Violence Is Wrong, and So Is Trump

Following the attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s life on July 13, it’s worth keeping in mind the old maxim that two things can be true at the same time.

One truth is that political violence has no place in a democracy. Even in a faltering and deeply flawed one such as ours, violence is wrong and must be condemned. At the same time, Donald Trump remains an existential threat to democracy. Trump, the MAGA movement, and the program for right-wing governance proposed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are all intertwined, and they have not changed. They remain as threatening as ever, and we must not shrink from saying so.

And yet, in the aftermath of the apparent attempted assassination, the mainstream media have exhorted us to embrace a form of collective amnesia, and to forget the dangers of Trumpism, MAGA, and Project 2025. We are told that what’s needed in this hour of peril is national unity, and to achieve unity we must accept a bogus narrative of moral equivalency that asserts that Democrats and Republicans, liberals, progressives, and conservatives, are equally guilty of using hyperbolic and divisive rhetoric for partisan gain.

Whether out of fear of reprisals from Trump should he be reelected or simply because of their fundamental corporate orientation, the mainstream media have attempted to steer the conversation away from the dangers of Project 2025 and MAGA extremism to a one-dimensional discussion of the need for unity. We cannot afford to go along.

Lester Holt’s July 15 interview with President Joe Biden is a prime example of this trend. The 20-minute session began with the NBC anchor pressing Biden to engage in “soul-searching” about a call he had with donors a week earlier, in which he reportedly said it was time to stop talking about his poor performance in the first debate and time to start putting Trump in a “bullseye.”

Holt brushed aside Biden’s weak attempt to defend the comment as a metaphor for focusing on Trump’s election denialism and history of using violent rhetoric to scapegoat immigrants and his political opponents. “This doesn’t sound like you’re turning down the heat,” Holt insisted, before segueing to the issues of Biden’s age and the persistent calls for him to drop out of the race.

Holt also dismissed Biden’s weak attempt to discuss Trump’s policy positions on abortion and climate change, and his selection of the crackpot JD Vance as his running mate. But most lamentable of all, neither Biden nor Holt brought up Trump’s longstanding ties to Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, and the inchoate violence the project holds in store for all those who oppose it.

Although Trump has recently sought to distance himself from Project 2025, and has even gone so far as to claim he knows nothing about it, the former president is nothing if not a polished liar. In fact, Trump served as the keynote speaker at the Heritage Foundation event in April 2022 where the project was launched by the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts.

“Our country is going to hell,” Trump declared in familiar fashion at the event, reprising the theme of American carnage that propelled him to presidency in 2016. From there, he went on to praise Heritage as a “great group… that will lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America and that’s coming. That’s coming.”

As Roberts explained in an appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on July 2, what’s coming with Project 2025 is nothing less than a “second American Revolution” that will be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The details of the “revolution” are set forth in the Project’s 920-page manifesto called the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” Produced by Heritage with input, support, and advice from over 100 conservative groups, the mandate consists of 30 chapters written by leading figures on the American right, who demand sweeping overhauls of virtually every federal agency, from the Department of Defense to the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the Federal Reserve. Although drafted by different authors and directed at disparate agencies, each chapter promotes the common goal of centralizing all federal power in the hands of the president, advancing the so-called “unitary executive theory” long championed by the radical right.

The chapter on the Justice Department—written by Gene Hamilton, the vice president and general counsel of the America First Legal Foundation, a group founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller—calls for the DOJ to be placed under direct presidential supervision. It also calls on the attorney general to pursue an aggressively “anti-woke” legal agenda, using “the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination” against white people under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs.

The chapter on the Office of Personnel Management, written by a trio of authors, including Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025 who served as and Trump’s OPM chief of staff, calls for reinstituting “Schedule F,” a job classification program implemented by Trump in October 2020 but subsequently repealed by President Biden. Under a renewed Schedule F, tens of thousands of federal workers would be stripped of civil service protections, and transformed into “at-will” employees who could be hired and fired solely on the basis of their loyalty to the president.

The chapter on the Department of Homeland Security, written by former Trump cabinet member Ken Cuccinelli, calls for the department to be dismantled and combined with other immigration agencies to create a more powerful force of border security and facilitate Trump’s goal of conducting the largest deportation program in American history.

And the parade of horrors does not end there. Other chapters advise the next Republican president to “stop the war on oil and natural gas” and replace carbon-reduction goals with initiatives to increase fossil-fuel production; “dismantle the administrative state;” eliminate the Department of Education and the National Weather Service (considered an agent of climate-change propaganda); and prohibit the mailing of the abortion pill mifepristone.

Whether out of fear of reprisals from Trump should he be reelected or simply because of their fundamental corporate orientation, the mainstream media have attempted to steer the conversation away from the dangers of Project 2025 and MAGA extremism to a one-dimensional discussion of the need for unity. We cannot afford to go along. As November approaches, remember the old maxim that two things can be true at the same time: Violence is wrong, and so is Trump and all that he stands for.