Project 2025 aims to purge government and restaff it with movement loyalists. It won't go well

Now that we've established that Project 2025, the ideological manifesto and roadmap for a second Donald Trump administration written up by nearly three dozen of the seditionist felon's own previous administration members, is still very much alive and kicking, there's another part of that embarrassingly premised but still detail-filled Politico article about the roadmap that's worth some serious examination. While the project's "Mandate for Leadership" document was assembled and printed up in it's final form nearly a year ago, this bit of the project's plans for remaking government continues at a full clip and in full public view.

I'm referring, of course, to the Database of Haunted Souls.

Chretien turned around his computer monitor to reveal his profile on Project 2025’s most cherished resource. The personnel database, Chretien told me, was a significant part of what distinguished Project 2025 from Heritage’s past transition efforts: The think tank wasn’t just issuing white papers; it was building a network of vetted and loyal foot soldiers who could be trained and ready on Day One. Even if Trump lost, he said, the database could serve as a resource for the conservative movement for decades to come.

The need for such a database didn’t come out of nowhere. On the campaign trail, Trump and his allies have promised to “take swift and unprecedented action to protect Americans from the out-of-control Deep State” by “fir[ing] rogue bureaucrats and career politicians” and replacing them with Trump loyalists. Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, has suggested that Trump “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” All of those new bureaucrats would need to come from somewhere — and Project 2025 gambled that its database could serve as the staging ground.

In Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership, Trump's allies are quite emphatic about the need to purge government of all but vetted Trump loyalists, from the Justice Department to the intelligence communities to weather and climate forecasting. It is the primary demand of the document; the government must not be allowed to harbor Americans who disagree with Republican ideology, who refuse to obey illegal orders issued by its Dear Leader figure or his lieutenants, or who participate in scientific endeavors that Dear Leader's minions don't like.

That promised federal purge of conservatism's enemies poses two obvious problems. The first is that it would be brazenly illegal, or would have been before the Trump-dominated Supreme Court announced that from now on presidents can do whatever the fk-all they want, break any laws they want, and pardon anyone they want for federal crimes committed on their behalf. The Project's plan for getting away with the purge—not for legalizing it, mind you, but for making it a fait accompli before courts or Congress could do a damn thing about it, is known as Pillar IV, a closely guarded "secret" document describing the agenda for the first 180 days of a new administration whose creation is now the responsibility of hard-hard-right movement crackpot and ex-Trump Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.

But the second problem is that purging tens of thousands of Americans from the federal government so that they can be replaced by devoted toadies requires an equal supply of toadies, and Trump's team was scraping the bottom of the conservative barrel to come up with enough people to staff its last administration. That led to pulling in multiple hard-right House Republicans, and it led to the elevation of cranks like Larry Kudlow, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, and it led to Trump son in law Jared Kushner being put in charge of whatever part of government Trump had to most urgently deal with at any given moment in time so that Trump wouldn't have to take five minutes out of his day to remember the names of whoever he had ostensibly put in charge of those things to begin with.

Project 2025 ringmasters like Kevin Roberts, Paul Dans, and Russell Vought are apoplectic in their insistence that the government needs to be purged of the sort of disloyal Americans that blocked Donald Trump's attempted coup last time around, but after nearly a decade of Republican Party purges of the "disloyal" there aren't 10,000 or even 1,000 loyalists left who have the genuine chops to take on most high or mid-level government jobs. So that's where this new database comes in: It's a "conservative LinkedIn," a bare-bones website that invites Trump loyalists to add their names to the Heritage Foundation's list of foot soldiers that believe they may be worthy of the Sedition Administration 2.0. Applicants are vetted with a questionnaire that probes their ideological beliefs in an attempt to weed out undesirables, and into the database they go.

As you might imagine, there's been problems.

On paper, the database has been a success. As of June, Chretien told me, the database contained over 10,000 profiles. But he declined to say how many of those profiles had been completed (an applicant can create a profile but fail to fill it out completely) or formally vetted. By July, a Heritage spokesperson said the database was “closing in on 20,000 profiles.”

Privately, though, some of the people directly involved in the project have questioned whether the database is attracting the type of people who could actually work a job in a future Republican administration. In an explicit effort to reach beyond the Beltway, the Project 2025 staff have traveled around the country to promote the database, hosting recruiting stations at events including the Iowa State Fair — a move that may help grow the database’s raw numbers but isn’t guaranteed to identify people with the credentials to staff senior roles in the White House or at a cabinet agency.

“It’s like a noble aspiration to say that we should look beyond D.C. … [but] it becomes a qualitative issue rather than a quantitative one,” said the person who advised the project. “I don’t think anyone [outside the Project 2025 team] has any idea what kinds of individuals are in the database.”

So the advocates of the massive government purge have, in order to head off the catastrophic and agency-shuttering staffing shortages that would result from their plans, been tooling around the country attempting to recruit party-loyal replacements.

"Hey there! Hey, you with the waffle cone! How'd you like to run NOAA? Wanna fly planes into hurricanes? Wanna be in charge of oil company regulations? How about you there with the balloon, think you have the chops to lead the national security state?"

It's one thing to announce that your new fascist state will purge the party's enemies from government, but it's entirely another to then find an equal number of party loyalists who know a damn thing about what government does.

Trump's ideological allies are running into the hoariest of authoritarian problems. It's one thing to announce that your new fascist state will purge the party's enemies from government and the public square, but it's entirely another to then find an equal number of people who are both (1) devoted loyalists to your extremist movement and (2) have even the tiniest amount of expertise in any damn thing the government actually does.

The sort of people who show up in the streets with Home Depot-purchased garden torches to celebrate the legacy of some long-dead racist twit, to use just one example, are generally not the sort of people who have been willing to subject themselves to the education and training required to obtain true expertise in much of anything. They are, by definition, not institutionalists. They are, by nature, largely immune to the effects of education.

If you want to comb the nation's state fairs and conferences looking for people able to pin up racist posters or be professional rabble-rousers pissing off whoever they see walking around a college campus, sure, you're going to be able to build yourself a nice little movement out of that. But it's not a government.

Once an authoritarian movement seizes power and begins the promised purges of their ideological foes, the movement's leaders can respond to this unavoidable staffing conundrum in one of two ways. One: They can temper their ambitions and admit that they can't simply remove all their enemies from government because then government wouldn't be able to function. Two: They can charge on, announcing that none of those fired workers were doing necessary jobs to begin with and proclaiming that all that is truly necessary is a devotion to the movement; the rest is detail work.

I'm lying, of course. Authoritarian movements never do the first thing. Authoritarian movements are premised on the notion that nobody but their own ideologues knows anything of value to begin with, and when successful in obtaining power those movements always, always proceed by purging non-loyalists and installing unqualified but sycophantic goons. It's the whole point of such movements. They never have the backing of a nation's institutionalists, or the educated, or the knowledgable, because fascist movements in particular define themselves by declaring institutionalists, the educated, and the knowledgable to all be the movement's most insidious enemies.

So what we're seeing in the Heritage Foundation's state fair scramble for waffle cone-carrying loyalists is also a rote part of a fascist movement's rise to power. They've explicitly stated that it is non-ideological knowledge and expertise that is the cause of the nation's problems, they've vowed to replace all of those people with whoever can pass tests promising to run government according to Dear Leader's wishes, and now they need to plan out how to staff a government made up entirely of Dear Leader worshippers. And so we step squarely into the very next move of new authoritarian governments, the inevitable loyalist worker boot camp:

To ensure a baseline level of knowledge across prospective recruits, Project 2025 has rolled out its “Presidential Administration Academy,” a series of interactive video trainings led by prominent conservative politicos and broken up into four different subject areas, including “Conservative Governance 101” and “the Administrative State and the Regulatory Process.” At the end of each module, viewers are prompted to take a quiz, and participants who watch all the classes and pass all the quizzes are awarded a “certificate” that’s reflected on the profile in the database.

But in the end, the modules were relatively light on substance and heavy of ideology, according to a person who was familiar with them. At least one conservative who was asked to contribute to a module was subsequently asked to “dumb down” his material to make it more palatable to viewers.

There you go, sport. In order to get you up to speed on the part of government Dear Leader will be handing to you, we've published a series of interactive video trainings explaining how things like "the administrative state and the regulatory process" work. Watch the video and get your certificate, and don't worry—we know none of you are book learners. We promise this course is as "dumbed down" as possible.

So now you're all set to take over for the government veteran with 20 years of experience in building and managing government regulatory compliance databases. You're ready to work in the U.S. Mint. You're ready to decide who gets prosecuted for what crimes, and if you don't know which things are crimes and which ain't then don't worry, I'm sure there's another video on that sitting in whatever desk you're assigned.

Again, this is rote. You cannot hold a purge without an accompanying elevation of hacks; it is the stuff of every authoritarian movement. It also closely mirrors the also-Heritage-boosted plans for the American reconstruction of Iraq, if you're hunting for evidence of how this new version is likely to play out. Spoiler alert: Not well.

The relatively low-budget feel of the database and the training academy has prompted some of the project’s partners to wonder what, exactly, Dans and his team have done with the $22 million that the Heritage Foundation initially pledged toward Project 2025.

Oh, I think we all know where the money went. The money went where the money always goes, in these things. Let's not kid ourselves here.

So that, then, is the next part of the Project 2025 agenda everyone needs to know about. It's one thing to marvel at the countless fascist declarations promising to purge governmental enemies sprinkled liberally through the Mandate for Leadership, but it's important to understand that Trump's ex-administration allies don't consider that to be a vapid and purely aspirational document. The next two parts of the plan consist of the pseudolegal maneuvering that will be used to actually enact that purge—as described in a document that will remain very, very secret, unless somebody inside Heritage squeals—and the vast database of the nation's most devoted Dear Leader loyalists, the people who are being vetted for their willingness to put movement ideology over knowledge, compliance over competence, and who will be directed to party-produced videos to learn about the whatever bits of government the movement intends to assign them to.

This is all playing out precisely like other fascist movements have, from the testing-the-waters violence of the first coup attempt to the demonization of scientists and educators to the raw buffoonery of addlebrained movement leaders. There's still hope it can be circumvented next November—which will require defeating the next of the movement's already-organized moves, the pre-planned claims that the voting was rigged and that our democracy is simply too corrupt to count as legitimate—but the people who insist that America cannot survive if their enemies are allowed to still participate in government or in society will be very much with us for a long, long while.

Fascist movements do not go away when they are defeated. They simply sulk and stew, even more convinced that democracy is indeed a plot against them. We'll be dealing with these creeps even after Florida's gone near-completely underwater. They'll be claiming the seawater is a plot against them, too.