Last week, my daughter was working at the front desk at her theatre conservatory when she overheard two actors talking.
I know, that feels like the start of a joke, but it’s not.
One actor was telling the other what she had just learned about Project 2025.
Project 2025, of course, is the Heritage Foundation plan to obliterate the “administrative state” and make all federal agencies beholden to the whim of the president.
It was first revealed this summer in a New York Times piece by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman.
They wrote:
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
And, they added:
He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”
So, he will purge the military of people who are disloyal to him, but who are loyal to the constitution.
He will reveal the names of spies, shattering peoples lives all over the globe, as well as any relationship we may have with other countries.
He will institute loyalty oaths for all government workers. People who have worked for the government for 20 years might suddenly be out on their behinds with no recourse, because a vengeful president and his cronies changed the rules.
Make no mistake, removing officials will not be limited to intelligence and military. This will extend to people who process Social Security checks - and keep track of eligibility; to people who keep watch over federal education money doled out to school districts; to people who test drug and product safety.
A postal worker could be fired for not pledging loyalty to Trump. Hell, an entire city could be punished - ala Fort Lee, New Jersey’s “traffic problems” - by eliminating most of their post offices if the mayor doesn’t pledge loyalty to Trump.
Hundreds of thousands of people will be out of work. They will get no federal unemployment, and most - since so many federal government jobs are in red states - will have no state unemployment.
The U.S. will be plunged into a depression. Not a recession. A major economic depression, as the walls on which we built this country - walls of trust and norms - come tumbling down.
The actor whom my daughter overheard was telling her friend about all of this. My daughter got the impression that she had just learned it. And she was alarmed.
The reaction from the actor she was talking to was disbelief.
“That can’t happen,” she answered her friend. “We have laws.”
My daughter was irritated at that answer. I was like, “Oh, honey, that answer is so 2016.”
Navalny
I thought about this conversation on Friday when I woke up to find that Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny had been murdered while he was in prison in Siberia.
“Murder” is not the official accounting of the death. There is no official accounting of the death, and likely will never be. Just like there is no official accounting of the death for Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015 as he was walking on a bridge over the Moskva River in front of the Kremlin.
There was no official accounting of the death for Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who had been critical of Putin and his deputies, who was murdered in the lobby of her apartment building in 2006.
There was no official accountability when Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, or when Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were given a nerve agent while they were in a park in Salisbury, England (they survived), or for Vasily Melnikov - one of a spate of Russian oligarchs who mysteriously died with family members next to them in 2022, after they criticized the Ukrainian invasion.
Oh, and let’s not forget Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, who had stoked death in Syria and other Middle East and African countries on behalf of Putin. Prigozhin led a march that got close to Moscow to protest the lack of Russian preparation for the Ukraine invasion, and then was allowed to head to Belarus. How many of us were surprised when his plane mysteriously blew up a few months later?
Navalny, himself, was poisoned in 2020 by the same nerve agent used on the Skripals. He, too, survived, after being flown to Germany and put in a coma for two weeks. Afterwards, he worked with the investigative outlet Bellingcat to uncover evidence that Russian intelligence agents were involved in the poisoning.
Putin joked about the attack. “Who needs him,” he said of Navalny.
Sound familiar? Sound a bit like “she’s not my type” or “lock her up” or “I will encourage Russia to invade any NATO country that doesn’t pay”? Turning a commitment that NATO countries are to fund their own militaries into a protection racket?
Navalny also, according to the original obituary from the Washington Post, was poisoned at least two other times. And, the day before he took a walk and came back “feeling unwell” at the Siberian penal colony he had been transferred to, he was joking with a judge and an officer in a court hearing. Looking perfectly healthy.
Connect the Dots
What strikes me about the timing of Navalny’s death is that it came just weeks after the Republicans in Congress demanded a border bill as ransom to release money for Ukraine, and when they got the bill they asked for, they reneged. The press reported that it was because Trump wanted to run on the border issue. None of them reported on the fact that Putin doesn’t want the U.S. to arm the country he invaded.
Putin controls Trump. And Trump controls the House Republicans.
After that, Trump told Putin he could invade any country he wants to. That, of course, came after Tucker Carlson sat for a lecture from Putin in which the Russian dictator pulled out the old, disproven, “Poland actually started WWII trope,” which signaled strongly to Russian experts that Putin is thinking about invading Poland. That will trigger NATO’s Article 5, which will obligate all other NATO countries to enter the fight.
If Trump is president, we will not enter the fight. It’s not a stretch to say that a great deal of Europe will be under Russian rule.
But that won’t be the biggest issue for the U.S.
Navalny challenged official corruption in Russia, and was imprisoned a few times. He tried to run against Putin for president, but was made ineligible.
What will Trump do to Biden? Or Hillary Clinton (if he can remember he ran against her)? Or Obama? Nikki Haley?
Navalny was put in solitary confinement for posting on social media.
How many people in the U.S. are going to be scrubbing their X accounts? How many accounts will X owner Elon Musk hand over to the Trump loyalty police?
How many school teachers will be fired?
How many journalists will be fired?
Hundreds of people who are laying flowers in tribute to Navalny have been arrested in Russia.
Russian people who protested the Ukraine invasion are now in prison, with years to go on their sentences.
You think anyone in the U.S. will be able to protest? Or pay tribute to a leader they admire who’s not Trump?
Trump learned to be ruthless under Roy Cohn, but he is learning to be a brutal dictator under Putin.
In the initial obituary for Navalny, the Post notes that Putin “used a combination of subterfuge, cash and coercion to silence oligarchs, the news media and political adversaries, often putting his friends in positions of power and creating a personalized system of control that brooked no rivals.”
That is a good description of Putin. It could also describe Project 2025. And Trump.
But honestly, far from being annoyed at the conversation my daughter overheard, I’m hopeful. Neither of these young ladies may have started the year with any idea of the danger that is out there. Then one of them learned about it, and shared it with the other. And both were outraged and afraid. Hopefully, they will come to understand the danger more fully by November.
But if they and their compatriots do not, we will all be nothing more than terrified Russian subjects.
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