Right Wing Watch's Peter Montgomery describes the threats posed by Project 2025 and a second Trump term.
Former President Donald Trump, nursing personal grievances against “deep state” officials and White House staff who thwarted his plans to stay in power after his 2020 defeat, has made it clear that his second term would be far more dangerous to American democracy than his first.
The presumptive GOP nominee’s 2024 campaign-trail bombast—including promising to be a dictator on “day one,” to “close the border,” and “drill, drill, drill”—is reminiscent of his 2016 campaign’s authoritarian rhetoric. He has also adopted the rhetoric of fascists in denouncing his political opponents as “vermin” and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” At right-wing events and on the campaign trail, he rallies his followers with promises of revenge against elites who ruined their shared dreams of a second Trump term. “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” he thunders. “I am your retribution.” He has vowed to “obliterate the deep state," throw off “the sick political class that hates our country,” and “come down hard” on media outlets critical of him. In the words of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU professor and author of a book about strongmen in modern history, “He wants to convert American democracy into some kind of autocracy.”