All Things Known

With the presidential election around the corner, folks are starting to get interested in who these guys are and what they’re about. To that end, a lot of folks are discussing “Project 2025”, which is an enormous plan for how the Republicans will rip out democracy from the United States and replace it with fascist tyranny. Folks, I like to embellish and exaggerate when I talk about things – I’m from Texas – but please bear with me when I say I’m not exaggerating about Project 2025. It’s a program that may have some worthy intentions, but it appears to be a wholly awful form of government.

Now, the Republican presidential candidate, who is a convicted felon, twice impeached, and currently awaiting punishment for… (checks notes)  electoral fraud, has come out on a couple of recent occasions to announce that he knows nothing about Project 2025 or the people behind it. This resulted in eyeroll across such a large population that the rotation of the Earth slightly slowed¹ as many of the policies in Project 2025 are reflected in That guy’s web site and the people behind it were major leaders of the White House organization during his presidency.

As much as it pains me to do so, I feel I should defend the man here. I recognize that if you or I were running for president and we had a major set of policy choices highlighted on our campaign website, we would probably claim them as our own. But we’re talking about a man with no moral compass, zero empathy, and more importantly, little interest in policy, history, or actually running the business of state. He wouldn’t know how to do something in good faith if he wanted to. In fact, I would find it highly suspect if he were to suddenly start spouting policy decisions in complete sentences. 

We saw how this man “works” for four years. He’s not a thinker, or a reader, nor is he much of a doer. He’s a talker, and that’s really all he did for four years. He spoke in an unending stream of consciousness fantasy that had no bearing on reality. He spent his time watching television in the morning and playing golf every afternoon and abdicated his job to his “people” to handle the business of “whatever”. They would trot him out periodically to meet foreign leaders, but he was generally disinterested in anything you or I would call “policy”. They would pretend he was important, but he didn’t actually manage or decide anything important.

It would have been weird if he had said he had read any of Project 2025, because he doesn’t read.

It would have been weird if he had said he knew the people behind it, because he never remembers anyone unless they’re very rich.

This same thing goes for comparing his campaign website to the Project 2025 playbook. I have no doubt there is significant similarity since both were constructed by largely the same hands. But would the small handed man in the long red tie know any of this? Probably not. Let this sink in: he doesn’t actually lie all the time. When he says he doesn’t know something, there’s a very strong chance he’s being entirely honest.

Despite four years in the job, he still doesn’t know anything about what it means to be President. He has some fantasy idea of cos-playing World Leader, but policy is for chumps. He simply doesn’t care, and has no notion that he should. And this, above all his many horrible character traits, his theft of government secrets and White House art, even above the overt profiteering over his position: the fact that he wants the job as President but doesn’t care who makes policy makes him the most dangerous man in the world.

The reason his policy looks like fascism and sounds like fascism is because he’s hired full-on fascists to write it all. So let’s break this down a bit. We know that Felonious Littlefingers hated to pay people, and had a decades-long reputation as someone who regularly stiffed people on their bills. We also know that Paul Manafort worked as a close advisor and attorney without pay, although secretly funded by Russians, because that’s what he testified in Congress. So it seems the best way to get into high positions in the prior administration was to look handsome and pledge to work for free. So what are the chances that the fascists behind Project 2025 were donating their time (while being secretly funded by the Russians or the Chinese)?

And just in case this seems like I’m overly fixated on fascism, allow me to point out that when you have a psychotic narcissist in a position of power who can be easily manipulated into hiring specific people into positions of authority and rule-making, then you open yourself up to having Russians and Chinese and North Korean spies and provocateurs at the highest levels of office. And if you think that this is outrageous embellishment, just note that Paul Manafort testified in Congress that he was, in fact, a Russian spy and provocateur who directed policy. 

The problem with electing a clown as President is that you make the White House into a circus. We’re still cleaning up after the elephant from the last time.

1. See? Embellishment! I can’t help it. ↩︎