Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is a collection of policy proposals from The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The group’s 920-page “Mandate for Leadership” is an extremely granular playbook that includes sweeping policy changes aimed at reshaping and dismantling American government. It’s pretty alarming. With so much at stake, we thought it would be good to do a deep dive into what the document contains and what it could portend for a possible Trump second term. Thomas Zimmer is a historian at Georgetown University. He’s studied and written about Project 2025 extensively, including for his Democracy Americana newsletter on Substack. Zimmerman is also the host of the “Is This Democracy?” podcast. He joins WITHpod to discuss what Project 2025 proponents aim to accomplish, how the plans within the mandate reflect broader American right ideology and more.
This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Thomas Zimmer: Project 2025 is their declaration of war on this idea of America. That’s what this is. And so in many ways, this is on the ballot in November. Those are the stakes. And I think this is really, you know, in a fundamental way in November, it’s going to be a referendum on whether or not we want to continue down this path towards multiracial pluralistic egalitarianism or not.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Well, as we’ve been saying throughout this campaign year, covering campaigns are always a little bit speculative in this sense. We don’t know the future. And when someone’s elected to be president, you don’t know ultimately what they’re going to do because that lies out in the future.
And you can make pretty good educated guesses, but sometimes there’s surprises. I don’t think people that had closely studied LBJ in the, you know, ‘50s and early ‘60s would necessarily have thought this will be the person that pushes through the most landmark civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, but that’s what happened.
There were reasons to think that FDR, who at one point ran on austerity and balanced budgets, would sign the new deal. So there are surprises for sure. But as I keep saying, in this context, we have a unique situation where for the first time since the late 19th century, we have two men squaring off who both have records because they’ve both been presidents. And then there’s an additional way in which we have a pretty clear sense of what the future will hold in a Donald Trump presidency.
And that is this extremely granular roadmap that has been put together by a bunch of sorts of right-wing activists and think tank folks and ex-government employees that’s called the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project Mandate for Leadership. And you’ve probably heard about it as Project 2025. Now, interestingly enough, I saw some polling today that suggested only about one in four voters have heard of Project 2025.
But it’s a pretty remarkable document because basically the kind of leading lights of the MAGA movement and American Republican conservatism writ large came together to basically say, you know, agency by agency in the federal government, these will be our objectives. This is how we intend to govern. This is what we plan to do with the executive power vested in us should we win the presidency. And it’s really clear and I think really alarming.
There’s been a fair amount of coverage of it. “The New York Times” has been running a series about it. A lot of outlets have talked about it. We’ve talked about it on the show. But today it’s not quite a “WITHpod 2024: The Stakes” because we’re not comparing the records here. But it’s in line with that theme because I thought it’d take some time with someone that has spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Project 2025 to talk about what is in there, what does it portend for a possible Trump second term?
And a great person to do that with is Thomas Zimmer, who’s a historian at Georgetown University. He writes about and studies the sort of anti-democratic tendencies in the American right since the 1930s. He has a Substack that’s called “Democracy Americana.” And on that Substack he has been writing about Project 2025 extensively. He’s read it and been writing about what it is and what it means and sort of putting it in a broader context of these anti-democratic tendencies, which I think are reflected in Project 2025. So, Thomas Zimmer, welcome to the program.
Thomas Zimmer: Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Hayes: First of all, just tell me how you got interested in Project 2025, like your entrance point into it.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah, I think I started hearing about it when it was launched about two years ago and then they published this, you know, this 920-page report which outlines their policy agenda. That is what you have been referencing, is what they call it mandate for leadership. That was actually published about a year ago. And at first, you know, it seemed like maybe that’s just, you know, whatever. They have some plans. They’re making plans. Who cares?
There was some reporting about it, right, and I felt like maybe I should take a look at it, right, and get some sense of what it was. But I didn’t think it was going to be that important. But then when I started reading, I felt like, wait, they’re outlining their vision for America and how they want to impose it on the country in really the clearest way possible. And this is something that if you want people to know what the American right is all about and what they want to do to the country, this is the best way to clarify that for people.
It’s not me telling them. It’s actually me telling people, look, it’s out there. Read it. Right? So I started digging into it. And I think I mean, just to be clear, this policy report is only one part of Project 2025. It goes even well beyond that. This is a massive planning operation. It’s also a massive hat hunting operation. They’re looking for personnel, thousands of people to staff the government. That’s all part of Project 2025.
And the deeper you look at, the deeper you dig, the more I became convinced that this really is such a great insight into where the American right is today and really what they want to do to the country.
Chris Hayes: So here’s my understanding of the problem that Project 2025 seeks to solve. And I think it’s similar in some ways to 1980, what we call the Reagan revolution. There are some echoes here, although I think this is much more sort of forthrightly anti-democratic and authoritarian than the Reagan revolution.
But the basic sense is the structure of the federal government, particularly the federal agencies, are in some ways bound to a vision of governance that is antithetical to right-wing objectives because of the permanent civil service, because of the institutional cultures. This is something that Reagan thought as well, that they’re kind of the enemy. They are, in Trump’s words, the deep state, which is what he talks about a lot, right, in terms of the CIA and FBI.
But more broadly, this idea that there’s a sort of set of institutions that are hostile to the most extremist imperatives of MAGA right-wing governance. And so you have to have a plan, both in terms of policy objectives, personnel and internal mechanics, to basically remake these places totally, to transform them ruthlessly.
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: So as to turn them, the way that a virus turns a cell into a factory for producing more virus, that basically you need to take these organs, you need to take these cells that are the federal government agencies and turn them into actively places that will reproduce this kind of right-wing governance. Because if you don’t do that, then you’ll fail to achieve your objectives and that’s the general sense about much of the Trump agenda in the first term. Is that your understanding of it?
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah, it’s really crucial to sort of understand the diagnosis from which all of this starts. They are convinced. They, meaning the people behind Project 2025. But this goes beyond just those people. The entire American right is very clear about the fact that they see the first Trump presidency as a failure, right? They are extremely disappointed with the first Trump presidency.
And they’re extremely clear about the fact that when they first rose to power in 2017, Trump world had no concrete plans. They had no personnel to implement whatever plans they might come up with and just very little understanding of the vast and powerful machine that is the American government. They were not ready.
And really, no one understands this more clearly than the right themselves. And they are determined to just not let that happen again and eliminate all of the hurdles that slowed them down or sabotaged them as they see it in Trump’s first presidency. And that is precisely those two levels, which is, one, we need plans. We need to know what we want to do.
And two, we need the right kinds of people in place to actually implement those plans and not be, again, sabotaged like the first time around when they were running up against what they see, like a bunch of quote, unquote “woke bureaucrats” who would just, you know, sabotage everything they wanted to do. That is that is the whole plan.
And that’s also why when you read about Project 2025 in mainstream coverage, you hear a lot about, oh, they want to dismantle government. And I think that’s really not what this is about. This is about sort of an authoritarian takeover of government. Yes, they want to dismantle certain parts of government, everything that can be used as a tool for like a more egalitarian, fairer society.
That needs to go. But other parts of government, they want to mobilize and weaponize and not dismantle at all. They want to turn government into an instrument to impose their vision of society on the country. And I think that’s really something very different from dismantling the government.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s really well said and important. And there’s two things I think that are sort of important to note. One is, in some ways, the existence of the vast bureaucracy that is the federal government and the civil service and the Pentagon, for instance, like every administration comes in and is a little bowled over by this.
I mean, it really is the case that the federal government is enormous, that it contains all sorts of organizations within it that have their own imperatives, that trying to get things done, even in the most benevolent sense, right, look, just trying to do good stuff.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You can be really frustrating. I know people that worked in government and there’s a lot of people telling, you know, all the time. There’s a lot of lawyers saying you can’t do that. But at the same level, those are part of the checks, right, that like there’s a kind of, I would say, productive friction that is in some ways kind of the point between the restraining forces of the vast architecture and bureaucracy of the government —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and the imperatives of an administration. And that productive tension, which I think can be frustrating at a personal level to people, whatever your ideological inclination are, right, I know this for a fact. They view it as like a structural flaw they want to get rid of.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And they want to like truly reconceptualize the federal government from, and maybe this is a good place for us to start the Schedule F stuff, which is —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — a huge thing is that most of the people that work for the federal government are civil service employees, which means —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — they are not political appointees, which means you can’t come in day one and be like, you’re fired because we don’t like you, we want to bring in your own people.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And the reason for that is prior to the civil service reforms in the 19th century, the federal government looked a lot more like what a big urban machine, like the Chicago machine would look like. You get into power and then like you appoint all your partisan buddies to be postmasters. At the time, this was like, you know, these post office jobs is the big bank of jobs in the federal government. And then they kick favors upstairs and they go and do stuff for you.
And it was basically like an enormous corrupt machine. Civil service reform was a way of doing away with that. It’s embodied in something called Schedule F, which is the —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — tell me a little bit about this structure, before we get to like the ideological —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — there’s a structural goal here, which is to remake the civil service and get rid of it as it’s currently constituted.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah. So some people may remember this shortly before the 2020 election, Donald Trump signed an executive order, Schedule F, that’s what it was called, that was rescinded then by President Biden immediately upon taking office before it could really do any damage. But it was intended to fight the deep state and they are now Project 2025. And really, everyone on the right is determined to execute Schedule F as soon as they get another chance.
It would convert tens of thousands of career civil service positions into political appointments. So, you know, there are about 4,000 or so political appointees across the American government. And every administration, when they come in, they look at all those political appointees and they usually, you know, they usually bring in about a thousand or so of their own people, you know, plus minus a little bit.
But, you know, the vast majority of people who work in government are civil servants and they have job protections, right? And the Trump administration wants to come in and turn, again, tens of thousands of those career civil service positions into political appointments so that they can fire them. That’s the whole point, right? Because that would take away all the job protections that come with civil service because they don’t want any more independent experts and they don’t want competent bureaucrats.
They want their own people. They want loyalists. They want ideological conformity because, again, that’s what they feel like sort of hampered them the first time around and they don’t want to let that happen again.
Chris Hayes: I just want to, like, put a fine point on this —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — because this can all sound abstract. Like somewhere in the federal highway transportation bureaucracy, there are a bunch of civil engineers who have to evaluate, like, what the safe turning radius for a road is. Like if you’re doing a federal, you know, on a federal highway and on ramp or off ramp, they promulgate regulations. And there are people that are not ideologues or partisans. They’re civil engineers who evaluate this, right. And then there are people who manage those.
Like, you don’t want that job, I think. You don’t want someone who’s got 20 years of experience doing that kicked out and replaced with someone who is like a right-wing vlogging influencer.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because they’re going to be ideologically devoted to Donald Trump and they’ve been handpicked to put in to now run the bureau that’s going to figure out the turning radiuses. You want actual expertise there, but that’s kind of what’s on the table. I mean, I’m making up this specific example, but that sort of thing happens throughout the federal government in a million different ways.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah. I mean, again, the whole point about these civil service protections is to say we need the federal government to be staffed with people who are not replaced every four years by whatever ideological criteria, but who are they are because of their expertise and because they can do the job that they are supposed to be doing. But this would change that. Now they’re saying, oh, we’re converting people in policy adjacent positions or policy advisory roles.
But those terms are so vague that no one really knows what that means. And really, it would probably go down to even maybe like some administrative assistance somewhere in some agency because, you know, aren’t they also executing policy? So who knows, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: Again, they’re explicitly talking about 50,000 people. All of this, of course, only makes sense if you have 50,000 of your own ideological loyalists that you can replace them with, because otherwise you’re just firing people and you have no one to come in. And that is why, again, part of all of this Project 2025 is also this really unprecedented headhunting operation where they are looking for, they’re vetting thousands and thousands of people, trying to find their type of ideologically pure right-wingers.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, there’s this old saying in D.C. and I think it actually is a Reagan era that personnel is policy, right?
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That when you get people in and I’ve watched this in government up close, how true that can be. Maybe this is a good time to talk about, like, who’s doing this? Like, it’s not explicitly the Trump campaign, which they’ll tell you, although it’s a lot of people who are Trump aligned. And the idea is like this is a toolkit for whoever. This actually happened before the primary. So whoever was going to be the Republican president or nominee, it’s now Trump is the nominee. Who is actually doing this?
Thomas Zimmer: Right. So we should probably say that planning operations are happening on several factions on the right are sort of coming up with their own plans right now. But what makes Project 2025 really stand out, even in this sort of universe of emerging right-wing planning, is that this is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. And it stands out because it unites much of the conservative movement and the machine of think tanks and activists and lobbying groups behind this goal of installing a more effective, more ruthless right-wing regime as members of its advisory board.
Project 2025 currently lists over 100 organizations and institutions. By the way, this is all online. If you just Google Project 2025, you’ll get right to it. You can click on it and then you can read this for yourself. If you look at the advisory board, it’s a who is who of right-wing actors, Alliance Defending Freedom, America First Legal Foundation, Center for Renewing America, Claremont Institute, Young America’s Foundation, Moms for Liberty. They’re all on there, right? And this is really why I believe this stands out.
Again, it’s spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, which for decades has been the most influential, most really the power center of the conservative think tank world. They’re spearheading it, but they have managed to really unite much of the conservative machine behind this. And I think that’s what makes Project 2025 really so both interesting, but also threatening because this is what they what they have agreed to do.
Chris Hayes: And Heritage is interesting, too, because it’s been around for decades. It’s always been at the center of conservative politics in Washington. It has taken a very MAGA-esque turn recently.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Almost in its like tonal, all of its public communication and its president sound like Truth Social posts, like all caps —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like truculent, trolling, aggressive, aggrieved, like it’s in that like Trumpian register, like everything they’re doing now. It used to be a little more like chin stroking —
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — tonal, like we’re serious people —
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and now it’s just like F.U. libs. Am I wrong about that or do you feel like that?
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, no. No, absolutely. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: So, I mean, Heritage was established in 1973. And for the longest time, it’s associated itself with Reaganism and it was associated with Reaganism. But in recent years, they have gone in a decidedly more Trumpian direction. And Kevin Roberts, who took over as president of the Heritage Foundation at the end of 2021, he has been really key in this development. Roberts is not some moderate imposter who just pretends to be hardcore, you know, to blend in with the MAGA crowd.
No, this guy comes from the religious right. He comes out of the world of reactionary Catholicism. He also, by the way, before he became the president of the Heritage Foundation, he also worked for a lobbying group in Texas that made the quote, unquote “moral case” for fossil fuels. So he’s like a hardcore culture warrior, but also fossil fuel industry, that type of thing. He holds a Ph.D. in history, you know, whatever that means.
But this guy, again, he is in his own words, he has sort of defined the mission of the Heritage Foundation now as, quote, “institutionalizing Trumpism.” And they don’t mean this as sort of, you know, taming it. They mean it as making it more efficient, making it more effective. And he’s also been entirely clear about, you know, what his politics is. People may remember that in the summer of 2022, in the fall of 2022, the sort of neo-fascists in Italy came to power under Giorgia Meloni, and like Roberts was just ecstatic about that, right. Absolutely ecstatic.
He was like, this is it. This is the model for American conservatives. And so, yeah, it’s very clear. These people are true believers. This is not some moderate Republican traditional conservatives. These people are all in. And Roberts is really, I think, indicative of how much the power centers of the right have radicalized towards Trump and Trumpism.
Chris Hayes: So let’s stay on this personnel’s policy, because I think the civil service reforms that they envision are one of the biggest sorts of fulcrums here. Can you do that unilaterally? Like it’s just now clear to me that civil service, I think, is set by a set of statutory requirements passed through the years.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So can you unilaterally just be like we’re making 50,000 more political appointees or would that have to go through Congress?
Thomas Zimmer: I mean, look, some of this is certainly legally questionable. And I’m certain that Schedule F, you know, if executed, would it would certainly be tested in court, especially now that the administration, the Biden administration, has just really, I think, has enacted a new rule that basically prohibits the kind of intervention that Schedule F envisions. This came down from the Office of Personnel Management basically saying, look, you can’t do this.
So, if the Trump administration now wants to overrule that or change the rule, they would have to find a court that agrees with them. They would have to find a federal judge that says, yeah, that’s fine. Or they could ignore maybe the rule and just do Schedule F anyway. And then again, it would be tested in court. But I think, you know, here’s the thing. I think what we’ve learned over the past, if we didn’t know this already, what we’ve learned is that you can do a lot of things if you just ignore norms and precedents.
A lot of this stuff doesn’t necessarily run-on law. It runs on norms. And if you are entirely willing to discard those and just do at the very least, you’ll get a lot of time to cause harm and damage.
Chris Hayes: Before the courts catch up to you.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah, exactly right. And I think that is the problem here, right? You can say, oh, they can’t just do that. This strikes me as yeah, and maybe again, it will absolutely be tested.
Chris Hayes: Well, the other lesson is that the law is whatever five right-wing justices say is. I mean —
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you know, you can make all sorts of preposterous claims and they might get a hearing. I mean, like the president is immune from, you know —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — sending SEAL Team six to assassinate political rivals. So, yeah, I mean, ultimately, this stuff will be sorted out by the courts and I think the courts did a decent job last time around of checking some of these imperatives and I think that’s not at all a foregone conclusion —
Thomas Zimmer: No.
Chris Hayes: — this time around. So my understanding is the parts I’ve read, it sort of breaks it up by agency —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like different parts of the federal government, right.
Thomas Zimmer: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: So I think it’d be a little tedious to go through each one. So maybe just like what do you what do you see as the most important things for people to know about what’s being called for? We talked about this sort of structural change —
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: — to the way the very fabric of government personnel functions, like Trump toadies in positions way further down into the bureaucracy than were imaginable. I mean, you know, a 25x increase, right, in sort of political appointees or a 10x, I mean, depending on how it all shakes out. What do you see as the other top things to take away from this document?
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah. So, again, this is the part of Project 2025 that outlines a proper policy agenda. It’s like a 920-page report. It goes agency by agency, federal. Like you’ll find agencies in there that I believe few people have actually ever heard of, probably. And they go chapter by chapter. Again, I think it’s really important to understand, it operates on two level. On one level, this is a program to dismantle the state, right. And you see this, for instance, with Department of Education needs to go out. We don’t want it. They want to just completely abolish it, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: That needs to go. Or for instance, when it comes to the EPA, any sort of climate change regulation, that all is out. It needs to go. We don’t want it. So that is sort of the dismantle part of this project. But then there is the weaponize and mobilize part. And that is sort of the idea to turn government into a tool that you can use for really only two purposes. One is to punish your enemies. And two is to impose this sort of vision of white Christian patriarchal order on American society.
Now, you see this, for instance, in the Department of Health and Human Services, which is I mean, if you read it, it’s it has very little to do with public health at all. It’s entirely conceived as an instrument to impose a certain understanding of what, you know, a sort of heteronormative understanding of gender. There’s just man and woman, a heteronormative understanding of marriage, a sort of hardcore, pro-life, anti-abortion sort of approach. And that’s what the Department of Health and Human Services is for, right?
It’s not about, oh, you know, public health in the broad sense. It’s about here’s what’s right. Here’s what they call it, the natural order. And here’s how we’re going to use this, you know, this machinery to impose that on society. So, for instance, the CDC, which on the one hand, they really hate because of COVID, right. So parts of the CDC, they want to dismantle and say never again can these bureaucrats, you know, tell us what to do in case of a pandemic.
But then also they want to turn the CDC into sort of a sort of an all-knowing departmental institution where information about every single abortion in the entire country, including like the name of the people who are pregnant, the doctors, everyone who quote, unquote “helped” with the abortion, right. They explicitly say we’re going to use the CDC to do something against all this quote, unquote “abortion tourism” by, again, turning this into a repository for detailed information about every single abortion, entire country.
And they want to force blue states to give that information to the CDC, which as of right now, California, for instance, doesn’t give that information to the extent it even has that information. It doesn’t give that information to the federal government. But they are saying we’re not going to accept that anymore. Every abortion in the country, we’re going to collect all this information at the CDC.
And, you know, this is not a small government vision, right? That has nothing to do with small government or —
Chris Hayes: I got to say, that’s really —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that’s deeply chilling, sense of saying.
Thomas Zimmer: I mean, yes, absolutely. It absolutely is. But I mean, explicitly, again, that is in the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Service. And I think it captures that dichotomy, right? Parts of the CDC, dismantle. We don’t want it. But also, oh, nice, we can turn this into a tool for the kind of society we want to create here.
Chris Hayes: So nationwide surveillance of pregnant people.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes. Absolutely. Yes.
Chris Hayes: In states red or blue, states where it’s legal or not legal.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So that we just know who’s getting abortions.
Thomas Zimmer: I mean, they’re being sort of ominous or they’re not explicitly saying what they will then do with this information, right. But the entire chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services is all about basically banning abortion through the back door, even without national legislation, because that’s not what they’re talking about. And also, they know that that might not come.
They might not be able to enact sort of a national abortion ban. But they’re very clearly saying that they want to outlaw mifepristone. They’re talking about outlawing, again, any sort of medication that is used for abortion. They’re talking about this vision of abortion surveillance. And again, they’re being very explicit about using the Department of Health and Human Services for this of hardcore pro-life. They’re basically saying explicitly the Department of Health and Human Services needs to be a pro-life tool.
Chris Hayes: Right. That’s Health and Human Services as an example —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and you have a background in actually writing about public health through your scholarship. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the Department of Justice, because —
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — the place that all this stuff kind of gets the scariest to me and the place that I keep referring to the Department of Justice as sort of like the Chekhov’s gun of American liberal democracy —
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: — which we’ve seen tested a few times and really was tested during Nixon, which is that the Department of Justice is in the executive. It is part of the Article 2 branch. It reports to the president. The president appoints various people. And at the same time, not really through statutory restriction —
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — but through norms and promulgations within precedential findings by the department itself —
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — there are all sorts of ways to regulate that power such that it isn’t just turned into a kind of authoritarian police force, right?
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You signed a petition against my government. The FBI shows up at your door the next day to investigate you about X, Y, Z, right?
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And this happens in authoritarian regimes all the time. Presidential dictatorships that are sort of like plausibly democracies, but aren’t really in action.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This is a key way that those become corrupted. What do they say about all that stuff?
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah. I mean, they’re being 100 percent clear. There’s not going to be a Department of Justice with any kind of autonomy from the White House. They’re being very explicit. Now, the Department of Justice has to do what the president tells us to do. And this is one of the biggest frustrations, not just of Trump himself, but also of these people that are behind Project 2025.
They believe that in the first Trump presidency, they were hampered by these lawyers in and around the White House who had too many qualms about questions of legality and norm and precedent. And by the way, we’re already talking about even in the first Trump presidency, we’re talking about Federalist Society lawyers, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes. These are all right-wingers. Jeff Sessions, and yes, yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: Proper conservative/right-wing lawyers. But the people behind Project 2025 are convinced that, you know, they were putting too much of a brake on, for instance, they are convinced they should have invoked the Insurrection Act in the summer of 2020 to suppress the protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder. They are convinced that, you know, there should have been more investigations into Trump’s enemies and they feel like they’ve been, you know, they’ve been sabotaged by these lawyers.
So this time around, I mean, there’s been basically a falling out between Trump world and even the Federalist Society. And they’re like, no, we’re not going to do this anymore. This whole idea of a sort of a semi-independent Department of Justice, that’s entirely out. And by the way, I can really recommend reading that chapter on the Department of Justice, because it’s really funny how they kind of try to justify this idea of making the Department of Justice into just a tool that does the president’s bidding.
They basically say, oh, the people have lost the trust into the Department of Justice. And if this report is to believe that’s because the Department of Justice didn’t investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop enough and also because it was just not going hard enough after the, quote, “radical agents” of the left like Antifa. It reads like a sort of a hardcore culture war. It could be written by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But this is, again, an ostensibly a policy document in which they are outlining this is what we’re going to do to the Department of Justice. And they’re talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and that really gives you a sense of what sort of the spirit is behind these ideas.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And there’s a broader ideological vision here, which we should maybe take a step back to talk about, which is back during the Bush administration, one of the things they would talk about is this notion of a unitary executive —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — which is that the constitutional structure of the country has an Article 2 branch, which is the executive.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And all power flows from the president. And anything that sort of checks that is itself kind of constitutionally suspect.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So when you have all these kinds of consultative boards, you know, all that are promulgated by statute, when you have administrative procedures, like there has been a hostility to that running through conservatism for a while. It’s also a hostility that is showing up before the Supreme Court and the federal society —
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — towards the administrative state, which is basically we don’t like these bureaucrats, despite the fact that they have been given this authority via perfectly like, you know, past statutes signed by a president, right, through the constitutional order. They have been created and given this, you know, authority to decide these questions, right? We just don’t like them. And we’re sort of coming up with a reason why they’re unconstitutional.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And so this idea of basically making the president’s authority within the government itself kind of more dictatorial —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — is something that they kind of are all on the same page against on. We don’t want lawyers and bureaucrats saying, no, you can’t do that. We want the edict of the president to go.
Thomas Zimmer: Well, as long as and if the president is a Republican, we should say —
Chris Hayes: Because it’s an important point, because if it’s the wrong president that we don’t want it.
Thomas Zimmer: No —
Chris Hayes: Then the government no longer has the power to regulate carbon (ph).
Thomas Zimmer: No. If it’s a Democratic president, then everything the president does is a sort of dictatorial overreach.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: But no, absolutely. I mean, again, at its core, Project 2025 envisions a vast expansion of presidential power and hovering sort of in the background of all of this, is this unitary executive theory, this of legal theory. It basically says there are zero limits of presidential power when it comes to the executive. Like the president has absolute king-like powers over the executive branch.
And like you said, that’s been around for decades. It’s something that the conservative legal movement has been pushing for a long time. And it does have significant support, not only in the conservative legal movement. Certainly there are at least two, maybe more conservative justices on the Supreme Court who are certainly —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: — let’s say, a unitary executive theory interested. And you see this throughout Project 2025, the vision of the president’s sort of basically unlimited control over the government is justified by this. But it’s also justified by something even more profound, by this idea that the president, at least this president, a right-wing president, embodies the true will of the people —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: — and that nothing must impede the will of the quote, unquote “real America,” you know, the sort of —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: — white patriarchal America, and certainly not some bureaucrats or lawyers or even the law itself. I also want to be clear, you know, they’re talking about this like the unitary executive theory, but it’s really not about a consistent legal theory with these people.
Chris Hayes: Yes, it’s not very theoretically developed.
Thomas Zimmer: No.
Chris Hayes: Right, yes, that’s a good point.
Thomas Zimmer: I mean, this is explicitly designed as a response to what they see, what they call the leftist woke threat. And they see what they do as justified because everything, no matter how radical, is justified in defense of, quote, unquote, “real America.” That is sort of the permission structure that governs conservative politics in these circles. And so, yeah, if they can latch onto unitary executive theory to make that sound more or less extreme or more, you know, more legitimate, they will do that. But, you know, they will also do whatever they want to do here, even without that theory.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You know, one of the things that’s been a little lost to history is that Donald Trump wanted the Department of Justice to prosecute his political enemies and called for them to do so publicly via Twitter all the time.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And they largely didn’t. They had the John Durham sort of special prosecutor who kind of did that and then very embarrassingly failed to secure convictions on the two trials he brought. Both were acquittals, which is like essentially unheard of in federal prosecution. Like no one goes 0 for 2 anywhere in the federal government prosecution. But they used it more as a shield than a sword.
And I think the place where the rubber really hits the road and the thing that really concerns me is using the Department of Justice as a as a weaponized tool. And they talk about this all the time because they’re doing this projection now with the cases brought against Donald Trump, that that’s what’s happening to him here and that turnabout will be fair play and that there will be special prosecutors and they’re going to just start prosecuting everyone in sight who stands against them.
And I guess there’s no way you could answer this. But given the fact that you’ve embedded yourself in this world, how realistic eventuality do you see that if Trump is elected?
Thomas Zimmer: Do you mean specifically the Department of Justice going after Trump’s enemies?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, I mean, look, I would say generally they will not be able to implement all of these plans exactly as they have outlined them here. That’s just not how the world works, right? But if you combine the plans with this sort of personnel operation that they’re running, this hat hunting operation, and if you think about who the people are going to be that they will that they will be bringing in and there’s nothing going to stop them from bringing in those people. There’s nothing going to stop them from staffing the Department of Justice with people who are on board with this kind of vision.
Chris Hayes: I mean, some are Senate confirmable positions, but they did a lot of messing around with vacancy appointments last time.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes, exactly right. I mean, that’s a really important point. In some sense, we’ve already seen sort of a preview of —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Thomas Zimmer: — what we might be getting ins of the last year or so of Trump’s first term when he was starting to play around with this sort of stuff.
Chris Hayes: They basically avoided confirmation battles altogether and everyone was sort of acting under the —
Thomas Zimmer: Acting something, yes.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right. Exactly.
Thomas Zimmer: And by the way, all of those acting some things are now among the people who have contributed to Project 2025 —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: — a lot of them have written those chapters on this department or that agency. So yeah, I mean, in that sense, it’s absolutely realistic. Again, all of this will be challenged. It will be challenged in court. There might be a public outcry against it. But the idea that we can all just dismiss this as just hot air. I don’t see how that is a realistic take on this, because again, this is not just Project 2025.
This is a good example of how Trump himself and the Trump campaign and Project 2025, what they are envisioning, again, while those are two separate kind of planning operations and two separates, although not entirely separate, is a lot of overlap, personal overlap between those camps, but there are two separate camps. But you can see with this point specifically with what they want to do with the Department of Justice and how they want to bring in these lawyers who will just provide, you know, pseudo legal justification for whatever the Trump regime wants to do.
I mean, this is entirely compatible what Trump wants to do and what Project 2025 is outlining here. There is no friction. There is no, you know, tension here. Oh, they’re entirely on the same page about this.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. One of the big lessons of the period between the election and inauguration in 2020 and 2021 and the run up to January 6th and this aftermath is that ultimately what mattered was what the people with law degrees in positions of power were willing to accept or not.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And enough people in positions of power with law degrees, including the acting head of the Department of Justice, the acting AG, the chief counsel to the vice president of the United States, his chief of staff, all of these people were simply not willing to go along with a coup.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There were people who were, but they were outnumbered. And if you rerun that experiment in which all the people not willing to go along are willing to go along and are willing to say, yeah, that’s fine. Let’s do this. Let’s send out this DOJ letter on DOJ letterhead saying the results are, you know, called into question and you should convene your state legislature. Like that was a place where this question of personnel is policy and actually more than personnel is policy. Personnel is law —
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: — really comes into focus.
Thomas Zimmer: And you know what? It’s even worse than that. I think this is maybe to me the biggest mistake that people make that look at these planning operations and say, oh, you know, I’m not going to take this too seriously. We’ve had Trump in power before and we’re just looking at a rerun. It’s just going to be more of the same. But this time, not only are they going to have the plans and the personnel, which again, they did decidedly not have in 2017.
They’re also going to be operating under circumstances that are decidedly more favorable to their overall project. They will be working with a supermajority on the Supreme Court, which again, they did not have in 2017.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: They will be operating with a fully or almost fully Trumpified Republican Party. Like there’s like the Mitt Romneys —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: — the Liz Cheney’s, they’ve all been ostracized from the party, right? So, these people are out. This is an entirely different, not entirely different, but a significantly different Republican Party. And also, they’re going to be operating in an environment in which everyone who stands up against whatever Donald Trump wants to do, and I’m not talking about people on the left. I’m talking about whatever level of resistance is even still left within the Republican Party.
They have all seen now that they can expect an enormous level of violent threat directed at them, right, because that is what all the election workers are facing across the country. That is what every Republican is facing who has said anything critical about Trump. So we are operating under entirely different conditions. That was just not the case in 2017.
Chris Hayes: Or less so the case. I mean, there were some of that.
Thomas Zimmer: Less so the case, yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s way more widespread and almost sort of priced in as ubiquitous now.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, you just look at the judges and the district attorneys and the —
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — judge’s clerk in a civil fraud trial. I mean, anyone that gets in the crosshairs has to deal with a security situation. They have to deal with doxing. Maybe their phone is going to be overwhelmed. They may have to move apartments. Like, these things are real tangible costs of sort of the threat of violence and the security burden is a tax that is applied to people that cross Trump.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes, absolutely. And again, I think if you combine those three elements, right, so different Supreme Court, different Republican Party, and this sort of environment of heightened violent threat, this does not mean that they will be able to do whatever they have outlined here. Again, this is not what I’m arguing, what anyone, any serious person is arguing. But it will mean that the idea that we’re just looking at a rerun of like the first Trump presidency, that is just not a plausible analysis of the situation.
Chris Hayes: I feel like now at this point, we have to talk a little bit about the sort of the fascism debate or the authoritarian debate.
Thomas Zimmer: All right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the language in this Project 2025, and I have read large parts of it, not all it. I have read the Justice Department section.
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: It’s pretty close to fascist language. I mean, it’s a constant paranoid obsession with an internal enemy who is seeking to undo the purity of the nation from within.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s textbook fascistic. Now, it’s also you could say textbook reactionary or textbook conservative, and there’s lines between those. I’m not that interested in this debate —
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — that has played out over the last 10 years about the degree to which Trumpism is fascism or not.
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: The name doesn’t matter that much to me. But what does matter is models of authoritarian governance.
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: And, you know, people talk about Hungary a lot as a sort of model. And Donald Trump has explicitly said, Orban’s great. I like what he’s doing.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And one of the things you see there is, you know, the newspaper that is, you know, or the university that is a sort of bastion of dissent and criticism comes under all sorts of regulatory scrutiny or tax scrutiny. Or in Turkey, where Erdogan is also sort of overseeing this kind of presidential dictatorship, which is ostensibly democratic, but corrupted in key ways. You know, you pass a law regulating large media enterprises and then they’re sort of forced to sell to friendly competitors. There are all these ways in which, like, it’s not the tanks roll in.
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: But you’re using essentially the mechanisms of governance in a fundamentally coercive fashion directed at constraining speech and against political enemies. And I wonder how much you think what’s laid out in Project 2025 fits with these other kind of presidential dictatorship authoritarian models.
Thomas Zimmer: So, I mean, look, the answer to the question of, you know, whether or not this is adequately described as fascism depends on how you define fascism, and there’s no consensus definition of fascism out there. So that’s one of the problems here. But I think you’ve framed this exactly right. It’s not about what label you slap on it. It’s about we shouldn’t get bogged down in labeling fights.
To me, I will say this, and I think most serious economic observers, I think, would agree with this. There is Trumpism specifically. Trump and Trumpism specifically represents a specifically American, specifically 21st century version of fascism. That does not mean that everything on the right is fascism. It doesn’t mean the whole Republican Party. If you look historically, so fascist movements and parties have always existed in sort of coalitions and alliances with more established conservative right-wing reactionary forces.
And I think that’s also exactly what we’re seeing here, right. We’re seeing sort of an alignment. We’re seeing an alliance, a sort of a coming together, and making common cause between these different strands on the right. The people behind Project 2025, they’re not Trump, although, again, there are strong connections. There are many sorts of Trump alumni, Trump administration alumni among them.
But again, granted, they’re not Trump himself. But what Project 2025 offers is a story of a once great nation in decline because of the enemy within and the enemy without, but they are in cahoots, right. It’s like the woke enemy within is in cahoots with and the globalist elites are in cahoots with like communist China.
They’re being 100 percent explicit about this, by the way. I’m not just paraphrasing here. And Project 2025 is sort of a promise to restore this former national glory by purging these enemies and these deviants from the nations. It is viscerally —
Chris Hayes: Why did you put it like that?
Thomas Zimmer: I’m somewhat, you know, on purpose putting it like that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: But look, Project 2025, regardless of where you look, regardless of what chapter you read, it offers sort of a visceral disdain for any kind of pluralism and diversity. And all that is channeled into this program, aiming to extinguish that pluralism diversity. Look, again, I think by any reasonable definition of fascism, there’s some key elements of that that are present here.
But again, if you’d rather call these people enablers of fascism or making common cause with fascism, I don’t care. I really don’t. What is important here is that we understand how radically anti-democratic this is, how radically anti-pluralistic, and that this is really an extreme reactionary vision of white Christian patriarchal dominance and an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism in order to impose that vision on society against the will of the majority. And as long as we can agree on that and how dangerous that is, you can honestly call it whatever you want. I don’t think it matters all that much, but the diagnosis matters.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So one of the things that I wrestle with here is that I think there’s a little bit of a psyop being run by Bannon and some people on the right, which is, and you even saw this the other day, Ronnie Jackson, who’s the, you know, ex-White House doctor turned right-wing MAGA Texas congressman, you know, saying people are scared about Trump’s second term, you should be scared. And there’s a little bit of big bad wolf happening.
You know, it’s like Steve Bannon is like talking a lot of trash from his microphone, and it’s like, I’m not scared of you, sweaty doofus. Like, you know, I just refuse to be too cowed by these losers. And I wrestle a little bit with balancing two imperatives that are an intention. One is taking seriously the authoritarian aspirations and threat represented by this movement in which they say, I mean, Bannon the other day literally said, we got to get rid of the entire FBI and start over. It’s totally corrupted. And yes, we are going to prosecute. There will be punishment for anti-Trump forces in a Trump term, like not even in coded language, right, like straight up saying this is what’s coming.
So one level I’m trying to balance in the way I think about this and the coverage of it being very clear eyed and serious about what a threat this is, but also not letting their like trash talking make them seem more powerful and imposing than they are. You know what I mean? Because that’s part of the game here. Part of it’s like —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you should be scared of us and Trump’s going to rule forever and, you know, it’s the last election in America. And it’s like, no. I refuse to seed all this stuff.
Thomas Zimmer: Right.
Chris Hayes: I refuse to seed it because if you seed it ahead of time, you say, if Trump’s elected, all these terrible things are going to happen, you may have to wake up on the Wednesday morning after he’s elected and say, like, no, like we’re not going to go without a fight. And I wonder how to think about those two imperatives, because there’s a certain amount of like braggadocio that’s happening here.
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: They really like to talk like Disney villains.
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like there’s this like cackling like, I’ll get you. You know, it’s like, all right.
Thomas Zimmer: So, I mean, I will be honest with you. I try to ignore Steve Bannon as much as I can —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: — because I do not find that very insightful.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: I’m not gaining any insights from listening to whatever he has to say.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: I’ll say this, everything we’re seeing here, this sort of radicalization, this sort of anti-democratic radicalization of the right, of which Project 2025 is a manifestation, it’s not coming from a place of strength. It’s coming from a place of weakness.
Chris Hayes: That’s an interesting way of putting it.
Thomas Zimmer: Because the reason why they are radicalizing is because they, and I think they’re quite correct about this, they can feel and they can see that American society is moving away from their vision of what America should be. Broadly speaking, over the past two decades, right —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: — the country has become less white, more pluralistic, more diverse.
Chris Hayes: More secular, certainly. Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: Yes, absolutely. Yes. And that’s mostly for demographic reasons, right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: So, again, I mean, Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012 with like 40 percent of the white vote or something like this, entirely unthinkable in previous eras of American history. And so in a very real sense, they are reacting to something that’s real. They’re not imagining the fact that the country is becoming more pluralistic and more diverse.
And so that is why this of this sense of being under siege that is really that you can grasp. And I really recommend everyone read the full word that Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, wrote for this policy report that Project 2025 put out. It’s only like 15, 16 pages long.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: And it’s so tangible, the sense of being under siege and having their backs —
Chris Hayes: Aggrieved.
Thomas Zimmer: — yes, and having their backs against the wall.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Thomas Zimmer: It’s all about this, we are losing and the left and the wokes and the globalist elites and the progressives, they have taken over all the institutions of government and all the institutions of American life. This is precisely why they say conservatism is no longer enough. That’s now explicitly what you hear on the right. We can’t be conservative anymore. We need a counterrevolution. We have to embrace sort of a counterrevolutionary spirit, right. There’s nothing left to conserve. We need to we need to be much more radical than this.
But again, don’t let Steve Bannon tell you that this is because they’re so strong and so manly or all this kind of nonsense. It’s because of out of a sense of weakness. And that is, I think, a sort of a glass half full kind of way to look at the current situation —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: — right. In many ways, and I mean this sincerely, in many ways, the country has just never been closer to finally realizing the promise of sort of egalitarian, pluralistic, multiracial democracy, that, I mean, it has never kept that promise so far, but that promise has always been part of the American project. And in many ways, the country has never been closer to realizing that.
And that is precisely why they are, again, feeling so much under threat on the right. And I think it’s really important to keep that in mind whenever you hear Steve Bannon like pretend, he’s like the man.
Chris Hayes: There’s a line, I think it’s a Benjamin Wittes line of Lawfare who said that, you know, describing the Trump administration or Trump as, you know, malevolence tempered by incompetence, which I thought it was.
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And one thing I think is good to remind people, even though, again, I don’t want to fall into a trap of being like, oh, it can never happen here. It will be fine. I don’t think that. But also the incompetence isn’t just going to go away. Like there’s something woke like they will be more competent this time —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — but it doesn’t mean it’s going to go away. Like Trump is still Donald Trump, and in certain ways, extremely distractible, you know, flawed figure for executing projects in a systematic fashion. I mean, that’s just the truth about him.
Thomas Zimmer: Let me take of the other side of this of this debate and push back a little bit against it, although I’m not saying you’re entirely wrong, but look, it is true, right? In some ways, Trump is a less than ideal vessel for the kind of ambitious, comprehensive plans that are emanating from the right. He’s erratic. He’s lazy. He’s volatile. He’s certainly not sitting down and reading his extensive policy memos. I mean, no one believes that he is —
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: — like reading 920 pages —
Chris Hayes: Nor does he care about anything except, you know, himself and his own glory, and yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: No, that’s right. But in other ways, Trump is especially suited to lead this kind of crusade.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: He isn’t restrained by norms or questions of precedence or forbearance. I mean, that is why the right united behind him in the first place. It really takes a radical leader —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: — to implement extremist plans and kind of, you know, that’s Trump. Look, I mean, if you strip it down to its core, what Project 2025 is about is, again, this massive expansion of presidential power and making the executive into a tool for whatever the regime wants to do. And it doesn’t take much sophisticated analysis to explain why such a plan would appeal to Trump. He wants power. He wants immunity.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Thomas Zimmer: And he wants the ability to plunder, right? And so, again, while he will not sit down to read those plans, he will look at this and say, oh, yeah, I get more power and I totally go after my enemies. Awesome.
Chris Hayes: He doesn’t have a lot of ideological commitments, but he does have a few. The biggest one is his own glory and vanity and power. But he’s genuinely, I think, a bigot. Like I think he —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — he’s not an egalitarian. He really thinks there’s like a small group of people and of certain races and nationalities that are better than others. And he’s genuinely authoritarian at a principal level. Like I think —
Thomas Zimmer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — he’s really genuinely viscerally deep in his heart, thinks democracy is bad and strong men are good. And I think he thinks that —
Thomas Zimmer: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — as like a foundational fact, like it’s not a made-up thing. It’s not just an incidental thing. He likes dictatorship affirmatively as a model of governance. And every time he talks about Kim Jong Un —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — or Xi or Putin or whoever, it’s like they’re strong, they’re strong. It’s like that his people salute when he says something. I want my people to say that. He once said that about Kim Jong Un. To his cells, is an authoritarian.
Thomas Zimmer: I mean, he is the perfect avatar of sort of aggrieved masculinity —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: — and he’s the perfect avatar of sort of a white male grievance.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: And he’s not putting on a show. He is not like Kevin Roberts is, again, he’s the president of the Heritage Foundation. That guy’s coming out of this of reactionary Catholicism world, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: That’s not Trump —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: — and Trump is not deeply steeped in white Christian nationalism in that way. But again, he is sort of an aggrieved white male alpha who believes the world is not giving him his due anymore —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: — and that’s not right, because all the women and the brown people and the black folks they’re being a little too loud and too rowdy and why are they not shutting up? And so, again, I think in that sense, I kind of struggle when people say, oh, all he wants is like plunder and enrich himself. No, I mean, there is this sort of aggrieved white male masculinity and that is also very much what he is.
And again, in that sense, also, how he sees the world and what he wants America to be is entirely 100 percent compatible with this vision of white patriarchal order that emanates from Project 2025.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Where are you from, Thomas, originally?
Thomas Zimmer: I’m German. How about that?
Chris Hayes: What brought you to the States?
Thomas Zimmer: Well, you know, I was offered a job at Georgetown. And so, and my wife was also at the very same time offered a very good job in D.C. We were offered our jobs within three days of each other and so we felt like that’s too good. We can’t say no to that. So we came over.
Chris Hayes: Can I ask as a final question as someone who —
Thomas Zimmer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — is from a nation whose sort of defining feature of the last, say, 70 years is reckoning with fascist evil and the aftermath of that, like how you feel about being an American or living in America at this moment?
Thomas Zimmer: That’s a good question. You know what? I struggle with this a little bit because I’m not an expert on, like, German history. I’m not an expert on Nazism. But it is true, certainly, that the idea that it cannot happen here is certainly not something that you have in your DNA. If you grow up in Germany in the late ‘20s —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Thomas Zimer: Right? I mean, I was born in 1982.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: And so it is the very core of my school education about German history, that it can absolutely happen because it did happen, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Thomas Zimmer: And so I do think that this has probably immunized me a little more against the sort of tales of American exceptionalism, the sort of tales of America supposedly immune to this kind of stuff and America supposedly has 250 years of stable, consolidated democracy and stable, consolidated democracy do not fall to authoritarianism. I mean, first of all, it’s not 250 years of stable, consolidated democracy.
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Thomas Zimmer: The first time America had any right to call itself a multiracial democracy in any sense of the word is in the 1960s after the civil rights legislation of the ‘60s. And even then, this has been the defining political fault line in American history, whether or not the country should actually continue on this path towards becoming, again, which it has often promised to be, a multiracial, pluralistic, egalitarian democracy.
That’s what all people are created equal ultimately means, right? A country that is not defined by sort of, you know, discriminatory hierarchies of race and gender and wealth and religion, but something where the individual is, again, not measured by, you know, who you are and what you look like and who your parents were and all of these things.
America has never been that. But since the 1960s, there has been this sort of struggle over should we continue down this path towards becoming that, finally realizing that promise? And I think, again, when I hear people who are confidently telling their audience and these are people with like big platforms writing for mainstream media outlets, confidently telling their people that, you know, it’s all just hysteria and liberal alarmism and like democracy in danger, stop with this alarmism.
Like Project 2025 is immensely helpful, at least in this one respect. You don’t have to trust me, some lefty liberal like —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Thomas Zimmer: — professor or whatever, who cares? Or you, right? The lefty liberals over here, like, okay, if people don’t want to trust us, fair enough.
Chris Hayes: (inaudible)
Thomas Zimmer: These people could not possibly be clearer about what they want for the country. So at least trust them and believe them when they say they are just fundamentally not on board with this vision of an egalitarian, pluralistic democracy. Project 2025 is their declaration of war on this idea of America. That’s what this is.
And so in many ways, this is on the ballot in November. Those are the stakes. And I think this is really, you know, in a fundamental way in November is going to be a referendum on whether or not we want to continue down this path towards multiracial, pluralistic, egalitarianism or not. And this should be read as a reminder of the fact that those are the actual stakes in the election.
Chris Hayes: Thomas Zimmer is a historian at Georgetown University. He writes a Substack called “Democracy Americana.” He’s co-host of the “Is This Democracy?” podcast. Thomas, that was fantastic. Thank you so much.
Thomas Zimmer: Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Thomas Zimmer. You can read more of what he has to say about Project 2025 over at his Substack, which is called “Democracy Americana.” He also hosts a podcast called “Is This Democracy?”
We love to hear your feedback. Project 2025 has started to get a lot of attention. We’re curious what you’ve heard about it, your thoughts on it, what you thought of today’s episode.
You can e-mail us at withpod@gmail.com. We use the #WITHpod on a bunch of different social networks. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me on Threads, Bluesky and Twitter @chrislhayes.
Before we go, we’ve got a really exciting announcement. So on Saturday, September 7th, MSNBC will be hosting a live event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, in the borough of Brooklyn. It’s called “MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024.” And this premiere event is all to basically celebrate you guys, our fans.
It will be your chance to hear thought provoking conversations about the most pressing issues of our time. You can do so in person with some of your favorite journalists. I will be there if I happen to be one of them. You can also take part in a sit-down dinner for an insider’s view of the upcoming election. Visit msnbc.com/democracy2024 for more info. We’ll also include a link in our show notes. I’m looking forward to being part of this and we hope to see you there.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening. New episodes come out every Tuesday.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?