In the wake of former President Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election, far-right activists began laying the groundwork for his return to office. One of the centerpieces of that plan is something called Project 2025, which aims to gut the federal government and fill it with MAGA activists who will do Trump's bidding.
As Politico recently reported:
They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.
The project, launched last year, is backed by dozens of organizations across the religious right, corporate right, and MAGA world political infrastructure, including powerful institutions like the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, and the American Legislative Exchange Council. One of the key players in this effort is the America First Policy Institute, a far-right "think tank" filled with former Trump administration officials. One of the key players in this effort is the America First Policy Institute, a far-right "think tank" filled with former Trump administration officials.
Last month, the AFPI held a summit called "Laying the Groundwork for the Next America First Administration" at which Brooke Rollins, AFPI president and CEO and a former Trump adviser, admitted that their plan for "an America First takeover of the administrative state" is "revolutionary."
Rollins claimed that the federal government has been taken over by the left because an "ordinary conservative" would never take a job that conflicted with their values whereas an "ordinary leftist" will jump at the chance to infiltrate and "subvert" any institution in order to "turn it fundamentally toward progressive and leftist ends."
"This mechanism unfolds time and again and always to the left's advantage, and always well outside the vision of the American founders and their understanding of civic equality and self governance," Rollins declared. "But conservative candidacies are starting to figure out that we too can organize, we too can engage legal methods of ballot harvesting, we too are realizing that we can leverage a legal regime meant for enforcing inequality to advance the protection of the left's own disfavored classes."
"America first conservatives have figured out that we too can seize control of the administrative state and use it—while also dismantling it—for the proper ends of government and most importantly for our people," Rollins added. "All this really is revolutionary, and I don't use that word lightly. What we're doing is ideologically revolutionary—an America First takeover of the administrative state; operationally revolutionary—an America First confrontation against anti-conservative institutions; and strategically revolutionary—seizing control of a century of labor on behalf of the American people."
