Reading Project 2025 as a Manifesto
Manifestos have very often prefigured constitutional crisis, revolution, the overthrowing of legal orders, and set the terms of what follows. Project 2025, or the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, can be read as a manifesto, and one that is now well on its way to being implemented. Examining it through the lens of constitution (re)making sets out some of the terms in which it could be opposed, including by counter-manifesto.
Constitutional Change and Manifestos
The US started with a manifesto. The US Declaration of Independence is a firm articulation of a claim to have the necessary constituent power to make a new state. It throws off the legitimacy of the old legal order – the British constitutional imperial structure – and sets out the basis for the “new world” it was seeking to create.
Manifestos are more common in law than we may presuppose. War Manifestos were long part of the apparatus of legality in warfare in international law. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, for instance, remains part of French constitutional law. The Haitian Declaration of Independence was key to establishing black sovereignty. There are also the manifestos that challenge exclusionary practices of constitutional law; for example, feminist manifestos such as Olympe de Gouges’ which claimed that the Citizens in the French Declaration must include women, as they too fought the revolution, claimed in other words constituent power on behalf of women to make the new state.
These types of political manifestos (and the constitutions they go on to inspire) are a form of utopian legal blueprint for the imagined state they are demanding and creating. They pre-figure the legal order that they wish to come into place. Where manifestos might outline how power should be wielded, how citizenship will be bestowed and how human rights will be guaranteed in this ‘better place’, the constitutions that follow set up these terms. The liberal utopianism of the US Constitution was not utopian for all, of course. The two-thirds solution embedded racist citizenship into its roots while the continued absence of the Equal Rights Amendment has meant that women’s bodily autonomy and equality of citizenship are continuously bombarded and reliant on the judiciary for their protection.
What Frankenberg describes as the ‘constitution as political manifesto’ turns what were revolutionary, political or normative claims into mere statements to be confirmed, declared or reaffirmed in constitutional form. Through legal performance, they take on a form of apparent immutability. If we are in a ‘post-constitutional moment’ (as Russell Vought argues), or witnessing the counter-constitution (as Kim Lane Scheppele labels it), then it is imperative that constitutional scholars expose this myth of immutability and start to critique the claims to constituent power that are emerging. What then can we learn from reading Project 2025 as a constitutional manifesto and the ways in which it aims to remake the state?
Reading Project 2025 as a Manifesto
Project 2025 is very much a manifesto. It lays out a vision that is both backward looking, in that it claims to be bringing the US constitution back to its roots, while also forward looking in laying out a very clear utopian blueprint. Blueprint utopias (in contrast to, for instance, feminist utopias which tend towards a “critical” model, that rejects an end state) are very often invoked in imperial or authoritarian projects. They are the utopias that people most often are referring to when they talk about oppression.
While both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance distanced themselves during the election campaign from Project 2025, and Project 2025 says all over the front page of its website that it is not a Trump plan, the first few weeks in office suggest its contents certainly are one of the blueprints for the re-ordering of the US Constitutional system. Many of the document’s authors either worked with previously or are now part of the administration.
The document was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a US right-wing think tank. It describes itself as a ‘historic movement’ to ‘take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.’ Now, that phraseology might make some immediately sceptical, but then again, calling George III a tyrant probably did in 1787 also. To construct a potential constituency from its audience, it states
“If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”
The use of “we” is a common tactic employed by manifesto writers to attract likeminded individuals and/or to construct legitimate constituent power. These can be read as prefigurative claims to have the power to bring about these fundamental changes to the constitutional structure of the US. It established a collective “we” that is positioned against an ‘other’, here that ‘other’ are those who they describe as radical Left, but also the many others targeted in the Project.
Reading Project 2025 as a manifesto exposes how in today’s legal reality, it is a blueprint for what is happening. A quick comparison between the demands and recent Executive actions suffices. It is a long document, but the elements they themselves highlight is a good starting place.
A Gendered Pattern
The website’s front-page states that one aim is to ‘[b]an biological males from competing in women’s sports’. Of course Trump’s Executive Order goes further, but in the main text of Project 2025 there is a clear link made between trans people and pornography and what it describes as ‘radical gender ideology’. If we place that alongside the Project’s aim to dismantle Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DEI), and Trump’s Executive Orders to ‘maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family’ a gendered pattern emerges.
The project claims that they are ‘[r]estoring the family as the centerpiece of American life’. But what we get here, is an almost stereotypical move from making trans people non-citizens by removing their identity, then moving into family, and from here of course, undermining the rights of all women. A return to social-science and biblical definitions of the family is one where women, and their bodies, are confined and controlled. The definition of women and men contained in another Executive Order, is one that begins, biologically inaccurately, from conception, where, according to Project 2025, life begins.
Reading Project 2025 as a utopian manifesto facilitates and necessitates an exploration of the underpinning fundamental values at the core of the project. In her approach to utopia, Ruth Levitas reminds scholars to be “archaeological” in their study of utopian projects; to ask who is included and who is excluded, and to consider the harms and exclusions that ground the political demands. The gender ideology is not hidden beneath the surface in Project 2025. Blueprint utopias might invoke an inevitable final destination, but what Levitas and theories of utopianism provide are the tools to interrogate how these blueprints are constructed, disseminated, and ultimately to start to expose their hideous harms that inform their “dreams”.
Project 2025 is also deeply sceptical of climate change, promoting, for instance oil and gas exploration in Alaska and ending wind energy development. Another Trump Executive Order goes about ‘Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential’ while rescinding a Biden Executive Order that supported offshore wind.
Overthrowing the Constitution
Many of the Executive Orders are being challenged before US Courts, the Just Security blog has an excellent tracker for keeping up to date on these cases. The reaction of the Executive to the judiciary is important. The Executive Order that denies birthright citizenship, guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, is being held up across four courts. The order itself is damaging to ideas of the rule of law, to introduce an Executive Order that quite obviously contradicts the constitution.
But J.D. Vance’s reaction to the judiciary holding up executive orders was to state that ‘[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power’. Project 2025 argues there is a duty to protect the powers and privileges of the President from encroachments by Congress, the judiciary, and the administrative components of departments and agencies. Dismantling the notion of the separation of power as a fundamental commitment within US constitutional law and creating an all against the President scenario.
Project 2025 emphasises the need for political appointees to be answerable only to the President. The Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies Executive Order partially brings that into place; it removes vast swathes of oversight and accountability, leaving just the President. Project 2025 is also clear that it wishes the administrative state to be dismantled. For instance, it wanted the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) to be ‘prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character’. The CDC is now delaying releasing information on, for instance, bird flu.
Project 2025 is very clear on what it sees as the extent of power the Executive Office ought to hold, stating ‘the overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need of repair. Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.’ This is a manifesto call to action, and we should take seriously how far they will go to implement this plan
Stop Project 2025
What we have seen over the past few weeks is the implementation of a manifesto that aims to completely alter the US legal order while adamant that it is returning to its roots. In ‘dismantling the administrative state; defending the nation’s sovereignty and borders; and securing God-given individual rights to live freely’, Project 2025 foreshadows the basis on which the Trump Administration is acting. And whilst it might not offer the whole basis, thus far it has given us a fair indication of travel.
Reading Project 2025 as a manifesto heralds a warning of what is potentially to come, it offers a blueprint for the US Constitutional structure it seeks to prefigure. But what reading these sorts of texts as manifestos also highlights is the need to be alert for the counter-manifestos that are emerging – in other words, the resistance to Project 2025, which was present even before Trump’s election – whether that is in the form of women’s magazines outlining their projections for the state of women’s rights if Project 2025 is implemented, to the (albeit overly commercialised) t-shirt people can buy in support of “Stop Project 2025”.
Manifestos as prefigurative constitutional documents are more common than we imagine. Though Project 2025’s handbook for constitutional re(making) is rare in both its detail and the speed at which it is being implemented. Regarding it as such, enables the possibility of opposition on its own terms, a counter-manifesto to prefigure a new and different constitutional future to one currently being constructed.