we told them so, we told them so, and we told them so again and again, and every time they just denied it harder and harder. Now they're pretending they are surprised and never heard of it either.
How do you suppose such evidence could be procured? I understand the burden of proof in terms of claims, but this is one that is, by design, difficult to gather substantial evidence for. Particularly without legal/criminal repercussions, and that's in good times when they are at least making an attempt to follow the law.
Is it? I mean it wasn't a particularly spicy statement - did anyone actually think the president wrote any of the plans he's greenlighting / signing?
If anything, I was kinda confused why he called that into question, the job of the president is to decide whose plan is getting executed at any given time, not actually do the planning himself
As with the Project for a New American Century douchebags, they just straight-up told us the bad things they were going to do to the country, and now they're doing them, and people still manage to be all, "hey, where'd all this stuff come from?!".
What was widely reported was that he disavowed Project 2025. Those denials were seldom challenged, nor were the many Heritage Foundation related people that were also in Trump's inner circles reported upon in any critical way.
There is no reason at all it shouldn't have been the only thing they'd bring up when talking to or about Trump during the campaign. Instead, they let "oh, yeah, never heard of it" slide.
I don’t agree with the premise. Should the news have refused to talk about his tariff plans or promises of personal retribution so they could reserve the space for Project 2025?
Dude can barely string two sentences together— can't tell when a photo has been annotated and has no idea what Signal is. Thinks "groceries" is an old-fashioned word. It's pretty clear at this point that it's others behind the curtain running this show.
>It's pretty clear at this point that it's others behind the curtain running this show.
Honestly, the fact that he's now surrounded on all sides by Curtis Yarvin acolytes should have us deeply concerned. I fear someone with that ideology who's maliciously competent coming to power.
> It's pretty clear at this point that it's others behind the curtain running this show.
It doesn't matter who else is running the show in his name in the same way that it didn't matter who else was running the Biden administration. He's more than just culpable by association. Stop trying to infantilize the man. He's old but he's nowhere a stupid as everyone makes him out to be. He is callous and vindictive and expects loyalty in all things. He hates all forms of liberalism including the Republican ideals of liberal democracy and believes himself to be above the law. It's his administration, even if he doesn't seem to know about or even care about all the details.
Oh for sure, I don't think any of this lets him off the hook; the concern is more that the movement is significantly greater than just him. When he's out of the picture there's a whole machine ready to slot in the next guy and keep on the agenda.
By that logic wouldn't any of the presidents since Regan be fulfilling project 2025s "Mass deportations". Trump admin is behind even the previous admins total deportations at this point in the term. And they're being extremely lenient to businesses who hire illegal immigrants (which breaks the law) and even encouraging it.
It’s important to remember that while the President issues the orders, there are other actors behind the scenes writing them for him. They have goals that go beyond a single man considering ideological crimes.