Evil Think Tank Plots Trump Second Term. No, Not The One Behind Project 2025.

AFPI might be worse than the Heritage Foundation.

Here is the story of two conservative policy institutes. Does that not sound like the opening to the worst fairytale that ever slid from the quill of Hans Christian Andersen?

The first institute is the Heritage Foundation, that rat’s nest of Donald Trump sycophants with parasitic brain infections that has gained a great deal of notoriety during the presidential campaign thanks to its heavily promoted Project 2025. That blueprint for a second Trump presidency, which read like something an AI machine might have spit out after ingesting Mein Kampf as a prompt, earned so much negative public attention that most of Trump World loudly pretended that President Brainworms would have nothing to do with it. Heritage, taking the clue, has stopped talking about it quite as publicly, even while its architects remain poised to work for a second Trump administration.

The second institute is the America First Policy Institute, a much newer organization that heeded the Trump campaign’s warnings a year ago to shut the fuck up about its very similar plans to turn America into Stupid Hungary. So, for example, no one from AFPI has been following the example of Heritage head idiot and human thumb Kevin Roberts, who publicly threatened the Left that his Project 2025-induced revolution would only become bloody if we had the temerity to oppose it.

That does not mean, however, that AFPI has stopped working and planning and very quietly sending some of its staffers to work on Trump’s transition team. Now, according to The New York Times, AFPI has “installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again.”

It is good to be Project 2025 with a lot less public yapping:

But its vision is no less Trumpist: It calls for halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.

Could we just, like, trap these people in the Red Room from The Haunting of Hill House, where they can spend eternity deluding themselves that they are living in the inhumane theocracy of their dreams, while the rest of us continue living our lives and leaving other people the fuck alone?

It also goes significantly further than Project 2025 in one key area, calling for the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees — a strategy supporters believe will allow Mr. Trump and his aides to root out career staff members who they believe stood in his way in his first administration.

Trump’s campaign slogan really should be something like “Trump 2024: A system of economy-destroying tariffs and corrupt political patronage systems from the 1890s for the new millennium!”

Granted that’s a little wordy for a bumper sticker, but we’re suckers for accuracy.

Regarding the “rooting out” of career government employees, Heritage this week published what amounts to a McCarthyite hit list naming career government bureaucrats it believes shanked Trump’s immigration agenda during his first term. The list came complete with bios and each person’s political donation history, so that the frothing and rabid wingnuts who think of immigrants as an invasion force now know that, for example, the associate counsel from US Citizenship and Immigration Services donated a grand total of $73 to Bernie Sanders during the entire 2016 campaign cycle. What does Heritage think its insane followers will do with this information, drop this woman a friendly Christmas card?

Now imagine what a plan that has been described as going further than Project 2025 might look like if the people implementing it are equally if not more fanatical.

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A lot of AFPI folks have long been deeply embedded in Trump World. One of its sister organizations is working on get-out-the-vote initiatives for the campaign. Its legal arm is led by Pam Bondi, one of the less savory characters (and that’s saying something) from Trump’s first term. Bondi has been busy filing lawsuits related to voting in battleground states as part of Trump’s plan to cause chaos and hope it leads to his somehow being declared the election’s winner.

One of AFPI’s leaders is Linda McMahon, co-chair of Trump’s transition team and former head of the Small Business Administration during his first term. McMahon this week was named in a lawsuit alongside her husband Vince and his organization, World Wrestling Entertainment. The defendants are accused of allowing the sexual abuse of young boys by WWE’s ringside announcer, Melvin Phillips Jr., in the 1980s and 1990s. Whoa, someone tell the Republican base we found those “groomers” they are always complaining about!

In a normal presidential campaign, “campaign’s transition team leader accused of turning blind eye to child sexual abuse” would be a huge scandal. In this campaign, as with all Trump campaigns, there is enough other noise that this will get drowned out.

Eleven more days and Allah willing, these people can crawl back into their burrows and hibernate for another four years like the world’s most evil cicadas.

[New York Times]

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