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free trade
Project 2025 and the Year It Made
Over the past year, Trump has followed the plans laid out by Project 2025 almost to the letter, leaving the rest of the world reeling.
Jan 03, 2026
The year 2025 was marked by the Trump shock: an unprecedented wave of extreme brutality, unapologetic nationalism, and unrestrained extractivism that shook the world as never before since 1945.
To better understand what made it all possible, and how to confront it in the future, we must turn to its roots. Namely, to Project 2025, the 920-page report published by the Heritage Foundation, Washington’s most influential conservative think tank, in 2023. From one state department to another (security, immigration, education, energy, trade, etc.), the report outlines the strategy to follow after taking office, targeted for January 2025. It even specifies the content and timetable for executive orders, the presidential decrees signed publicly and in rapid succession by Donald Trump since his inauguration.
The report drew on the work of hundreds of conservative experts—as they call themselves—brought together by the foundation, which is lavishly funded by corporations and billionaires. What stands out most when reading the report today is the degree of technical, political, and ideological preparation behind the Trump administration. Over the past year, Trump has followed the plans laid out by Project 2025 almost to the letter. The new National Security Strategy published by the White House on December 5 reads almost like a copy-and-paste of the project.
Revealingly, Project 2025 identifies several political and ideological enemies. First, there are the globalist liberals, staunch advocates of absolute free trade and unfettered globalization, who are portrayed as useful idiots. Easy to defeat and despise, these liberal elites care little for deindustrialization, job losses, and the destruction of local communities and family ties. In contrast, the proud conservatives behind Project 2025 claim to protect these communities. They do so first by asserting US power in the world, relying heavily on tariffs and all-out extractivism: outright asset seizures (Ukraine, Panama, Greenland), imposing military tribute on Europe, and doubling down on fossil fuels. Next, they champion hard work, family values, and respect for natural and cultural hierarchies. The scourge of « fatherlessness » (growing up without a father, a situation that particularly affects ethnic minorities) is repeatedly condemned and blamed on liberal narratives that deny traditional gender roles and undermine the traditional family.
In reality, the true enemy of the nationalist and extractivist right embodied by Trumpists is the global social-democratic left. That left can win, provided it learns to organize and move beyond the liberal ruts of the past.
But Project 2025 is mainly concerned with an enemy it deems much more dangerous: internationalist socialists and their plans for a global superstate. The fear may seem laughable, as Trumpists sometimes tend to conflate mild-mannered European social democrats with fearsome Marxist revolutionaries. Yet it must be taken seriously. First, because supporters of democratic socialism such as Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani have become very popular among young Americans over the past decade.
Even more importantly, the authors of Project 2025 seem genuinely alarmed by international debates on taxation, climate reparations, or reforms of the global financial system that have gained traction since the 2008 crisis and the Paris Agreement of 2015. They loathe Brazil’s proposal to create a global tax on billionaires just as much as they resent the significant issuance of international currency (Special Drawing Rights by the International Monetary Fund) that occurred after the crises of 2008 and 2020. All the more so because the US will soon lose its veto power over such decisions as its share of global GDP declines.
A particularly telling section concerns trade, which takes the very unusual form in Project 2025 of two chapters setting out opposing positions. The main chapter advocates an avalanche of tariffs closely resembling what Trump implemented in 2025. Like the US president, the author seems to be under no illusions about the extent of industrial job creation this could bring. In general, the report displays little empathy for the poorest and relies on an instrumental, paternalistic, and hierarchical approach to the working-class vote. The main objective of tariffs seems to be to generate revenue for the federal government and to continue dismantling the progressive tax system—a project shared by liberals and conservatives since the 1980s, though conservatives have always maintained a lead in this area.
Project 2025’s second chapter on trade opposes such a strategy. The dissenting conservative author fears that by so openly repudiating the principles of free trade, the door may eventually be opened to global socialist planning. In future, opponents of the market will use this precedent to regulate trade based on social and climate criteria: the ultimate nightmare for conservatives. In the end, Trumpists opted for protectionism for both electoral and financial reasons, but the fear of a socialist drift is clearly acknowledged.
In reality, the true enemy of the nationalist and extractivist right embodied by Trumpists is the global social-democratic left. That left can win, provided it learns to organize and move beyond the liberal ruts of the past. Trumpist brutality is a sign of weakness. The US is losing its grip on the world. Across the Atlantic, some believe they can escape this decline by brandishing weapons and instructing Europeans to preserve their racial purity to maintain the Western alliance. All they will do is further tarnish their country’s image and convince the rest of the world that the future will increasingly be written without them.
This column was first published by Le Monde.
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Hands Off—Yes! But What Are the Working-Class Demands?
Unified and spirited opposition to Trump's destructive rampage is exactly what's needed, but a successful movement will not grow without a vision and proposals to support it.
Apr 09, 2025
On Saturday, April 5th, fifty-seven years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered across the country to challenge Trump’s attack on, well, just about everything!
I went to the rally in New Jersey, where speaker after speaker had us chanting “Hands off our Social Security!” “Hands off our Medicare!” Hands off our Medicaid!” “Hands off our Abortion Rights!” and so on. This was the national theme developed by the Democratic Party.
A few protestors in the back chanted “Hands off Gaza,” which was not on the agenda. But they soon retreated into silence. One woman carrying a large Trump 2024 banner walked near the edge of the crowd of about 2,000 and took on a few angry shouts, but there was no confrontation. Tensions rose enough, however, that the chair of the gathering did feel obliged to remind us that this was a peaceful, non-violent gathering.
As I looked around at the well-healed demonstrators from our liberal town, I couldn’t help but imagine adding a few other items to the list: “Hands off our IRA’s!” “Hands off the Stock Market!” “Hands off Free Trade!” I’m sure that would have been right on the money.
But why was I raining on this parade? After all, these were my neighbors, good caring people who turned up on this rainy Saturday because they truly want to make our society a better place.
My mind went negative because it was crystal clear that the rally was the opposite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to the established order that enabled Jim Crow and persistent poverty. Dr. King asked us to envision massive changes to the status quo. Today, we were chanting to defend the status quo that Trump is surely taking a wrecking ball to.
The Democrats who put the rallies together across the country missed a moment to present an alternative vision. This was a chance to announce new proposals to tame runaway inequality, the growth of which has undermined the Democratic Party’s coalition, and to provide job insecurity, the lack of which has given MAGA a foothold in the first place.
Instead, we got pure opposition, spirited to be sure. Its only virtue was to provide collective support to those of us who have been stunned by the revanchist thrust of Trumpism. We can’t believe what is happening and we need each other to shore up our spirits. It was a chance, feeble but necessary, to show some form of communal defiance.
But a successful movement will not grow without a vision and proposals to support it. Why didn’t the Democrats do that? Because, except for a few fellow-travelers like Bernie Sanders, their vision is deeply tied the status quo BT (Before Trump).
That set of BT institutions was working well for the top 20 percent of the income distribution, especially those with college and post-graduate degrees, including just about everyone at our town’s demonstration.
It was not working for those whose jobs had been shipped abroad to China, Mexico, or elsewhere, and who watched their communities then crumble.
It also wasn’t working so well for those who lost their jobs to finance Wall Street stock buybacks and outrageous CEO salaries.
And it wasn’t working well at all for those working at poverty wages, especially immigrant workers, risking life and limb with little protection.
In short, the Democratic Party, long the party of the working class, has no compelling vision today because it has left behind a big chunk of the working-class. As analysts debate what went wrong, they should perhaps ask why the Democrats are so reluctant to support a working-class populist agenda.
The answer lies in how it became the party of the established order and therefore was unable to provide a vision that makes sense to working people who have been screwed by the established order. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
And that’s a damn shame. Because we want and need to be inspired by a positive vision. But that will only happen when the Democrats take their hands off their imaginations and ours.
We need to return to the days when the vision was FDRs for four freedoms, not four family tax credits to support the “opportunity society.”
The Democrats still have a chance, the field is open, but really? That is not likely to happen until it is challenged by a new independent party that stands for substantive change, created by and for working people.
I’ll be demonstrating for that.
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Why Aren't You Supporting the Trump Tariffs?
Progressives and Democrats need a trade policy that makes sense, resonates with working people, and proves they understand the economy better than a know-nothing President Trump.
Apr 07, 2025
On this question, you can take your pick:
- They will lead to a destructive trade war.
- They will lead to a massive economic depression, like the 1930s.
- They will make prices and unemployment rise at the same time, like in the 1970s.
- They will disappear our savings and pensions as the stock market craters, like in 1929.
- And to save democracy, WE SHOULD NEVER SUPPORT TRUMP ON ANYTHING!
The United Autoworkers (UAW), one of the most progressive unions in the country, isn’t buying any of this. For now, it fully supports the Trump tariffs. As the UAW puts it:
This is a long-overdue shift away from a harmful economic framework that has devastated the working class and driven a race to the bottom across borders in the auto industry. It signals a return to policies that prioritize the workers who build this country—rather than the greed of ruthless corporations.
For more than thirty years, the UAW and other unions and progressives have fought free trade deals like NAFTA, adopted in 1994, which in the succeeding decades have decimated American working-class jobs and communities, especially in the industrial areas of the Midwest.
The argument against free trade was simple: Allowing corporations to flee easily and rapidly to low-wage countries put them in a competitive race to the bottom in pursuit of cheaper wages and less costly working conditions. This was especially true in the better-paid U.S. manufacturing industries. Company negotiators threatened job relocation or reductions in virtually every collective bargaining effort with industrial unions.
Corporations said it again and again: “Accept wage and benefit concessions or we’ll move the plant to Mexico.” For labor unions that was a lose-lose proposition. Take less money and benefits and undercut your standard of living or hold fast and lose your job.
The Democrats, led by President Bill Clinton, put together enough votes to pass the deal, and they have been paying the price ever since. Sherrod Brown, the former U.S. Senator from Ohio, says that what he repeatedly heard in his failed senatorial campaign last year was how the Democrats destroyed jobs via NAFTA.
Allowing corporations to easily relocate abroad has been a key element of the neoliberal march to rising inequality. Free trade involves a trade-off, it was argued. More workers would get jobs in growing export industries than would be lost in manufacturing. And the rise of cheap imports would lower the prices of goods workers bought, effectively giving them a pay raise.
Of course, the reality was that the new non-union working-class jobs pay far less than the unionized ones that were lost, and the working-class knows it. And while cheaper goods from Walmart likely offset some of the material sting, moving down the socio-economic ladder is painful and contrary to the American dream.
After years of railing against this Faustian bargain, progressives are now watching Trump claim he is protecting U.S. industries through massive tariffs. The goal, he sometimes says, is to bring back the jobs that were lost.
Progressive Democrats are stuck with a painful dilemma. If they oppose the tariffs across the board, they will be siding with the financiers and CEOs who have profited wildly from low or no tariffs, and have ushered in runaway inequality and increasing job insecurity. (See Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
But Democrats on the left so detest Trump, that it’s nearly impossible for them to join with the UAW to support the tariffs. Unless a new path is forged, progressives will find themselves in an unholy alliance with the Wall Street neoliberals and against the working-class, sounding the death knell for any kind of progressive-worker alliance to build an alternative to Trumpism.
What is a Progressive Trade Policy?
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is attacking the Trump tariffs by playing his Vermont card, since the state has extensive economic ties to Canada. His key is focusing on working-class jobs:
Given Vermont’s long-established economic ties with our Canadian neighbor, the impact on our state will be even greater. We need a rational and well-thought-out trade policy, not arbitrary actions from the White House. I will do everything possible to undo the damage that Trump’s tariffs are causing working families in Vermont and across the country.
But just what would a “well-thought-out trade policy” look like?
Boarder Adjustment Tax
The goal of a worker-oriented trade policy is to take wages out of competition. That could be most easily done through a tariff called a border adjustment tax. The tax covers the difference in wages between the low-wage and high-wage workers, something that is easily calculated. If wages are nearly identical there would be no need for a tariff.
Targeted Tariffs
When John Deere and Company announced last year it was moving approximately 1,000 jobs to Mexico, in effect to finance higher CEO pay and stock buybacks for Wall Street investors, Trump threatened to impose a 200 percent tariff on any subsequently imported Deere products from that country. That sent the exact message workers wanted to hear: You move our jobs away to fatten your pockets, you get hammered.
Hard to argue with that proposition, but the Democrats did just that. Instead of dealing with how the job shift to Mexico was being used to finance stock giveaways to Wall Street, they rolled out Mark Cuban, who called the tariffs “insane,” because they would hurt Deere.
What About Countries with High-wage Labor?
Workers in export industries in northern Europe, Canada, and Japan have wages and benefits as high or higher than U.S. workers. What’s the rationale, for example, to put tariffs on German-made cars? One reason would be to equalize tariffs in each country and in the long run move them towards zero. The other is to encourage them to increase production in the US.
Ironically, about 5,600 German corporations already have been moving to the U.S. as they seek access to bigger markets and lower production costs. As many set up in low-wage states in the U.S. South, they avoid the higher labor costs in Germany. Also, they have been taking advantage of lavish subsidies as states compete to attract jobs. Energy is also cheaper in the U.S. and transportation costs are lowered. And finally, Germany makes certain high-quality products, especially in green energy, that aren’t yet produced here.
This suggests that a “well thought-out trade policy,” a la Sanders, with Germany should be the result of negotiations, not unilateral actions.
But Trump doesn’t do “well-thought-out,” which means his tariffs are a colossal mess, perhaps even the product of quickly produced ChatGPT hallucinations.
Yet opposing Trump across the board isn’t a well-thought-out approach either. It leads to the tone-deaf reactions of people like Mark Cuban that protect the status quo and avoid dealing with actual job loss caused by plant relocations to low-wage countries and the impact of such threats on collective bargaining. Which, needless to say, is the real problem.
The UAW is trying to make the distinction between supporting pro-worker tariffs and opposing other anti-worker Trump actions. As UAW president Shawn Fain recently said:
But ending the race to the bottom also means securing union rights for autoworkers everywhere with a strong National Labor Relations Board, a decent retirement with Social Security benefits protected, healthcare for all workers including through Medicare and Medicaid, and dignity on and off the job. The UAW and the working class in general couldn’t care less about party politics; working people expect leaders to work together to deliver results. The UAW has been clear: we will work with any politician, regardless of party, who is willing to reverse decades of working-class people going backwards in the most profitable times in our nation’s history.
For progressive Democrats UAW’s approach will be hard swallow. First, it dilutes the all-out attack on Trump for every action he takes, each of which is viewed as an existential threat to democracy. And secondly, it forces the Democrats to deal with job destruction in the private sector, something they have failed to do for more than a generation.
A better approach would be for left politicians like Sanders to sit down with the UAW to hammer out a common progressive position. Where tariffs protect jobs and remove job relocation from negotiations, they should be supported. Where they kill jobs or simply attack high-wage countries for spite, they should be opposed and replaced by careful negotiations to create a low-tariff level playing field.
Let popular worker support for tariffs teach us that this issue requires problem solving, and support for any tariff should not signal failure on a leftist litmus test. The alternative, pure opposition to tariffs, which is where the entire Democratic Party and the left seems to be headed, is only likely to increase working-class support for MAGA.
Jesus, how did we get into this mess?
Maybe ask the Democrats who didn’t have the guts to challenge Biden’s decision to run again until it was far too late.
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