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maga extremists
Totalitarian Rule Is Here: Project 2025 9 Months Along
MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
Sep 10, 2025
I had the opportunity to engage the author of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” Paul Dans, this Saturday on BBC World News Radio. The essential question was whether Project 2025 was a document of totalitarian rule. Dans, who was fired from the Heritage Foundation during the presidential campaign for linking Donald Trump to the fascist playbook, has returned in full force as a MAGA senate candidate in South Carolina. He is a conservative committed to attacking democratic institutions, although he would claim that Project 2025 centers on returning the federal government to the hands of the people.
According to various trackers, the Project 2025 agenda has been nearly 50% completed. The assault on the federal system is well in hand. But is this totalitarianism?
Yes, it is.
I have written earlier about totalitarianism in the science policy of the White House. The totalitarian model extends further, up and down from the White House to the reactionary Supreme Court and especially to MAGAlytes in Congress. MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
First, recall that Project 2025 is a 900-page cornucopia of conservative delights. It calls for the replacement of merit-based federal civil service workers with people loyal to Trump and for taking partisan control of such critical law-enforcement agencies as the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It promotes the closing of the Department of Education and the restructuring of museums, foundations, and even private universities to challenge fact-based institutions in their primary missions. In the economy, Project 2025 institutionalizes trickle-down economics: It reduces taxes on corporations, cuts social welfare and medical programs, draws financial and communications firms into the totalitarian fold, and rewards wealthy collaborators and industrialists as Hitler did in Nazi Germany with access to the halls of power. It promotes anti-LGBT discrimination; it ends Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. In fact, Project 2025 does not rein in the administrative state, its major stated goal, but gives additional tools to weaponize the corrupt Trump presidency.
Hence, Project 2025 reflects totalitarian political culture, in particular the persistence of a one-party system with an authoritarian leader who uses extra-legislative means to achieve his goals. For example, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to root out “inefficiency” in government, but he in fact directed the faux department to emasculate agencies he and Project 2025 adherents disliked. In subservience to the president, MAGA republicans in Congress allowed DOGE to usurp their oversight. Further, while railing against executive orders (EO) of past presidents, Trump has used them in fact to replace policy making. Trump averaged 55 EO annually his first term; by mid-2025 he was averaging 330 per year with the goal to drown the courts and Congress in executive branch power.
Like in Hitler or Stalin who created a cult of personality, Trump has bullied MAGA to ensure allegiance to him as the all-powerful leader. This leader is the promoter of disorder, the arbitrator of conflict, the omniscient problem solver, the stager of domestic military sweeps and other Epstein flyovers to distract the populace, the organizer of state dinners and cabinet meetings in which his magalytes sickeningly faun for him. He is the Department of War lobbyist for the Nobel Peace Prize and the UFC organizer for a wrestling event on the White House Lawn. One senses he is jealous that Russian President Vladimir Putin miraculously scored eight goals in a charity hockey exhibition game (no one checked him, strangely). He is certainly angry that Kim Jong-Il shot a 38 will 11 holes-in-one, while the president must cheat at his golf game at his courses to win trophies.
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality.
Totalitarian governments bathe the public sphere with propaganda; the Soviets were masters at misinformation. Putin has reestablished state control of all media. For his totalitarian push, Trump promotes branded presidential newspeak on his own channel, Truth Social. Such loyal media outlets as Fox help him spread false claims. Indeed, totalitarians want to control the medium and the message, not educate the public; destroy expert independence in government agencies, not encourage it; and in general to sully data, not analyze them. The complete weaponization of government comes in the selective assault of academic and intellectual freedom in the Trump administration attack on universities, law firms, and other private businesses.
The totalitarian state embraces the veneer of legality, but engages extrajudicial confiscation of power. Like the Stalin Constitution of 1936 or Nazi laws of the 1930s, magalytes treat the US Constitution as vaguely important when its language fits their plans. Otherwise, they rely on executive branch overreach and on specious interpretation of congressional laws (the Enemy Aliens Act 1798; Posse Comitatus Act of 1878) to end due process and deploy military troops in blue states. Partnering with such mega-maga-communications magnates as Peter Thiel, they deploy AI to create a surveillance state. DOGE sought personal information of US citizens to build a surveillance regime.
A signal action of totalitarian regimes is the identification of external and internal enemies, heavily colored with homophobia and xenophobia. AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Patel are aggressively prosecuting people who crossed the president: former adviser John Bolton, prosecutors, judges, and even congresspeople. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other unidentified government police, their faces covered, their uniforms obscured, their racism barely concealed, resemble Stalin’s NKVD in their black overcoats as they round up, subdue, and cart enemies away to secret facilities. The major enemies are undocumented immigrants, which SCOPUS has now okayed to arrest on the basis of skin color alone. Recall that so fearful are the Trumpisti of immigrants that they have separated children from their parents to secret them out of the country; Putin, another authoritarian ruler, approves the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
Project 2025 harps on the fear of internal enemies over alleged supposed additional rights given to individuals based on gender and color (“DEI”). In fact, like the Nazi prosecution of homosexuals or the Putinite illegalization of LGBTQ public existence, so the Trump administration has set forth a litany of enemies to be deprived of rights. They include Venezuelan gangs, lesbians, gays, people of color, Democrats, and trans individuals, the last who may be denied the Second Amendment right to bear arms by a finding that they are insane (“mentally ill”).
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality. Women’s rights are anathema to the conservatives of Project 2025 who mention abortion over 200 times in the 900-page document. They claim to be pro-life and pro-family, but they pursue regressive natalism and forced pregnancy such as that imposed on women in socialist Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. More and more gerrymandered states are following the examples of Texas and Florida to criminalize women and their personal physicians for not carrying fetuses full term—no matter the circumstances (rape, insist, mortal risk to the mother).
It's all there in Program 2025. And it’s all there in the White House.
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The Trump Coalition Wants to End Democracy as We Know It
Four groups aim to degrade our one-person-one-vote election system so a few billionaires and certain religious zealots can consolidate their political power.
May 14, 2025
The Trump coalition includes four groups of people:
- The MAGA (“make America great again”) base, mostly rural white men and women;
- A group of Silicon Valley billionaires known as the Paypal Mafia;
- A separate political movement called “religious nationalists”; and
- The Trump crime family itself.
All four groups share one basic aim: to degrade our one-person-one-vote election system so a few billionaires and certain religious zealots can consolidate their political power to eliminate free and fair elections to become even more controlling and richer than they already are.
Here are brief descriptions of the four groups.
1: The MAGA Base: Who Are They?
The hardcore, mostly-rural MAGA base can be understood as an echo of the Confederacy. Philosophically, many of them are the same people who tried to destroy the United States to preserve slavery via the Civil War (1861-1865). In their view, the basic ideas that inspired the founding of the U.S. (1776-1788) are wrong: All humans are not created equal and should not have equal rights under law. In 2022, MAGA believers included about 15% of the U.S. adult population, or about 39 million out of 258 million adults.
The MAGA Base: What Do They Want?
For many MAGA believers, President Donald Trump has been sent by God to make American great again, restoring white power. To many of them, white men naturally should dominate all people of color and all women. To varying degrees, many of them scorn foreigners, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, LGBTQIA people, and anyone they think looks down upon them (the mainstream media, Hollywood, and college types, among others).
White MAGA confederates share a seething resentment that they are losing the power and privilege that they have always taken for granted. Trump is their retribution, and many of them find community by rejoicing in his sadistic cruelty.
Of course, they want to restrict the vote. To achieve that goal, they are working to limit or eliminate the right to “due process” guaranteed in the Constitution, which is a step toward their goal of curbing the authority of the judicial branch of government. They seek freedom—freedom to do whatever they want to whomever they please, and they have made real progress.
2: The Paypal Mafia: Who Are They?
The Paypal Mafia is a loosely-affiliated group of billionaires in California’s Silicon Valley with roots in apartheid South Africa. Nazi-saluting Elon Musk is the most famous of them, though Peter Thiel is likely more influential. Many have become devotees of a man named Curtis Yarvin, a racist and avowed monarchist who believes democracy is unworkable and has failed. Yarvin is friends with Vice President JD Vance, whose political career was launched and funded by Peter Thiel.
The Paypal Mafia: What Do They Want?
The Paypal Mafia wants the U.S. to be run by a king, whom they would call a “CEO” (but which Curtis Yarvin has bluntly called “a dictator”). Seriously. They want the nation run like a corporation because corporations are “efficient” (meaning tightly controlled). Another term for what they want is “techno-fascism.”
This “tech broligarchy” (which reveres unlimited male power) wants to “get government off its back” as it continues to create and sustain gigantic monopolies of dubious legality like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Paypal, Palantir, and so forth—while they freely explore the profit potential of crypto currencies and artificial intelligence, among other dangerous wild-west technologies. Obviously, they oppose one-person one-vote democracy, which might eventually break up their monopolies and curb their dangerous tech gambles.
3: Religious Nationalists: Who Are They?
Religious nationalism includes a large group of people who share an overwhelming desire for political power to eliminate democracy and who are exploiting religion to achieve that goal.
As Katherine Stewart has shown in two well-researched books, The Power Worshippers and Money, Lies, and God, this is not a religious movement. It is a radical anti-democracy political movement dressed up in religious disguise.
About one-third of U.S. adults (roughly 78 million people) either strongly support (26 million) or partially or moderately support (52 million) religious nationalism. Although they are often called Christian nationalists, their actions and goals have little to do with the teachings of Jesus—feed the hungry, house the homeless, welcome the stranger. None of that.
Christian nationalists are Donald Trump’s largest group of devoted supporters. Two out of three completely or mostly agree that God ordained Trump to win the 2024 election. Without religious nationalist support, Trump would never have become president. So, their wish is his command.
Religious Nationalists: What Do They Want?
As Katherine Stewart has shown, religious nationalists want political power so they can eliminate democracy from the United States. They want to end the separation of church and state; eliminate public education and, in its place, substitute particular religious teachings; ban abortion nationwide and restrict access to birth control; deprive gay people of the right to marry and rescind laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation; eliminate no-fault divorce and restore “traditional” family roles in which men dominate; pack the federal judiciary with religious nationalists; allow corporations to discriminate openly against female employees (denying them access to birth control); declare “war” on progressive social policies and on “critical race theory;” end all restrictions on corporate monopolies; cut funding for science; get rid of governmental social safety nets (for example, social security, Medicaid, and food programs) so people will become dependent on churches for their survival; promote a Christian Nation identity in which conservative Christians have a right and a duty to enforce their values, sometimes by force; and of course make it hard or impossible for most people to vote.
Their core mission is to take over America and end democracy. Some of them are well on their way.
4. The Trump Crime Family: Who Are They?
Over the years, many people have compared Donald Trump’s family to a “crime family” and Trump himself to a Mafia godfather, demanding unquestioned loyalty from underbosses, enforcers, and associates.
Trump is always looking for ways to keep his soldiers and associates (in the three groups described above) loyal by giving them some of what they want. Meanwhile his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, are roaming across the planet making lucrative deals with people who seek privileged access to the President of the United States. Cryptocurrency has made such access simple and secret.
The Trump Crime Family: What Do They Want?
So long as Donald Trump can use his office to acquire gobs of money, push people around, receive endless praise and adoration from his subordinates, and inflict cruel revenge on those who stand in his way, he seems happy. His sons seem satisfied to score a few billion dollars here and there, based on their family ties to the president. At bottom, the family wants to retain power so they and their soldiers and associates can make boatloads more money. This requires modifying election systems so Republicans can win despite the odds against them.
Conclusion
So that, in a nutshell, is the Trump coalition. They all share one goal: to end one-person one-vote democracy. To do that, they first want to disempower the federal judiciary and eliminate the expectation of “due process.” Then, by making it difficult or impossible for large numbers of Americans to vote, they intend to remain in power forever.
It is up to the rest of us to make sure they don’t.
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Resisting Trump and Musk’s Cultural Revolution
Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Feb 22, 2025
The aging leader wanted to shake up his country, so he launched a second revolution with the help of a cadre of young people. Drunk with power, the leader targeted his enemies, remade his political party, and turned his own government into a self-destructing circus. Anyone with real expertise was sent far away from the political center. Intellectuals of all kinds came under suspicion. And the young people who rose up in support of the aging leader ran roughshod through society.
They might not seem to have a lot in common, Mao Zedong and Donald Trump. The Communist leader, having come to power through a revolutionary war, harbored a visceral hatred for capitalism. The American businessman shirked military service, won the presidency (twice) through democratic elections, and harbors a visceral hatred for communism.
And yet, Trump is currently involved in a cultural revolution as thoroughgoing in its ambitions and potential destructiveness as what Mao unleashed in China in the mid-1960s.
You Say You Want a Revolution?
At one level, what Donald Trump and his minions are doing is regime change, as Anne Applebaum has argued. They aren’t reforming U.S. government. They are transforming its operating system, courtesy of Elon Musk and his inaptly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Regime change is certainly part of the Trump game plan. He has borrowed this strategy from Viktor Orban, who turned Hungary’s political system based on liberal principles into a patronage system run along illiberal lines. The Orban transformation relied on a compliant legislature that allowed him to concentrate power in the executive. Once a leading liberal, the Hungarian leader knew how to deconstruct the Hungarian political system from the inside by stacking the courts, suppressing civil society, and controlling a right-wing media.
You’d think that regime change would be enough for Trump. He is a man of unpredictable utterances but rather constrained ambitions. He wants to punish his enemies, reward his friends, stay out of jail, and secure his financial and political legacy. Those around Trump, however, are pushing for something more extreme. They have cast him in the role of the Great Helmsman—Mao’s favorite moniker—who steers American society into turbulent, uncharted waters.
Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.
Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” according to Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. By “left,” Roberts means anyone who follows the Constitution, acknowledges the importance of international law, and has a moral conscience.
This more revolutionary program owes much to Chairman Mao who, in 1966, decided that Chinese society was so infected with various strains of reformism (capitalism, liberalism, traditionalism) that it, too, needed another revolution. On top of that, Mao unleashed the power of populism—the “masses” in the vernacular of that time and place—to eliminate his political enemies. “It was a power struggle waged… behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement,” writes Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans.
In the 1950s, after the country’s first revolution, Chinese society remained fundamentally conservative. The economy was primarily agrarian and Confucianism was still strong, particularly in the countryside. China was also elitist, with a Communist leader like Zhou Enlai born into the mandarin class and Mao himself coming from wealthy landowning stock. The Communists didn’t just aspire to change China’s governance. They wanted to turn Chinese society into something considerably more urban, industrial, secular, literate, and egalitarian. The change would be violent, if necessary, because Mao believed that “revolution was not a dinner party” (one wonders if Kevin Roberts has a copy of the Little Red Book on his bedside table).
At first, Mao relied on the party and its repressive institutions to effect change. By the mid-1950s, he launched an effort at reform, the Thousand Flowers Campaign, that spiraled out of the party’s control, which generated the backlash of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. That was, in turn, followed by the disastrous economic experiments of the Great Leap Forward. These whiplash changes in policy created considerable anxiety among the Chinese leadership that the party, and the revolution more generally, was losing its hold over the population, which understandably didn’t know where to turn. Mao ultimately decided that only another revolution could break the country’s ties with its past.
The agents of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were the Red Guards, teenagers who heeded Mao’s call for transformation by taking the law into their own hands. They attacked capitalist-roaders, “bourgeois” teachers, and ultimately each other. Chinese society descended into such chaos that some people even fled over the border into North Korea, which was seen as a place of relative sanity. That’s how violent, unpredictable, and apocalyptic China was during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted nearly a decade until Mao’s death in 1976.
Trumpists have their counterpart to Mao’s desire for revolutionary transformation: a plan to destroy everything in the federal government except the royal presidency and the Pentagon, and privatize everything in the country that has a tinge of the public to it.
The Trumpian equivalents of the Red Guards are a motley crew. There’s “Big Balls,” 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a DOGE-employed hacker who, among other questionable ventures, administers “an AI-powered Discord bot operating in Russia.” Then there’s 25-year-old Marco Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after the revelation of his racist tweets (but whom Musk has promised to rehire). The parallel with China is not precise, since there are plenty of non-teenagers who are involved in this insurrection, including the middle-aged January 6 rioter Peter Marocco, who is slated to head up USAID. Whatever their age, however, these Trumpists are true believers, enthusiastically feeding democracy into the woodchipper.
Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.
Why Trumpians Take Culture Seriously
The Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not just a response to some recent fad. They are, as in China, an effort to radically revamp the very culture.
Since the 1960s, the United States has become a more inclusive country, which has necessarily meant that white men have lost some part of their privileged positions in education, employment, and entertainment. By the 2000s, the United States still had a long way to go, but in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racism books were on the best-seller list, major corporations were examining their hiring and promoting policies, and educational institutions were finally beginning to address structural racism.
Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.
Cultural transformations always move two steps forward and one step backward. In this case, the backlash has been much more intense, with Trump and company eager to rewind the clock to before the various civil rights movements, back even before the 14th Amendment that added birthright citizenship to the Constitution in 1868. The Trump administration has tried to impose gender categories that define the trans community out of existence. It is restricting abortion access at home and abroad, fulfilling the candidate’s promise to help women “whether they like it or not.”
In the same way that Mao tried to make everything in China public—business, meals, child-rearing—Trump wants to privatize everything from schools to the post office. He is opening up government to conservative Christians, and religious institutions are poised to claw back as much public power as they can get.
Mao thought that he was pushing with history’s tide. China’s current capitalist trajectory suggests otherwise, even though the regime change implemented by the Communist Party has remained more or less intact. The party remains in charge, but the culture shows few enduring influences of the Cultural Revolution.
With far-right politicians on the rise around the world, Trump and Musk similarly believe that they are on the cutting edge of change. But mass deportations and boosted birthrates among “tradwives” won’t prevent America from losing its white-majority status in about 20 years. DEI is no fad. It is an accurate reflection of demographics. And short of imposing totalitarian control and setting up concentration camps, the MAGA crowd won’t be able to alter this trajectory.
Welcome Back to 2025
This is not the first time I’ve written about the parallels between Trump and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 2022, safely ensconced in the Biden era but plagued by nightmares of the future, I wrote an article entitled “The Terrifying World of 2025” for TomDispatch. It was and is a world of mass deportations, where “Social Security checks and Medicare benefits have been delayed because the federal bureaucracy has shrunk to near invisibility.” Here was my look into the future, which is now our present:
On his first day in office, the president signaled his new policy by authorizing a memorial on the Capitol grounds to the “patriots” of January 6 and commissioning a statue of the QAnon shaman for the Rotunda. He then appointed people to his cabinet who not only lacked the expertise to manage their departments but were singularly devoted to destroying the bureaucracies beneath them, not to speak of the country itself. He put militia leaders in key Defense Department roles and similarly filled the courts with extremists more suited to playing reality-show judges than real life ones. In all of this, the president has been aided by a new crop of his very own legislators, men and women who know nothing about Congress and actively flouted its rules and traditions even as they made the MAGA caucus the dominant voting bloc.
My piece focused on one part of this nightmare scenario—the dispatch of all newly unemployed federal employees, academics, and journalists to take the jobs vacated by deported immigrants. That has yet to take place, but Musk’s acquisition of all federal data could serve as the basis for a MAGA Corps of workers that fill the gaps in the private sector.
The Trump team is currently stress-testing U.S. democracy to see where and how it breaks. Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.
Back in 2022, I was not optimistic in my crystal-ball-gazing:
I know this nightmare won’t end overnight. China’s Cultural Revolution stretched on for nearly a decade and resulted in as many as 2 million dead. Our now-captive media doesn’t report on the growing violence in this country, but we’ve heard rumors about mobs attacking a courageous podcaster in Georgia and vigilantes targeting a lone abortion provider in Texas. Things might get a lot worse before they get better.
Things could indeed get a lot worse. The mass deportations haven’t begun in earnest. The courts have hit pause on a number of Trump’s more egregious moves. The worst of the new Cabinet members—Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have yet to make their marks.
But I’d like to believe that Trump and Musk, for all the power they currently deploy, are basically spitting into the wind. But it’s up to us, with every breath we take, to make sure that all that ugly spittle ends up back on the face of MAGA.
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