Republican Project 2025 Photo by Douglas Rissing / NNPA

They said it would never happen here. Yet here we are. Forty-eight percent of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s fascist playbook for dismantling American democracy, has already been put into motion. Nearly half of this regime’s roadmap to erase civil rights, gut public programs, and reimpose racial hierarchy has been realized, with Black America once again standing at the edge of the abyss.

Project 2025 was never just a “policy plan.” It was a declaration of war on pluralism itself. A promise by Donald Trump, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller to chain the machinery of government to white nationalism, Christian dominance, and patriarchal control. The American Civil Liberties Union warned that it would replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals, reviving 19th-century bans on abortion, dismantling civil rights enforcement, and weaponizing federal agencies against immigrants and protestors. Now, the chains are tightening. The Center for Progressive Reform reports that 251 of the 532 Project 2025 actions have been executed. Entire agencies that were once meant to serve and protect have been hollowed out, their missions inverted. Within the Department of Justice, Trump’s appointees have revived the death penalty, reinstated the racist China Initiative, and authorized aggressive prosecutions of local officials who refuse to enforce his version of “law and order.” Civil rights enforcement has been stripped bare; instead of protecting citizens from discrimination, the DOJ now protects power from dissent.

At the Department of Education, Title IX protections for women and LGBTQ students have been rolled back, and the Office for Civil Rights dismantled. Public education is being replaced with privatized indoctrination, pushing “parental rights” that serve as a Trojan horse for white Christian control. Even special education programs have been gutted, leaving millions of disabled children abandoned in the name of “efficiency.” The Department of Health and Human Services, which was once a guardian of public welfare, has been turned into a moral police force. Abortion access is being criminalized, Planned Parenthood defunded, and data on gender identity erased from health surveys. The new public health priorities are “fertility awareness” and “family discipline,” language straight from the Heritage Foundation’s patriarchal gospel. In housing, Trump’s HUD has repealed fair housing protections and reintroduced policies that penalize single mothers while rewarding “marriage stability.” The echoes of Jim Crow are unmistakable. Homes and neighborhoods once opened through decades of civil rights struggle are being closed again under the pretext of “local control.”

Project 2025’s architects have already unleashed the machinery of cruelty on immigrants and communities of color. Thousands have been rounded up under ICE raids that blur the line between citizen and foreigner. It’s a calculated terror tactic meant to normalize the surveillance and detention of Black and brown bodies. Families have been separated again. Birthright citizenship is under attack. ICE, that iron emblem of modern slavery, now casts a shadow over the same soil where slave patrols once hunted the enslaved. This is not accidental. It is the vision of Russell Vought, who co-authored the 900-page “Mandate for Leadership,” the Project 2025 manifesto. As Trump’s budget director and now his ideological enforcer, Vought believes in purging the federal government of “unfaithful” employees, which means anyone who resists his religious and racial orthodoxy. Stephen Miller, the same architect of family separation and Muslim bans, is back to oversee deportations, surveillance, and the silencing of dissent. Their fingerprints are everywhere, from the federal hiring purges to the empowerment of police forces granted immunity from prosecution. Nearly half of the Project 2025 vision has already been achieved, and it is remaking America into a parody of its democratic promise. The Environmental Protection Agency has reversed greenhouse gas regulations, the Department of Agriculture has reinstated draconian work requirements for food aid, and the White House itself now dictates loyalty tests for every federal employee. This is not governance, it is occupation.

The Center for Progressive Reform notes that Trump’s government shutdown in October 2025 was not a failure of management but a strategy. A deliberate effort to dismantle public programs while blaming “big government” for their collapse. He used the shutdown, as the report states, “as an excuse to advance his goals of slashing programs that benefit millions of Americans.” In this America, cruelty has become the operating principle. The poor are starved to feed the rich, the immigrant is caged to comfort the fearful, and truth itself is outlawed. He once warned that if we do not confront the truth of who we are, we will be consumed by it. Project 2025 is the truth of America unmasked. A nation willing to trade freedom for dominance, justice for vengeance, and compassion for control. Nearly half of the chains have already been forged. They rattle in our schools, our hospitals, our courts, our homes. And while they may not yet bind every wrist, they are ready. The architects of Project 2025 have made their intention plain. To enslave the will of a free people through law, bureaucracy, and fear.

We are halfway to chains.