Never mind Biden's presser; Look to '2025' instead
Ultra-conservative group telegraphs its next move
Last night’s press conference in Washington involving President Biden did little to move the needle. If you think it’s time for him to exit the stage, you’re likely to still feel that way. And if you were faithfully standing by the elderly president, you’re still with him after last night’s performance.
Aside from that 20 minute interview with George Stephanopoulos a few days ago, we had not seen Biden in an unscripted setting since his disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump two weeks ago. In case you missed my take from that time:
Last night, a member of the House of Representatives from my state, moderate Democrat Jim Himes, joined the chorus of his colleagues calling for Biden to be replaced at the top of the ticket. Dems in Congress, including Himes, surely have internal polling suggesting their own seats are at risk and that the Senate could swing to GOP if Biden remains the nominee. Members of Congress are rarely brave. More often, they simply act in their own self-interest. That’s likely what motivated Himes and the others (at the current count, 18 House Dems and one Dem senator) in calling for Biden’s exit.
This might get me in trouble with my progressive friends, but I feel compelled to say it:
Biden’s entire career has been one of exceptional mediocrity (i.e “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”). He crammed and plagiarized his way through Syracuse University Law School. His singular talent was getting elected and reelected senator in a tiny state that functions as a tax shelter for credit card companies and yacht owners. For as long as I can remember, Biden has been a self-described “human gaffe machine.” For a handy list compiled by one of his adversaries, click here. I’ve been amazed that progressives and people of color are quick to forgive him because many of his worst gaffes and lies are about race, and he has previously praised segregationist senators.
Prior to being elected in 2020, Biden twice ran unsuccessfully for president. In 1988, he was forced to withdraw after revelations that he had plagiarized portions of his own speech from British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock. He ran again in 2008, but folded up his tent after coming in fifth in the Iowa caucuses. Looking for a party elder to compensate for his lack of experience, Barack Obama tapped Biden a few months later to be his running mate.
Bob Gates, a respected former secretary of defense and CIA director under Obama and George H.W. Bush, said Biden, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” To wit, his boneheaded and widely panned idea to partition Iraq into three separate regions based on religious sects.
Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, an event that quickly turned into a circus and wound up giving us one of the worst Supreme Court justices in recent memory, thanks in part to Biden’s incompetence and his unwillingness to call three other witnesses who could have corroborated Hill’s charges of sexual harassment. Note: Biden, now 81, was 49 during those hearings and presumably at the top of his game.
I still think he’s too old to be the leader of the free world and, if reelected, it is very unlikely he’ll make it through to the end of his term. Either he will die on office or resign because of health reasons. But I have no standing in the debate over whether he goes or stays. I’m not a Democrat. But if he is the nominee, I will hold my nose and vote for him because the alternative is even worse: another old man who is not only losing it but is batshit crazy. Speaking of which:
Project 2025
Meanwhile, in other campaign noise, much has been made of a new blueprint for a second Trump term conceived and produced by the Heritage Foundation, a once-respectable conservative think tank that has turned into a MAGA counter-information machine.
Folks at Heritage are salivating at the very thought of a second Trump term, so they published Project 2025 more than a year ago. If you have the time and patience, click here to read full 900-page PDF of the proposal. Various other groups and news media outlets, have summarized the proposal, including the BBC, which characterized it as “A wish list for a Trump presidency.” Below is a video presentation from the New York Times (free link), which has been reporting on Project 2025 for more than two years:
As reporter Jonathan Swan points out, it’s not unusual for think tanks to publish wish lists and policy plans, along with recommendations about who will staff a new administration in a presidential election year. Or as the BBC words it, “It is common for Washington think-tanks of all political stripes to propose policy wishlists for potential governments-in-waiting.”
What’s most unusual about Project 2025 is the scale. The Heritage Foundation has gone to great lengths to produce a vision for the future, having assembled more than 100 conservative groups to make recommendations for policy changes in a second Trump administration.
The long and the short of is that Project 2025 proposes to effect sweeping federal tax cuts, eliminate the Department of Education, begin the impractical mass deportation of millions of unlawful immigrants, withdraw the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, and slash federal money for research and investment in renewable energy sources.
Perhaps most ominously, the BBC says, “Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control” — part of a controversial constitutional idea known as “unitary executive theory,” which holds that the president has the authority to control almost the entire executive branch.
Project 2025 would also dramatically curtail the civil service, and it actually provides a personnel database of loyalists to replace thousands of civil service workers with political appointees selected by the president. These new hires would be trained through a private online training center.
That particular move is consistent with modern conservative thought concerning the so-called “deep state,” the idea being that federal government workers are mostly liberals who will undermine any attempt by a Republican administration to implement a conservative agenda.
As you can imagine, much of this is controversial and some of it is terribly unpopular, especially banning mifepristone and abolishing the Department of Education. Oh, and Project 2025 proposes to ban pornography:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
First of all, the courts would have to agree on the definition of pornography. And it can’t be how Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart described porn in 1960: “I know it when I see it.” Then the Trump administration would have to fund the building of new prisons to house all those pornographers in schools and libraries — to say nothing of the tens of thousands on online porn content creators.
All kidding aside, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity, Project 2025 appears to be a radical document which, if enacted, would fundamentally change the way the federal government operates.
To be clear, I’m not opposed to everything in Project 2025. For example, I’m not sure closing the federal Department of Education is such a bad idea. We got along fine before the department was created in 1980 during the Carter administration. Most public schools and institutions of higher education get a very small percentage of their budgets from the federal government. With only 4,400 employees and annual budget of less than $70 billion, the Department of Education is the smallest cabinet-level agency in the federal government. I’d like to see a study of how the department’s functions and grant-awarding duties could be covered any another agency.
But really, much of the rest of Project 2025 is a naked grab for power — the kind of stuff I would expect to see from a far-right political party in Hungary or Argentina.
It is worth noting that Donald Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025. He posted an incoherent statement on his low-rent social media platform earlier this week:
So he “knows nothing about Project 2025” or its authors, doesn’t like “some” of their statements but nonetheless wishes them luck. If you can make sense of that word salad, I will happily buy you a drink next time I see you.
Trump’s protestations of innocence notwithstanding, a CNN review has found that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025 … including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.”
Dozens more who served in the Trump administration are involved with conservative groups connected with Project 2025, including former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s longtime adviser, the white nationalist Stephen Miller. But Trump has “no idea who is behind it.”
Right on cue, the Biden campaign has ramped up criticism of Project 2025 and Trump’s ham-handed attempt to camouflage his relationship to it:
He’s trying to hide his connections to his allies’ extreme Project 2025 agenda. The only problem? It was written for him, by those closest to him. Project 2025 should scare every single American.
Ironically, Project 2025 could be the gift that keeps on giving for Democrats. But, whether it’s Biden or Kamala Harris, it looks like they’ll still be hamstrung by a weakened nominee with low approval ratings. Bon appetit!
Not only is Trump “batshit crazy”, he’s a convicted criminal, a rapist, and whenever he opens his mouth he spews forth a firehose of lies or whatever happens to cross his pismire-sized brain. I really don’t know how anyone can possibly vote for such an ill-informed creature.
Either Biden or Harris remains a significantly better option than the alternative; I’m voting for an administration that includes seasoned policy professionals over partisan hacks who kowtow to a petulant narcissist. Despite Biden’s personal mediocrity, the answer to this question — by almost every metric — is a solid yes: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Those answering in the negative are either pathologically partisan or just plain stupid.