Even to a Democrat like me, Donald Trump’s first ten days in office were mind-blasting.
President Trump issued over 100 executive orders, proclamations, and memoranda in just his first week in office. Joe Biden had signed 15 executive orders in his first day. Trump signed 26. Then Trump just kept signing.
He broke records and hired 1,300 new people, government employees totally loyal to him and ready to do anything he said.
He pardoned 1,500 January 6th rioters, withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, began a massive immigrant crackdown, declared a national energy emergency and a national emergency at the border, banished diversity, equity and inclusion from the government, came down hard on transsexuals, ordered an Iron Dome anti-missile defense system for America, reclassified civil servants so he could fire those who wouldn’t knuckle under to him, told two million Federal bureaucrats to either take a settlement and leave their jobs or to wait to be axed, and, the really big one, on Monday, January 27th announced a funding freeze on $3 trillion in government grants and loans.
A Washington judge suspended that funding halt until Monday, then the President rescinded it.
Trump is attempting to terrify Federal employees into the MAGA way or the highway. Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at Georgetown University described what Trump may do next: “They can fire 1,000 and put their heads on pikes, and then everyone else quickly falls into line,” says Moynihan, and, “That way you have a terrified bureaucracy that still has institutional knowledge. …scare the bejesus out of 49,000 people and force them into line.”
But Trump’s whirlwind ten days raise a question. How in the world do you get 100 executive orders ready to sign on the first week in office? How do you get the personnel it takes to carry those orders out? And how do you get a game plan that can be executed so fast? A game plan designed to unfold with so much happening in so little time that it leaves your opponents dazed and confused, unable to comprehend it all, and unable to oppose it?
How do you organize a blitz, a tsunami, a carefully choreographed program of what Donald Trump likes to call “shock and awe?”
How do you flood the zone? You have help. Lots of it. Working for years. Preparing every detail. And where does that help come from?
Remember back in June, when Democrats went on the attack against what they called Project 2025? Remember when actress Taraji P. Henson talked about Project 2025 during the BET Awards and comedian John Oliver dedicated an entire segment of his HBO show to it, fueling more searches for Project 2025 than searches for Taylor Swift or the NFL?
And remember when Donald Trump said, “I know nothing about Project 2025”? Remember when the Trump Campaign said it would ban people from Project 2025? Remember when the press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee said the Democrats had fabricated a false attack and that the Project 2025 story was a “desperate lie”?
Is it true that Donald Trump has not known a thing? And that he would ban anyone that Project 2025 sent his way? Not exactly.
Donald Trump’s primary advisor, Stephen Miller, has appeared in videos promoting Project 2025 and was in one of Project 2025’s advisory organizations. Donald Trump’s Director of the White House Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, is listed as a member on the Project 2025 website. Russell Vought, who’s been described as “a principal architect of Project 2025,” has been nominated by President Trump to head the Office of Management and Budget. Project 2025’s Karoline Leavitt is President Trump’s new press secretary. Project 2025’s Brendan Carr is President Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission. And Project 2025’s Tom Homan is Trump’s border czar.
Even J.D. Vance, President Trump’s vice president, is said to be “closely allied” with Project 2025’s prime mover, the Heritage Foundation.
Project 2025 has a massive 920-page book laying out its plan for a total MAGA takeover of the government and for the dismantling of the “administrative state”. That book was penned by over 144 people who either worked for President Trump in his first term in office or in his first campaign.
But most important, it appears that Project 2025 wrote the game plan for Donald Trump’s first weeks in office and fashioned the hundred documents Trump signed. As for the personnel it will take to execute those documents, since November 15, 2022, Project 2025 members have pulled together a linked-in-style database of 20,000 rigorously pre-screened, enthusiastic MAGA Republicans eager to be hired. And Project 2025 has trained these Maga believers to execute its plans. What’s more, Project 2025 has written a first-180-day plan for the president himself.
It appears that Project 2025 has made opening a presidency by flooding the zone as easy as a paint-by-numbers kit. And the result is not pretty. The Gallup Polling Organization revealed the night of Wednesday, January 30th, that Mr. Trump is “the lowest-rated new president since 1953.”
References:
https://nypost.com/2025/01/21/us-news/trump-sets-first-day-hiring-record-with-1300-new-staff/
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/28/nx-s1-5276293/trump-executive-orders
https://www.propublica.org/article/project-2025-trump-campaign-heritage-foundation-paul-dans
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-pause-federal-grants-aid-f9948b9996c0ca971f0065fac85737ce
https://apnews.com/article/f67f5751a0fd5ad8471806a5a1067b5e
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/22/inside-the-trump-plan-for-2025
https://www.afge.org/article/new-trump-administration-packed-with-project-2025-architects/
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/trump-koch-brothers-231863
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Concludes Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” Bloom’s next book, coming out March, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
