Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
If you frequent Black Twitter, visited a barbershop recently or could hear the BET Awards over your uncle yelling: “If God made something finer than Taraji P. Henson, he must’ve kept it in heaven,” then you know about Project 2025.
According to my cousin’s beautician who does hair in her kitchen, on Jan. 20, 2025, shortly after the inauguration ceremony concludes, President Donald J. Trump will send jack-booted thugs door-to-door to murder anyone who voted for Biden. He will issue an executive order eliminating the letters C, R, T, D, E and I from the English alphabet. At the same time, newly appointed Labor Secretary Marjorie Taylor Greene implements the Bureau of Bound Laborers, Agricultural Careers and Kitchen Jobs Only for Blacks. Volunteers in the mandatory BLACK JOB program will generously donate their labor to help create the greatest economy since 1865.
No, Project 2025 is not the name of the upcoming Jordan Peele film. It is an actual, real-life script that’s been in development for years. Although it has terrified more people than the recently released horror movie about the president who turned into a zombie during a debate (the lead actor was compelling), few people have read it in its entirety.
I did.
To address the rumors, fears and anxiety over the GOP’s latest project, I read all 922 pages of Project 2025 and all the Agenda47 transcripts, the official policy agenda for Trump 2024. Instead of summarizing the entire blueprint for an America with less “economic anxiety,” we specifically looked at the policies and plans that would affect Black Americans.
Here’s what we found:
What is Project 2025?
Project 2025 is Donald Trump’s blueprint for how to make the conservative culture wars a permanent part of the federal government.
Officially, Donald Trump has nothing to do with the 900-plus page “mandate for leadership” known as Project 2025. Technically, the “Conservative Promise” is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, a 50-year-old think tank known for engineering bright ideas like the enduring myth of “welfare queens,” Reagan’s CIA crack cocaine project, and George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts is a pro-Trump culture warrior whose only goal is “institutionalizing Trumpism.” To achieve his objective, he assembled policymakers and MAGA extremists from the first Trump administration. The advisory board is comprised of right-wing organizations like the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, the “anti-woke” 1792 Exchange and Liberty University, “the most conservative college in America.”
The Trump-approved architects divided the Trumpian document into 30 different chapters. They used Trump-affiliated experts to address every part of the federal government and strategize what a Trump presidency would look like. But, to be clear, the 200 Trump-connected policymakers’ blueprint for a Trump presidency has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
If Project 2025 is not Trump’s agenda, does he have one?
Technically, he has some videos.
Because Trump is not a fan of reading or writing, he filmed a series of videos outlining his official plans for a second term. While Trump’s “Agenda47” is a remedial Cliffs Notes version of Project 2025, there are some minor differences.
Project 2025 is a MAGA employee guide for people who will work in the alleged Trump administration. Agenda47, on the other hand, is a political platform aimed at people who will vote for Trump. The former is a policy agenda; the latter is a campaign document for people who get their politics off YouTube.
Think of Project 2025 as the instruction manual for Trump’s Agenda47.
Here are the top 10 scariest things Trump has planned for Black America:
10. Make the government white again.
Every Black person has a cousin or aunt who works in the federal government. While the civilian federal workforce is disproportionately white at the highest levels, in March 2021, nearly half (46.7%) of low-level government employees were non-white. In fact, African-American government workers are overrepresented in the federal government.
This is the “swamp” that Trump wants to drain.
The “fundamental principle” guiding this pro-white project is a plan to embed conservative-minded political appointees (pronounced “white pee pull”) throughout the federal government. However, it is illegal to discriminate based on race, ethnicity or political affiliation. Trump’s deputy secretaries can’t ask prospective workers if they have accepted Donald J. Christ as their lord and savior. So, how do they plan to draft a minion of MAGA workers into the federal workforce?
Project 2025.
Recommended Stories
Currently, about 4,000 presidential appointees work in federal agencies, including 1,212 senior officials, cabinet secretaries and deputies that require Senate confirmation. In most cases, the agencies’ deputy secretaries work with the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) office to fill these leadership positions. In contrast, the rest of the agencies are filled with career-level government employees. Using their “personnel is policy” theme, a second Trump administration will essentially make every government employee a political appointee by using Project 2025 to train all president-appointed, Senate-confirmed leaders. Those leaders will use the MAGA handbook to fill lower-level career positions.
Not only will this employee guide whitewash the entire federal government, but, if you recall, many of Trump’s presidential scandals, including his first impeachment and his mishandling of COVID-19, were sparked by career government workers-turned-whistleblowers.
If you’re not interested in Project 2025’s level of specificity, you can also read Agenda47’s plan to “Dismantle the Deep State.”
9. They will fight racism — against white people.
According to Caucasian race theory, racism against white people is destroying America.
While the federal government has little to do with local school curriculums, Project 2025 alleges that “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms,” which is why the so-called “small government conservatives” plan to defund Black history. Both plans vow to get rid of anti-white indoctrination, affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion and especially the dreaded critical race theory. “Those who subscribe to the theory believe that racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate—necessary, even—making the theory more than merely an analytical tool to describe race in public and private life,” explains Project 2025’s chapter on Education. Ultimately, this is how the MAGA government will fulfill Agenda47’s pledge that “President Trump will cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
For years, Caucasian Americans have also lamented the decrease in white soldiers signing up for the U.S. military, partly because of efforts to increase diversity among military officers. Project 2025’s section on the Department of Defense includes a section titled: “Stop using the Army as a test bed for social evolution.” But instead of saying: “The U.S. Army wants more white people,” they use more subtle language:
“The Army no longer reflects national demographics to the degree that it did before 1974 when the draft was eliminated,” it explains whitely. “Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend ‘training’ seminars about ‘white privilege.’ Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about ‘intersectionality’ and abortion.”
Agenda47 calls it: “Rebuilding America’s depleted military.”
8. They actually have a plan to stop anti-Black racism.
To be fair, Trump and his allies do have a comprehensive plan to address white supremacy homophobia and transgender discrimination. As much as it pains me to admit it, their strategy to erase racism throughout America is pretty brilliant.
They are going to officially erase races.
Nearly every federal agency collects demographic data to examine racial and gender disparities. We know Black men get longer sentences than white men who commit the same crimes because of the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s racial data. The numbers from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office show that Black students are punished at higher rates. Racial prejudice, harassment and retaliation are the most frequently filed workplace discrimination claims, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
A Trump administration would ban many government agencies from collecting racial or demographic data. Not only do they want to discontinue the practice on mortgage applications, government hiring and business loans, but at least 15 of their proposals suggest they “start with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity.” They also want to eliminate nearly every division that fights against discrimination, including the civil rights offices in the Departments of Education, Labor, and Housing and Urban Development.
“The next Administration should work with Congress to amend Title VII to prohibit the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from collecting EEO-1 data and any other racial classifications in employment for both private and public workplaces.”
— Project 2025
Perhaps the most alarming part of the project is the strategy to eradicate the principle of disparate impact.
According to the principle, if the effect of a policy or practice negatively affects a protected group, it is discriminatory. That’s why proving racial bias doesn’t necessarily require intent. For years, conservative groups wanted to repeal an official letter from the Obama administration threatening to withhold funds from any school district that disproportionately punished Black students. Trump’s Department of Education wouldn’t just repeal Obama’s disparate impact threat; it would “eliminate disparate impact as a valid theory of discrimination for race and other bases.”
Trump’s literal policy plan is to stop talking about race.
7. Get tough on (Black) crime, go easy on white cops.
If you’re a person who exists in America, you’ve undoubtedly heard a person who owns a pair of wraparound sunglasses use FBI data to explain why Black people commit more crimes.
While I’ve written extensively about how white supremacists love to misinterpret these FBI statistics (You can read it here, here and here), this is the only agency in the entire federal government where Trump’s policy team wants to collect more racial data. “The National Crime Victimization Survey … is of particular importance,” explains Project 2025. “The demographic information that crime victims provide…enables such reports as Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018’ and finds that police are arresting those who, according to victims, actually commit crimes.”
Yet somehow, they also want to “prohibit the FBI from engaging … in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation.” They will stop the Justice Department’s civil rights division from investigating voter suppression and election interference. Parents of children who commit crimes like mass shootings won’t be subject to prosecution. But Trump’s Agenda47 pledges to wipe out gangs and investigate progressive prosecutors in “Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and every other city where these maniacs have taken over.” Meanwhile, Project 2025 wants to use the federal government to “target violent crime and career criminals” and “use the death penalty” as often as possible, or “until Congress says otherwise through legislation.” And on his first day in office, Trump will terminate every “unnecessary or outdated consent decree” in America – effectively eliminating the most effective tool for monitoring and overseeing corrupt and abusive law enforcement agencies.
The DOJ will re-evaluate whether social media threats, online disinformation and white supremacy should be considered forms of domestic terrorism. I wasn’t dismayed to read that Agenda47 would impose the death penalty on drug dealers. Then I remembered that white people are more likely to sell drugs, but Black people are more likely to get arrested for drugs. I was still happy to read Trump’s promise for a “complete investigation into the use of police state tactics” until I read the rest of the sentence:
“… to arrest conservatives and Christians.”
6. Make Jesus white again.
Much of Project 2025 and Agenda47 policies are based on what they call America’s “Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis.”
While you’re figuring out how American tradition stretches back to biblical times, check out a few of their Jesus-based policies:
- They will pass a law stating: “The only genders recognized by the U.S. government are male and female—and they are assigned at birth.”
- The Department of Labor will recognize that “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest.”
- Trump will delete the terms sexual orientation, gender, diversity, equity, inclusion, equality, equity, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and “any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
- Make abortion impossible (we’ll get to that).
- Allow Christian schools to use federal education funds with no oversight or curriculum regulation.
- Protect churches’ tax-exempt status of churches, even if they engage in discrimination or partisan political activity.
- Exempt Christian colleges, employers and health care facilities from anti-discrimination policies and government regulations.
- Agenda47 also insists that Trump will ”be a champion for the fundamental right to pray in school.”
- The Muslim ban will be reinstated.
5. Put men in control of women’s bodies.
Trump wasn’t lying when he said he wouldn’t pass a nationwide abortion ban. According to Agenda47 and Project 2025, he won’t have to.
While there are 199 mentions of abortion in Project 2025, none of them are about legislation. Instead, they found a loophole that will make it nearly force pregnant women to carry children to term. Not only would they “eliminate the promotion of abortion,” they would essentially cut federal funding from any agency, company or non-government entity that provides access to reproductive health services. They’d defund Planned Parenthood offices that don’t offer abortions. They want to stop government workers and military servicemembers from using their insurance to terminate pregnancies. They want to end international aid to countries that allow them.
Although they claim they want to “leave it up to the states,” they plan to sue states that require employee insurance plans to cover abortions. Not only would they prosecute doctors who terminate abortions, but they plan to sue companies that produce abortion drugs, indict people who get abortion-inducing medication through the mail and “reverse [the FDA] approval of chemical abortion drugs.” In fact, Trump would prohibit the Department of Health and Human Services from referring to abortions as “health care.”
Meanwhile, both projects vow to revoke all vaccine mandates and stop requiring agencies to report the racial statistics for COVID-19 deaths, maternal mortality and infant mortality.
5. Welfare for white people, poverty for the Blacks.
While conservatives claim they want to reduce government spending, their budget cuts will not disrupt the government handouts for white people.
Perhaps their most significant push for white welfare is disguised as “school choice.” Under their plan, people can pay to send their children to disproportionately white private and Christian schools with taxpayers’ dollars. Parents who send children and college students to these schools will also receive tax credits and have access to tax-exempt Education Savings Accounts. Agenda47 will also force education accreditation organizations to certify unaccredited right-wing Christian institutions that can’t meet educational standards. However, Agenda47 will “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left and Marxist maniacs” by stripping liberal colleges of their academic credentials. As they dismantle the “left-wing social-engineering agenda,” they will also provide subsidies for cops, truckers, farmers and real estate developers.
When it comes to Black people, here is a quick list of programs that will be cut or reduced:
- Food stamps: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Women’s and Infant Care and the Summer Food Service Program will be cut. The program will include work requirements.
- NPR: They will defund National Public Radio, Public Broadcast System (PBS) and grants for media outlets whose audiences are “mostly liberal.” (They actually say this)
- School lunches: There’s a whole section on rich kids eating free lunch. People who attend schools in poor districts would still have to qualify individually.
- Student loans: A Trump administration would cut or privatize all federal loan programs. Not only would this end “the fetish of forgiving student loans,” but it would also eliminate income-driven repayment plans.
- Black homeowners: While nearly three out of four white Americans own a home, there has never been a nanosecond in America’s history when the Black homeownership rate reached 50%. A second Trump administration will continue this trend by dismantling programs designed to increase Black homeownership and ending “other uses of special-purpose credit authorities to further equity.” They will also end rental assistance programs.
- Black-owned businesses: Trump”s project 2025 and Agenda 47 would dismantle nearly every federal programs dedicatied to building and strengthening Black owned businesses. It would eliminate a 60-year old program that requires federal contractors to comply with anti-discrimination laws and overhaul the Minority Business Development Agency into a program focused on “the benefit of free markets, the evils of socialism and Communism, and the destructive effect of taxes and regulations on minority businesses.”
“MBDA has the appearance, on its face, of perpetuating racial bias by focusing on minority advancement rather than economic need or other criteria. This is why the Trump Administration proposed eliminating funding for the agency in 2017. Many conservatives ask why the government is funding this activity.”
— Project 2025
4. Black schools will be worse.
Most Black children attend majority-Black schools that are underfunded, even when compared to the poorest white school districts. Part of this disparity is made up by the Department of Education’s Title 1 Program, which “provides supplemental financial assistance to school districts for children from low-income families.”
Not under a Trump administration.
Not only would Trump’s government totally eliminate the Education Department, but it would also make states responsible for funding impoverished school districts. That’s right, they expect the people responsible for unequal school funding to fund them equally. Not to mention how the repeated emphasis on “school choice” will increase these funding disparities.
It’s not just K-12 schools and majority Black institutions. With no Department of Education, no one can monitor states that underfund HBCUs. And Trump’s slimmed-down Department of Agriculture wouldn’t be able to enforce federal funding for already-underfunded Black land-grant institutions. Project 2025 will cut federal funding for institutions — including HBCUs — that offer minority-based scholarships, grants or any program based on their definition of diversity, equity and inclusion. Agenda47, on the other hand, will punish “schools that persist in explicit, unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity” with fines that equal their endowment. Under a Trump administration, “area studies” programs — majors like African American studies, women’s studies, etc., would also be defunded. In contrast, “programs that teach about free markets and economics” would continue to promote capitalism.
“President Trump will veto any effort to weaponize or nationalize civics education,” Agenda47 explains. “And he will create a credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values and support the American Way of Life.”
To be fair, racism is the most “American Way of Life.”
3. They want to go backward.
Project 2025 and Agenda47 don’t just plan to advance a new conservative agenda, they also want to reverse any gains toward equality and justice.
Aside from eliminating agency-level civil rights offices, they will repeal policies on LGBTQ rights, gender-affirming care and racial discrimination. They will rescind the data collection provision that creates access to capital for Black-owned businesses. The “diversity visa lottery” will also be repealed, as will nearly every environmental regulation. Every loan program in the Department of Education will be abolished, not modified. Medicare policies that benefit individual users instead of corporations will be reversed. Federal contractors will no longer have to pay “fair market wages.”
They will “immediately end the Biden Administration’s Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) policies” that prevent real estate appraisers from discriminating against Black home sellers. The HUD regulations that address housing inequality in segregated suburbs will be reversed because, according to Agenda47, it is just another “‘equity’ plan to impose the left’s Marxist housing agenda on your communities.” Trump will also repeal provisions that protect Black schoolchildren from the school-to-prison pipeline.
“President Trump will end the leftist takeover of school discipline and the juvenile system. He will order the Departments of Justice and Education to overhaul federal standards on disciplining minors to get violent thugs out of our children’s classrooms so they can get the professional help they need. When troubled youth are out of control, the consequences must be ‘swift, certain, and strong.’
— Agenda47
Interestingly, neither project included a plan to strengthen the dismantled portions of the Voting Rights Act or any other civil rights legislation.
2. The quiet part, loudly.
Because disguising racism is sometimes impractical, Agenda47 and Project 2025 don’t try to hide all of the racism with dog whistles.
For instance, an entire section labeled “The Equity Agenda” accused the Biden administration of a dastardly plan to “create several new offices to promote ‘equity.”
“These policies “must be forcefully opposed and reversed,” reads Project 2025. “The next conservative administration should take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).” But Trump’s MAGAmuffins wouldn’t just end DEI initiatives. Instead, they would “treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative…as per se grounds for termination of employment.”
And apparently, there are places where the “homeless, drug addicts and the dangerously deranged” are being housed in “luxury hotels.” Fortunately, Agenda47 includes a plan to relocate them into tent cities, which are definitely not internment camps.
Trump’s approach to Black protesters is even more straightforward. Like Daniel Perry, who was pardoned after being convicted of killing a protester, Trump proposes that murdering members of Black Lives Matter should be considered an act of self-defense.
“I will also appoint 100 U.S. Attorneys who will be the polar opposite of the Soros District Attorneys who are destroying the rule of law in America,” he explained. “As part of this effort, there should be a federal inquiry into the Soros prosecutor in Austin, Texas, who charged a veteran with murder for defending himself against a threat by a heavily armed member of a radical left mob … I will order the Department of Justice to establish a task force on protecting the right to self-defense, which is under siege nationwide.”
The best part of Agenda47 is how many variations of the n-word Trump uses, including “barbarians,” “Marxists,” “gangbangers,” “violent thugs in classrooms,” “unhinged maniacs” on street corners, “lunatics” and “wild maniacs.” And, while Trump’s plan to create regulation-free “Freedom Cities” where white people and corporations can do as they please, this plan is not that unique.
I just call it “America.”
1. Project 2025 is not Trump-dependent.
One of the underreported aspects of Project 2025 is that it is not just dependent on Trump’s election; many of the provisions require Republican majorities in the Senate and House.
He can’t appoint his acolytes inside the federal government without Senate approval. Even if he could, cabinet appointees and deputy secretaries can’t repeal already-existing laws. And because the House of Representatives controls the country’s pursestrings, any defunding strategy requires congressional approval. Conversely, a Republican legislative majority can legislate many of the parts of this pro-white agenda into reality. But of course, stopping the GOP from achieving the ultimate act of caucasity would require a less cowardly group of progressive Democrats.
Project 2025 and Agenda47 are not four-year plans but guidebooks for making elections inconsequential. This is why down-ballot voting is just as important as a presidential choice and why voting in primaries is crucial to intraparty politics. It disproves the idiotic notion that “both parties are the same.” More importantly, how we turn out against the effort to reverse the progress we’ve made will ultimately reveal more about our ability to organize and fight than Trump’s MAGA agenda.
But if we f*ck around …
We will definitely find out.
Michael Harriot is a writer, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His NY Times bestseller Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America is available in bookstores everywhere.