Halfway To Autocracy

They called it hysteria. They called it fearmongering. Now half of Project 2025 is embedded in government, proving the warning wasn’t loud enough.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Remember to follow him on Substack for more by clicking here. Michael just hit 500,000 subscribers on YouTube! Subscribe today for free here and let’s keep the momentum going!

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I remember the eye rolls. The smirks. The patronizing head pats from cable news know-it-alls and Trumpworld operatives alike when some of us dared to say, out loud, that Project 2025 wasn’t a think-tank fever dream; it was a roadmap. A 920-page instruction manual for dismantling a democratic republic and replacing it with something narrower, meaner, and far more obedient.

“Fearmongering,” they called it.
“Trump doesn’t even know what it is,” they said.
“He hasn’t read a book in years,” they joked—ironically the only accurate part of that defense.

Donald Trump himself swore he had nothing to do with Project 2025. No knowledge. No involvement. No interest. Which, if you’ve ever worked for Donald Trump, as I unfortunately have, should have been your first clue that the opposite was true.

Fast-forward to today. Roughly half of Project 2025 has already been implemented.

Imagine that. Half.

This wasn’t a slow drift. This wasn’t bureaucratic inertia. This was a blitzkrieg executed through executive orders, ideological staffing, mass firings, and the weaponization of federal agencies. It turns out you don’t need Congress when you control the personnel, and you don’t need the truth when your base prefers the lie.

There’s an old saying in Washington: personnel is policy. Trump didn’t just remember it; he weaponized it. Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s chief architects, now runs the Office of Management and Budget, the “nerve center” of executive power. Peter Navarro, who helped author the trade section, is back whispering tariff fantasies into Trump’s ear. Brendan Carr wrote the FCC wish list and now runs the FCC. That’s not coincidence. That’s compliance.

Let’s talk outcomes.

Project 2025 is obsessed with erasing modern understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and equality from federal life. And surprise: Trump’s White House has been remarkably efficient. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs? Slashed or purged. Federal rules scrubbed of words like “gender identity,” “reproductive rights,” and “sexual orientation,” as if deleting language deletes reality. Data collection that could expose inequality? Gutted. Because if you don’t measure injustice, you can pretend it doesn’t exist.

Reproductive rights were supposed to be “left to the states,” remember? That was the campaign line. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, about 40 percent of Project 2025’s anti-abortion agenda has already been achieved. EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act) guidance protecting emergency abortion care was rescinded. Planned Parenthood was effectively defunded through Trump’s tax law and friendly courts, threatening the closure of up to 200 clinics and cutting off health care for more than a million people. The CDC, once the gold standard of public health, has been hollowed out, its reproductive health division decimated, its abortion data delayed and politicized.

This isn’t about “life.” It’s about control. Project 2025 treats abortion not as health care but as heresy, and Trump’s agencies have obediently followed suit.

For LGBTQ+ Americans, the story is just as bleak—and just as intentional. Federal agencies were ordered to purge references to LGBTQ+ people. Health research funding, over $800 million worth, was canceled, including studies on cancer and HIV prevention. Trans Americans were pushed out of public life through passport restrictions, insurance barriers, and the deliberate conflation of identity with “ideology.” The Pentagon reversed protections, halted gender-affirming care, and reinstated discriminatory service bans. All of it straight from the Project 2025 playbook.

Education? Trump couldn’t abolish the Department of Education outright, so he did the next best thing: hollowed it out. Core functions were transferred to other departments, leaving vulnerable students—those with disabilities, low-income families, student loan borrowers—caught in bureaucratic limbo. A national voucher program slipped through Congress, redirecting public funds to private schools while the administration launched a campaign to monitor and punish schools for so-called “indoctrination.” Translation: teach what we like, or else.

And the military, once proudly apolitical, has been reshaped into an ideological testing ground. DEI offices eliminated. High-ranking women and people of color pushed out. Abortion travel benefits revoked. Transgender service members sidelined. Even commemoration months were deemed too threatening. Merit-based, color-blind rhetoric now masks a very deliberate rollback of inclusion.

Now, here’s the most alarming part: this is only halfway.

Project 2025 was never about governance; it was about permanence. About baking ideology into the machinery of government so deeply that reversing it becomes nearly impossible. Trump didn’t need to admit he knew the plan. He just needed to follow it. And he has.

So the next time someone shrugs and says, “He told us he had nothing to do with Project 2025,” remember this: Trump lies the way other people breathe. And the evidence isn’t theoretical anymore; it’s operational.

So stay loud. Stay visible. Stay politically inconvenient. Talk to your friends. Organize. Vote like the Constitution depends on it; because this time, it actually does.

And remember, Project 2025 wasn’t a warning shot.
It was just the opening act.

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