Where is the Democrats' Project 2025?
The Democratic Party is inept in countering Trumpublicanism. It comes down to a lack of vision.
During the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, the Democrats warned that the state of democracy as we know it would be doomed if Donald Trump was elected President. They evidenced this claim often with many examples of Trumps erosion of democratic institutions. In the latter half of the campaign however, one key study was highlighted by the Democrats as the Republican’s Gospel of Autocracy: Project 2025.
Project 2025 was a policy initiative established on April 23, 2022 supporting the consolidation of executive powers to enact right-wing policies. Published by the Heritage Foundation, the 900-pages, 30 chapters of policy initiatives called for the partisan control of several cabinet departments and federal civil servants to be appointed based on loyalty to Trump over merit to serve. The “about” section of the Project’s website made it abundantly clear of an ultra-institutional, anti-democratic nature with the key phrase:
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections.”
Now we live America 2025: federal worker are being fired in droves, Elon Musk is engaging in state capture, Donald Trump is using war powers acts to deport immigrants, and police have seized American resident who protested in favor of Gaza. In foreign affairs, America has destroyed it’s relationship with allies in Europe and Canada, it has voted more in-line with Russia and North Korea in the UN rather than the democratic world, and is holding Ukraine as a bargaining chip with Russia rather than backing it’s struggle from tyranny. Two months into Trumps’ term, the Republicans have already achieved so much even with a slim majority of 5 in the House. It is now clear that Project 2025’s vision of a Heirophant executive is becoming reality. But where are the is the opposition to all this?
Project 2025 was a horrific vision of the future that has now become the even more horrific reality of the present. But it was a vision nonetheless. In 2025, the Democratic Party has no project, no vision, no sense of the reality unfolding, and much worse, no courage to do anything about it. Since the withdrawal of Joe Biden’s hamfisted and self-gratifying run for a second term and Kamala Harris’ defeat in 2024, the Democrats have been running around like a chicken with their head-cut off. Despite warning of the dangers to democracy that would ensue if Americans gave Trump a second term, there is no clear leadership, no clear direction, no consensus, and no willpower to do anything to stop it. Where is the Democrats’ Project 2025?
Half the party’s elected leaders are claiming that the Democrats were impaled by their support of trans-rights and social justice. The other half, more sensibly and less bigoted, correctly identifies that the Democrats did not do enough to address working-class Americans. Every moment Kamala Harris spent campaigning with Liz Cheney, known for her homophobic views and deep support of the Iraq War, was a moment spent away from union rallies, pride parades, college campuses, minority-rights organizations, and town-hall gatherings. While Americans can tremble at the Republican’s effectiveness in promoting authoritarianism, they express far more fury to Democrats who sat and held up signs at Trump’s address to Congress reading “this is not normal”.
What has become normal is the Democrats’ bending the knee to conservatism and being actively inactive towards the Republican’s authoritarian takeover. Despite all Democrats in the House voting against the Congressional budget in 2025, hoping it would not attain a supermajority in the Senate and shut down the government, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer caved in and asked his colleagues to vote in favor of the budget. Schumer, along with 10 other Democrats, two of whom will be retiring in the 2026 election cycle, served the Republicans on a silver platter and ignited fury from Democrats in the House. When representative Al Green was removed for rightly objecting to Trump’s address to Congress, 10 Democrats joined Republicans in censuring him. The party shows it is divided and cannot agree who are it’s heroes and who are it’s dissenters. Given the lack of inspiration among party ranks, they have appeared to now emulate those previously iconoclastic to them.
Newly elected Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin from Michigan gave the response to Trump’s address to congress. Appealing to the best interests of Conservatives, Slotkin spent multiple instances of her 10-minute response praising former Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s records on foreign policy in contrast to Donald Trump’s bullish behavior. It is clear that the established Democratic party believes the best way to counter Trumpism is to embrace Reaganism. This strategy will only decrease their turnout further. It will result in Democratic voters continuing to snub a party who appears to represent the very ideology they voted against in 1980 and 2000. But there is another faction of Trumpublican opposition providing a more productive and appealing projection of 2025.
While Slotkin only received 900,000 views for her plea of bipartisanship with autocrats, independent progressive Senator Bernie Sanders received 3.7 million views for his response, in which he called Trumps America a “parallel universe”. The former candidate for president in 2016 whose run almost toppled establishment favorite Hillary Clinton and whose campaign in 2020 received the largest amount of small-donors of any candidate, is still regarded as a more powerful voice in opposing Trump than the Democratic establishment. Now hitting the campaign trail again, Bernie is going local rather than presidential, targeting Republican-held house districts where the incumbent narrowly won.
In Des Moines, Iowa, Omaha, Nebraska, and Denver, Colorado, Bernie has correctly identified that the challenge for America post-2024 is Fighting Oligarchy. Drawing crowds of thousands in towns that only have 10,000 or so residents when it’s not even an election year, it is clear that the national base that supported progressivism in 2016 and 2020 was subdued in 2024. Promoting a vision worth fighting for, Bernie’s calls for greater support to Ukraine, free healthcare, and fighting against Trump’s destruction of programs the benefit working-class Americans ignite applause rather than outrage towards Senate Democrat line-towing.
Bend it like Bernie!
Poster for Sander’s tour of “Fighting Oligarchy”
In 2008, Barack Obama went from little-known first-term Senator to presidential nominee because he had vision. Besting the Democratic establishment’s favorite Hillary Clinton, Obama channeled his campaign around Medicare for All, a progressive policy to ensure all Americans would qualify for health insurance. 2008 saw Obama win Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, and was 0.1% from winning Missouri. This unthinkable victory for the Democrats will have taken place 20 years prior to 2028. Even with the state of the economy and longevity of the Iraq War played in the Democrats favor, Obama exceeded conventional margins of victory because he provided a unifying vision for the country: progressivism.
In 2025, Sanders is activating the country’s progressive base that showed up in 2008, but withdrew in 2024. Despite the overwhelming nature of the Trump administration, opposition exists in areas that have voted for him since 2016 but have been deactivated because of Democrats aversion to a progressive vision. Sanders’ trailblazing has inspired other Democratic leaders like Minnesota Governor and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz to follow suit and activate areas of progressive opposition. While congress continues to bicker and bend over backwards, the campaign against Trumpublicanism rages on in the smallest towns across every state in the country. Sanders has shown that getting involved locally is far more effective to cultivating opposition rather than adhering to Congressional proceedings. It means that Trump’s reign of destruction can be fought against if, in the words of Bernie, “we do it together”.
If the Democrats want to succeed at countering Trump’s authoritarian assault against the senses of America and the world, they will need a vision for the future. If leaders like Schumer continue to bend the knee to Trump’s malevolence, the party may find that they won’t just need a vision, but visionaries.