Funding for To the Contrary Provided by A key part of Trump's agenda, and this is reflected in and parts of project 2025 is really using the levers of government to try to force policy upon people.

He's interested in disregarding the rule of law, disregarding courts, and potentially disregarding the fundamental foundational document of this country.

(MUSIC) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe' Welcome to To the Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week, Project 2025, the Presidential Transition Project created by the conservative Heritage Foundation has dominated the presidential campaign headlines.

Progressives fear it heralds a loss of freedoms and democracy.

Conservatives believe it restores American values.

Another organization Protect Democracy has crafted an antidote.

The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025, which addresses promises, powers and plans.

Joining us today is Aisha Woodward from Protect Democracy.

Woodward leads a team that focuses on constraining abuses of executive power and restoring congressional oversight of the executive branch.

Thanks for joining us, Aisha.

Thanks for having me, Bonnie.

So let's start with what do you think are the most egregious aspects of project 2025?

What how what are the worst things in it that will most constrain democracy?

So Project 2025 2025 is used as kind of a catch all for a four pronged approach from the Heritage Foundation.

and they're really gearing up to try to provide the infrastructure for a second Trump administration to take office and effectuate an agenda quickly.

So while the Heritage Foundation's mandate for leadership document, which is this 900 policy, 900 page policy document, has attracted a lot of attention, it's really part of a broader strategy.

So it involves this policy document, which we can talk a little bit about, but it also involves a massive personnel database where they're recruiting and vetting people who could serve at the highest levels of a second Trump administration.

It includes training modules for these people to help them better understand how to actually wield power and government, and use the government bureaucracy to carry out Trump's agenda.

And then it also includes a 180 day like, playbook for how they want to carry out that agenda in those first few months in office.

That playbook has not been made public, but that first big kind of mandate for leadership at home has been the thing that's attracted a lot of attention.

It's been authored by scores of Trump's former advisers, and it really goes department by department, outlining the ways in which the next conservative president might want to wield power.

And I would say, well, a lot of that material is, you know, in the views of some people, kind of conservative, standard conservative Republicans.

there, there's also a number of proposals that really cut at the core of our democratic system of checks and balances and the ways in which a future Trump administration really wants to undermine those core, separation of powers principles in order to carry out an authoritarian agenda.

Let's start with what it would do to the future of democratic elections in this country.

What would it change?

Because that's what a lot of progressives are fearing is that he'll get in office.

He'll never leave office or he'll, you know, transplant JD Vance to take over for him.

that that authoritarian, we will switch from having elections to having essentially a dictatorship or or, you know, a permanent hierarchy.

One of the key promises, and this is actually something that Trump himself has promised, and it's something we focus on in our authoritarian playbook document, is that he he's indicated that he might want to just, like, stay in power if elected and not leave in 2028. and a lot of people say, you know, that's not possible.

Doesn't the 22nd amendment prevent that?

You know, Trump says lots of things.

Our answer to that is that, you know, we should take Trump literally and seriously on on these promises.

Go back to 2020.

It's really easy to forget what actually played out in those final months of 2020.

Trump sowed mistrust around the election, and when the election did not go his way, he directed his Department of Justice to, conduct a number of sham investigations.

He backed a series of fake elector schemes.

And it also And I remember that calling the Georgia elector and saying, find 11,000 votes for me.

Exactly.

Yes.

And it all culminated in January 6th, very inciting an insurrection at the Capitol.

This is not a person who is interested in a peaceful transfer of power that reflects the actual outcomes of the elections, and so .

But- What would he change?

What would he change?

I mean, in the Electoral College, for example, what would what powers would he give himself or who whoever is in charge of the country or whoever he picks to succeed him to, to thwart the Electoral College and thwart the election by the people and the representatives of the people of who they want for a candidate as opposed to fixing the vote.

You know, I think we'll see a reprise of the same tactics he used in 2020.

But he's not going to put any.

He's not going to.

Is He does he plan to revise the Constitution?

How open our constitutional convention.

he's a man who said he'd like to terminate the Constitution.

And so, you know, actually going through the process of of amending the Constitution is, you know, well, takes a lot of time and effort.

That's not what Trump is interested in.

He's interested in disregarding the rule of law, disregarding courts, and potentially, you know, disregarding the fundamental foundational document of this country.

And, you know, you see this in his recruitment of JD Vance as his vice presidential candidate.

This is a person who, unlike Mike Pence, for all of Pence's faults, has indicated that he thinks, you know, Pence made the wrong call.

And if he were sitting in that president of the Senate's chair in early 2029, he would welcome these alternate slates of electors and challenging the electoral.

outcomes.

I read also that one of the points in Project 2025 is to stop, to force, I guess, public schools, maybe even private schools from teaching black history.

How does that work?

This is part of kind of a key authoritarian tactic, which is around like scapegoating vulnerable communities and also trying to police, you know, free speech and free expression.

this is part of project 2025.

It's part of Trump's agenda to to really try to scrub the, you know, federal policies and programs of anything that, in their view, creates special treatment for, for different populations.

and really police the type of content that can be, consumed in schools, universities, and in a lot of ways, like erase, erase our history.

Tell me how that works.

Because, for example, local school boards elected locally are in charge, have a say over what books are used, what's taught in school.

How would he circumvent that?

How does Project 2025 propose to circumvent that process?

A key part of Trump's agenda, and this is reflected in parts of project 2025, is really using the levers of government that are often invisible to many of us in our communities to try to force policy upon people.

And so, you know, around 10% of federal, 10% of K-12 education dollars come from the federal government.

There are key grants that go to schools that fund, you know, the support of of education, of teachers, Trump's threatening to withhold those dollars or withhold grants that schools can apply for in exchange for his policies.

and so there are a lot of ways kind of in invisible ways, where if you remake the federal government and the personnel in the ways that Trump is planning to, you can then use the powers that those people oversee to prevent the government from, or coerce communities into certain action based on money that they they need to sustain.

He also has a plan to remake the civil service.

Can you please explain to the audience what it is and why it's important?

And how that would limit democratic freedoms in this country?

Of course.

Yeah.

So, this is, as with many of Trump's promises, something that he started and tried to do during his first administration and ran out of time.

But the thinking behind this, and this is something that is shared by many of Trump's closest allies, is that he was thwarted in his effectiveness during his first term by all of these deep state government bureaucrats who weren't willing to carry out his agenda.

Now, that's not the case.

As you know well, the nonpartisan civil service is kind of foundational to to how our government is run.

These are people who are hired because they have expertise in science and data and policy, and they carry out the day to day functioning of government.

And they don't change from one administration to the next because their fealty is into a political party.

It's to carrying out the law as they see it and the policies of elected officials.

Right.

Like you work for the FDA, you, a lot of the, civil servants there have advanced degrees in medical research, and they make their judgments based on what's on science, not on their political beliefs.

And he would want to change that so that he could appoint people permanently who would make those judgments based on their religious beliefs.

That's exactly right.

And so to do this because, you know, the civil service is a protected class of employees that are not supposed to be subject to political interference.

Trump tried in his waning days of office to create this new quote unquote, schedule F, a different category of civil servants who would be moved away from the protections of the merit system and into a space where they could be fired at will for not carrying out his agenda.

He rolled out an executive order to this effect.

In the late days of his, of 2020.

He started to try to implement it, but ran out of time.

Joe Biden rescinded this executive order on one of his first days in office, but a real area of overlap between what Trump is promising himself and what project 2025 is articulated is a resuscitation of this executive order, and plans to get it out the door right away to remove some of the internal checks that, usually like prevent presidents from taking illegal actions, but in this case would enable, the Trumpian agenda with, with few checks at all.

All right.

So and on that point, on the point, you just made, let's switch to protect democracy.

How?

What?

First, tell me all about your plan and what's in it.

But then let's go specifically to how do you, how do you plan to make a permanent, unaffected by, politics, civil service.

But again, start with what you were, you know, tell tell the audience about your plan, what's in it and why you set it up the way you do.

In part because we really wanted to make sure that the public understood that some of the most concerning things about 2025 and the promises being made have come directly from Donald Trump's mill.

We put together this report.

It's called The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025.

And what it does is it takes what we know about how authoritarianism has played out across the globe, the tactics that authoritarians use to scapegoat vulnerable communities, stoke violence, corrupt elections and politicized institutions, among others.

to the specific promises powers that Trump is planning to execute on in 2025.

And what we found was really concerning, and we outlined five key areas that we're worried about.

Trump, in particular abusing power in 2025.

Those include abusing the pardon power to license lawbreaking and try to place himself Trump outside the reach of federal law.

It includes weaponizing the powers of the Department of Justice to investigate political enemies.

And again, to use the Justice Department as a shield to protect, protect Trump himself from legal accountability.

The third category kind of cover some of what we were just discussing.

We call it regulatory retaliation and includes both co-opting the personnel of government, but also co-opting government power to carry out the authoritarian agenda.

And then the last two are sort of on a continuum, of using government force to quash dissent and to enforce a really aggressive immigration agenda.

And so the two parts of that include a massive expansion of federal law enforcement power to carry out immigration raids, but also potentially deploying the US military to carry out the immigration agenda, but also to police protest and prevent dissent in the second Trump administration.

It sounds like it sounds like this.

This plan would turn America into a Handmaid's.

The Handmaid's Tale.

So one thing we like to talk about protect democracy, is that authoritarianism isn't necessarily an on off switch.

So you're not going to wake up on January 20th at noon and totally see a new country right out of the gate.

but what we do know is that across a host of indicators that indicate democratic decline, some of those things I mentioned a couple minutes ago.

Stoking violence, corrupting elections, aggrandizing executive power.

The US is seeing really concerning trends.

And if you imagine these as dials, they're really turning to the right and have over the past several years.

And so what we could see in a second Trump administration is a real hastening of that decline.

and a lot of that is because our democratic institutions and our system is just not as resilient as we thought it was.

And a lot has changed.

So some of the checks and balances that your viewers might be thinking like, you know, can't Congress stop him?

Or the courts have really been remade in the last several years?

as you know well, the Republican conference in Congress looks really different than it did even a decade ago.

Almost every Republican who voted to impeach Trump in that House has either been primaried out of office, or retired of their own accord because they knew it was untenable to stay in Congress.

The US Senate no longer has people like John McCain or Bob Corker or Lamar Alexander.

And indeed, you know, Mitt Romney is headed for the exit.

These are folks who, you know, despite often having conservative visions of the future, really understood that the role of Congress is to stand up to the executive and exercise its prerogatives.

And we're going to see a lot less of that.

And similarly, like the Trump administration and Mitch McConnell at the helm of the Senate, really remade the federal judiciary in some concerning ways.

And so the courts are not going to be a reliable bulwark in a second term.

And, in fact, the Supreme Court, which has been clearly remade by Trump in his his years in office, as recently as, you know, a few weeks ago in the Trump the US decision have really given a real license to Trump's vision of putting the executive branch up above the law and out of reach of criminal accountability.

So tell me, and what's your response?

And protect democracy.

Tell me about that.

How do you what do we what need what changes need to be made to government to and Biden, for example, proposed that that, Supreme Court justices be term limited and that there be an enforceable ethics code that if they violate it, they get, I don't know, fired, punished, whatever.

You know, a few things.

One, because I don't want to leave your viewers with a sense of hopelessness that if Trump wins, there's nothing to be done.

You know, the first thing is to remember that Trump hasn't won yet.

And in fact, you know, an election is three months away.

We like to say our best defenses are a good offense.

Like we have a chance to to make a decision, to not reelect this man.

And, folks should take heart that in, you know, each of the past several elections, 2018, 2020, 2022, a pro-democracy coalition of Democrats, Republicans and independents turned out and said, this is not what we want.

This is not who we are, and we need to mobilize that again.

The best thing we could do right now is to prevent a second Trump presidency from happening at all.

But should it happen?

Organizations like ours are preparing to be, you know, in a leadership position to to be part of the opposition that tries to hold Trump to account.

You know, despite the weakening of the institutions that I just mentioned, they are still there.

There are still people, who want to want to stand up for the rule of law.

And we need.

But let me, let me jump in and ask the despite the weakening of these institutions, how can you make it permanent that nobody forget about Trump 100 years from now?

Cannot do this again and cannot try to to, you know, stall or stop democracy from taking place in the United States?

Yeah, there's, you know, there, there you mentioned Supreme Court reform.

There are a number of reforms that, you know, our organization thinks about over the medium and long term, because you're right, this problem is much bigger than any one man.

And as a result, is the result of the abdication of responsibility of the other branches of government in a big way.

So Congress needs to get back in the driver's seat.

There are laws that they can pass to constrain executive authority.

You know, I mentioned the domestic deployment of the military being something we are concerned about.

The reason we're concerned about it is that Congress has a law on the books that has a lot of loopholes in it, and Congress could clean up those legal authorities and get back in the driver's seat on making decisions like that.

Similarly, with emergency authority, something that Trump used to declare an emergency at the national or sorry, the southern border to try to, you know, reappropriate funds, Congress could claw back some of those authorities and make it clear who who actually has the power to to make those decisions.

and, you know, I think the court reform ideas, they're going to take a lot of work and time.

You need political power to, to, you know, effectuate these ideas.

But, it it makes a lot of sense over the medium term to really think about term limits, and codes of ethics.

The last thing I would say is, you know, we need to be thinking even bigger when it comes to thinking about reform and making our democracy work better.

And I think ultimately, I think there's a question that a lot of American people have about whether or not the system we have right now is really working for them.

Is it responsive to their needs?

What is government really doing in their lives?

Ultimately, we need to make sure that we have electoral systems that reward potentially participation of other political parties and a broader swath of the electorate.

Many people feel pretty disillusioned by our two party system and feel like there are opportunities to really make make change in responsive ways.

And so, you know, one thing our organization also works on is really long term electoral reforms that could put us in a position to have more political, political participation, more inclusion and a feeling that the system we have is a lot more resilient than it feels right now.

You mentioned earlier, the pardon power.

Explain what is in your in Protect Democracy, your report that would change the presidential pardon power.

Trump is promising to use the pardon power to, you know, potentially offer blanket pardons to folks who participated in the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

He's also suggested he has the absolute pardon to power.

Power to pardon himself.

historically, the pardon power has been viewed as a real tool of mercy to kind of correct for injustices, that our system has rendered over time.

Trump has really turned that on its head.

We saw this in his first term, actually, when he, offered in advance and then and issued pardons to people like Paul Manafort, who refused to cooperate with the Mueller investigation.

He wants to use the pardon power, basically to insulate himself from justice and reward allies for, for not cooperating with the justice system.

and we're expecting to see more of that.

And in fact, the recent Supreme Court decision around Trump for us, I think, even heightens the concern about the pardon power, because if Trump is now believing that the court has given him a license to use official acts, and, and be insulated from criminal accountability, potentially from those acts, he might then also say to his, you know, closest associates, don't worry about it.

I'll give you a pardon to and like, make sure that you're, protected from any criminal liability if you carry out the things that I need you to do to, you know, effectuate my agenda.

So we're really we're concerned.

It's a it's a real perversion of the intention of the pardon power.

And it's, unfortunately, one that it seems like this court is, is implicitly endorsing in some ways.

And please give us a little more detail about how you would, which is a huge, I'm a law school graduate.

I never practiced, but I took the bar and passed.

but how do you protect the rule of law?

It's it's been so flouted in the last eight years in this country.

Yeah, I think it involves, like, a multi-pronged attack.

Right.

We we need to do some of the things that we did during the first Trump administration.

Take him to court, try to uphold the rule of law and cases.

And, you know, there's a lot of despair about the federal courts.

But federal courts have also, you know, come through in many instances.

And, you know, affirmed that, like the law, you know, can't be flagrantly violated.

The first Muslim ban was not held up in court.

We've litigated on behalf of religious leaders who are unnecessarily, like, surveilled by the first Trump administration.

There are opportunities, to to uphold the rule of law.

And we need to, like, still believe in the system that we have.

but we also, you know, per my earlier comment, really need to push Congress to rein in some of the, areas where the law is unclear.

And it feels like the president can flip flout these loopholes and push them to really, clean up the law and, and recognize that we can't rely on, like, the goodwill or forbearance of, of people in elected office.

Trump is really exposed that, it's not just a problem unique to him, but could be exploited by any future person who who also Oval Office.

And unfortunately, in a lot of ways, you see the Overton window shifting on what people think is appropriate based on what Trump has done.

And so it really points to the need for these reforms sooner rather than later, before there's no further change in public perception about what's really permissible.

How would you protect against using the military for political purposes or as a police force?

This is one of the most concerning promises coming out of the Trump campaign for his use of power in 2025, and we need to remember that this is something that Trump tried, and did execute on a little bit during his first term, most notably during the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, where in Washington, DC, he not only deployed the D.C. National Guard to put down protests outside of the white House and Lafayette Square.

But he actually requisitioned the National Guard of 11 other states, mostly Republican states, to come to D.C. to police.

These protests now, your viewers may know the the history around this issue is that there's a real there's been a real principled kind of foundational to this country that you don't use military force to as a domestic.

Against your own citizens.

Right.

Exactly.

You know, the US military and particularly the, you know, the federal armed forces are trained to, you know, carry out missions abroad against people who don't have the same constitutional rights that we do.

they're trained for a really different mission.

Trump really loves the military, though, and kind of demonstrations of might and power, particularly to quash dissent.

He hates it when people are on the streets, you know, protesting his policies.

It's really concerning.

It's something that, unfortunately, the law provides because of some of the vagaries of congressional oversight over the years, some real loopholes.

and so, in particular, there's an 18th century law called the Insurrection Act that Trump wanted to use to deploy the military.

after the Floyd protests, he's promising that next time, quote unquote, he won't wait.

He's going to just go and declare an insurrection act.

invocation.

As soon as inauguration Day, he has promised to put down protests.

This is something that we should be concerned about.

It's something that Congress has a real role in, though Congress could could clean up this really old law that has not been amended since the Civil War era to make really clear that there are only specific contexts under which the president can do this, that it's time limited, that it's subject to judicial review.

All of these things would really help protect us from this type of abuse of power.

Thank you so much, Aisha Woodward.

This has been very educational.

Thank you for joining us.

That's it for this edition.

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