Project 2025 reveals its goal: Trump as President for life

Project 2025 reveals its goal: Trump as president for life

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/project-2025-trump-president-for-life?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=501423&post_id=143115582&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ru6f5&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Project 2025, the Republican plan to functionally annihilate not just the federal government but democracy as well if Trump wins in November, is an unceasing parade of horrors.

Banning the abortion pill nationwide? Check. Rolling back protections for LGBTQ people? Check. Deporting literally millions of undocumented immigrants? Check. But amid each objectively horrible aim is an even more more insidious one: abolishing the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms. It’s an unvarnished, right-out-in-the-open plan to keep Trump in office well past 2028.

It’s not as if this is genuinely unexpected. By July 2019, Trump had “joked” at least six times about being president for life. Floating that as a possibility, as Peter Tonguette did last week over at The American Conservative, is a great opportunity to show fealty to a candidate who values loyalty over all else.

The American Conservative is a “partner” of Project 2025, along with such luminaries as Stephen Miller’s America First Legal law firm (currently suing everyone over the mildest of diversity efforts) and the Claremont Institute, which gave us Christopher Rufo and Moms for Liberty.


As Media Matters notes, the reasoning in Tonguette’s piece is dubious at best, but that doesn’t really matter. Project 2025 doesn’t rest on solid law, respect for democracy, or an understanding of history. It rests only on the notion that Trump should be allowed to exhibit raw, vicious, and unchecked power.

Tonguette’s piece doesn’t even bother with the pretense that getting rid of the 22nd Amendment would strengthen democracy overall. Instead, the piece is predicated on the utterly unfounded notion that when the amendment was passed, no one could have foreseen that a president would be elected to non-consecutive terms.

While Tonguette does mention Grover Cleveland, who every schoolchild learns did indeed serve two nonconsecutive terms, he seems to think that people were perhaps unaware of him when the 22nd Amendment was passed in 1951. Tonguette handwaves away the existence of Cleveland by simply writing, “In modern times, it is virtually inconceivable that any of the ousted one-term presidents would have seriously thought of running anew against the same opponent (now the occupant of the White House) who had bested them four years earlier.”

It’s also inconceivable that millions of Americans would line up for a candidate who incited an insurrection, is facing 91 criminal charges, was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, and was just recently rich-guy panhandling to pay his massive bond to appeal his civil fraud penalty in a different case, but here we are.

Embracing autocracy … for this guy?
Like many other projects of the modern Republican Party, a newfound loathing of the 22nd Amendment is wildly hypocritical.

Though there were multiple unsuccessful pushes for presidential term limits before the passage of the 22nd amendment, the GOP House majority prioritized the issue after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death in 1945. No Republicans broke the party line during key congressional votes on the amendment, but they were helped along by southern Democrats who were mad that President Harry Truman continued FDR’s liberal economic policies.