The Really Big Lie of the 2024 election was Donald John Trump’s contradictory claim about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a retrogressive plan for reducing and reorganizing the federal government. He denied knowing anything about it, but he disagreed with it. Nice.
Project 2025 was the all-encompassing plan with tendentious justifications for presidential action and detailed implementations by administration officials who pledged their loyalty to the President, not the Constitution. Its strategy was to flood the system from Day One, not with legislative proposals, but with Executive Orders, most of dubious legality or constitutionality. It intended to neuter and neutralize Congress and overwhelm and undermine the court system, in reliance on a partisan-majority Supreme Court headed by a moral eunuch and legal nitwit.
Congressional Republicans, thrilled by the re-election of Trump, were only too eager to please. In part, they approved of some of his positions; in part, they wanted to keep their seats. Aware of his strong support within their party and his willingness to use his power to reward friends and punish foes, they were equally eager not to displease him and risk their careers. So Senators and Representatives, lacking the moral spine to make sacrifices for the sake of right, quickly capitulated as his administration violated norms, laws, and Constitutional provisions despite increasing evidence that their constituents disapproved of its policies and practices.
This Republican behavior is not puzzling. They have been advocating and, wherever and whenever possible, adopting, anti-democratic laws, regulations, and procedures in elections for many years. Knowing that their positions are unpopular, they do not want elections decided by “the consent of the governed” by free and fair elections. They support disenfranchisement by purging voter rolls and erecting barriers to registering to vote and obstacles to voting. They support gerrymandering by manipulating voter populations according to party affiliation.
The aim is simple: Control who votes and where those votes count. With the SAVE Act, they block the voters they fear. With redistricting, they pick the voters they want. It’s all about cementing the Republican Party’s grip on power—no matter the cost to democracy. (Max Flugrath, “Republicans are brazenly rigging the 2026 midterms,” The Contrarian [21 July 2025])
Decisions by Republican flunkies on the Supreme Court have accelerated these anti-democratic trends. They have approved essentially unlimited funding of campaigns. They have approved infringements on voting rights. They have approved partisan gerrymandering. When, at the outset of Trump’s second term (2021), Amy Coney Barrett declared that the Court “is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she echoed Richard Nixon’s disclaimer “I am not a crook” during Watergate (1973) and self-identified the six Republican justices as vandals of law, precedent, and constitutional provisions.
What impresses me is the efficiency of this Republican movement in all three branches of government—Executive, Legislative, and Judicial—working to destroy American democracy. Thanks to the Heritage Foundation, it had a plan; thanks to Trump, it had a (would-be) dictator (after all, Executive Orders are diktats); and, thanks to rank-and-file Republicans, it had many vocal and active supporters. It remains to be seen whether the Epstein scandal will unravel the interlocking strands of abuses of norms, laws, and Constitutional provisions which have made American democracy work for nearly two-and-a-half centuries.
If not for these past preparations and the passive response of Democrats, Republicans could not have achieved so much in so little time. Since “give ‘em hell” Truman, Democrats have supported milk toasts labeled moderates or centrists: Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who kept Kamala Harris from bringing prosecutorial piss-and-vinegar to the fight. Democrats and the officials whom they have elected have long ignored or discounted past Republican efforts to curtail democracy, and trusted “sweetness and light,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, to prevail in the centers of American political power.
For the past six months or so, Democrats have excoriated Congressional Republicans for lacking the spine to stand up to Trump—Democrats ignore that he is their leader—, but they themselves have lacked a plan, leaders, supporters, and, with a few exceptions, the spine to stand up to Trump or to challenges the Republican movement. A few, like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Adam Schiff, have, to no effect. Hakeem Jeffries and Cory Booker gave record breaking speeches, just lots of talk to no effect. Street protests are all well and good for those who want to feel well and good. But, since Republicans do not care about people on either side of the political divide, they do not care about people on sidewalks. Protests might have value for reinforcing those who object to Trump and Republican policies, but something more material than merely moral or spiritual kumbaya is required. What about dispatching members of Congress to rallies and on tours to make the case for legislation embracing popular causes and against the Republican antidemocratic tactics which prevent their enactment? What about social media blasts, and TV and radio ads about Republican attacks on fair and free elections? What about joining with unions for targeted or general work slow-downs, boycotts, and strikes?
Until Democrats figure out how to connect everything involved with the rule of law to the living needs and moral values of Americans, they are going to rely on Trump, his administration, and Republican officeholders to self-destruct. Which trust is not only misplaced, but self-indicting. It implies that Democrats have no coherent, cogent program to promote American interests at home or abroad. At best, they can offer only a kinder, gentler approach to America’s deterioration as a dynamic nation and its decline as a leader of international liberalism.
What is facilitating the fast fall of American democracy is the moral rot, citizen by citizen, of two basic moral values—equality in law and politics, and equity in opportunity. Equality is undermined by gross disparities of income and wealth; equity is undermined by rejection of compensatory efforts to ensure fair opportunity for all. From hippiedom’s “do your own thing” to campus speech codes, from “rugged individualism” of western movies to tough-cop TV shows, Left and Right together have fostered a culture undermining social responsibility and civic conduct aligned with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Public education in civics or government classes have given way to social-reformist programs which provide little or nothing in the mechanics of democracy. So when an administration embarks upon the anti-constitutional campaign outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the Right is unleashed from restraints to advance it, and the Left is bereft of a strategy to oppose it.
The rot is nowhere more evident that in the legal profession generally and in the graduates of the best-known law schools of elitist universities specifically. Some of their graduates are prominent figures in the Trump administration and are giving legal support to violations of law and the Constitution. Law schools have apparently done little to engender a respect for the law and the rule of law. They have also avoided judging and responding to the professional misconduct of their graduates. They might have—and they still might—revoke their law degrees for conduct unfitting. The opprobrium of a revocation might give weight to ethics instruction to their law students and have a deterrent effect on their graduates. But, for too long and in lieu of such action, law schools have taught their students the technology of the law and legal practice, with little or no regard for professional ethics. Which is one reason why democracy has been so fast to fall after only six months or so since the onslaught against the law and the rule of law by the second Trump administration.
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