Why the second time will be worse

The Project 2025 plan has always been to gut checks and balances

Yesterday, Trump sought to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 by welcoming the “demise” of its director — damage control to address the severe blowback for his second-term agenda. His decision to throw Heritage under the bus is an attempt to mask his authoritarian impulses and convince people, as one elected Democrat recently said, “democracy will be just fine,” whoever is in office next year.

The reasoning why everything would supposedly be “fine” in Trump’s second term, as expressed by members of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, goes like this: “We think American institutions are strong enough to contain whatever designs Mr. Trump has to abuse presidential power.” 

It’s not only elites who hold this view, either. A recent poll conducted by The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University of registered swing state voters most likely to decide the outcome of the 2024 election found most voters “believe that the guardrails in place to protect democracy would hold even if a dictator tried to take over the country.”

These are all dangerous assumptions that don’t recognize how Trump has promised to blow out our democratic system of checks and balances, which is already weaker because of the damage Trump did in his first term. 

Here’s why we can’t take four traditional institutional guardrails — the courts, Congress, the civil service, and free and fair elections — for granted in a second Trump term.

First, look at the courts

No one is supposed to be above the law in our country, but in his quest to shield himself from any accountability for his actions on January 6, Trump asked the Supreme Court for absolute immunity from criminal liability and a majority of justices bowed to Trump’s request. They invented a new rule of immunity for “official” acts — a vague, sweeping term that remains largely undefined. What this means is that the courts can no longer be expected to hold a future President Trump accountable for violating our laws. 

The ruling will allow Trump to commit unlawful acts in a second term and will give him the green light to take “retribution” against those who challenge his authority.

Trump can also be expected to seek to absolve his staff from any criminal accountability for enabling these acts. He engaged in rampant pardon abuses in his first term and promises to expand on those abuses by issuing pardons for January 6 rioters, effectively creating a presidential license for the political violence unfurled that day, and enabling future violence to advance his political aims.

Another worrisome legal development: In the criminal case against Trump for his mishandling of classified documents after leaving office, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon, ignored law, precedent and history and dismissed the case outright, halting what the Associated Press stated was “widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats the Republican former president confronted.” 

Second, look at Congress 

Elected Republicans have proven that, as a party, they are unwilling to exercise any meaningful checks on Trump’s executive powers, either through investigation or impeachment. Those who have attempted to do so have been ridiculed and purged from the ranks. So long as that remains their posture, impeachment is not a realistic check on Trump’s future abuses of power.

Going forward, Trump and his allies promised to move swiftly and without restraint to move troops to American cities, invoking the Insurrection Act as soon as Inauguration Day to put down protests and deploy the military to the southern border to carry out what Trump promises to be the “largest deportation operation in history.” Given the current state of the party, Republicans in Congress are far more likely to enable these activities than act as a check upon them.

Additionally, Trump has specific plans to encroach on Congress’s constitutional duties rather than respect the separation of powers. Although the Constitution gives Congress the power to fund government action through appropriations, Trump plans to use a practice called “impoundment” to defund programs he doesn’t like or withhold money from states and localities to force them to do his political bidding. In practice, it could routinize actions such as Trump’s hold-up of Ukraine funding as leverage to help him win the 2020 election that led to his first impeachment.

Third, look at the civil service 

Trump has readied plans to gut independent agencies and replace career staff with loyalists, through a Day One executive order known as Schedule F. Doing so will allow Trump to then deploy federal regulatory powers to punish his perceived opponents and reward those he favors.

Long before JD Vance became Trump’s official running mate, Vance enthusiastically supported such plans and explained how Trump should dare the Supreme Court to stop him:

“I think that what Trump should — like, if I was giving him one piece of advice — fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Fourth, look at elections. 

After losing the 2020 election, Trump pressured Department of Justice officials to launch sham investigations into the election results in hopes of overturning the outcome. When that didn’t work, he incited an insurrection in an attempt to remain in power. 

In 2022, he called for the “termination” of the Constitution over what he falsely described as “fraud” in the 2020 election. 

Given Trump’s track record, his repeated flirtations about staying in office beyond a second term and recent remarks to supporters about how they “won’t have to vote anymore” if he’s elected should not be taken lightly. Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate is another important and new factor to add to the ledger. Whereas Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence refused to go along with schemes to stop or delay the certification of Biden’s presidency through the use of false electors, Vance has stated otherwise. In a July 2024 interview with ABC News, Vance said:

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that's what we should have done." 

In this scenario, and many others, the last backstop would be the Supreme Court, and as explained in the first bullet above, that institution cannot be relied upon to reject such an outlandish scheme. With his arguments for total immunity, Trump has shown an ability to persuade a majority of Supreme Court Justices to accept what were, until recently, considered to be unacceptable legal arguments.

The lesson that we should be taking from Trump’s first term and promises to enact an authoritarian agenda in his second term is that we should not take our democratic institutions — the courts, Congress, independent agencies, and our elections — for granted. Institutions do not defend themselves, and these institutions can only be relied upon to protect and uphold the rule of law as long as the people who are stewards of them remain committed to doing so.

Photo: Broken glass in the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, via Getty.