We Need a “Project 2027”

Recently, I spoke at a candidates’ forum held by Democrats in Charlottesville. Here is what I said to them.

I’ve never run for office before and never wanted to run for office. But every day I get a reminder of why I’m running and what needs to be done.

The latest was a report about a Democratic think tank trying to come up with a “Project 2029”—a Democratic agenda to counter the Republicans’ notorious Project 2025, the playbook they have put in place during Trump’s second term. And I think this is a great idea. We need an answer to Project 2025.

But then I read the details, and there was this very familiar feeling of disappointment. It was a lot of smallball, technocratic stuff like overhauling electric utility regulation, some vague ideas about childcare programs, and I guess a ban on spam phone calls. And look, some of these might be worthwhile efforts. But there was nothing new, nothing I hadn’t heard talked about for 20 years. And none of this, none of it, is an answer to Project 2025.

Now, a little bit about my background: I’ve been a writer covering politics for 30 years. Back during the 2024 election, I dove into Project 2025 and wrote about it. And so I know that Project 2025 was not just a list of ordinary conservative policy ideas. The real heart of Project 2025, which I warned about at the time, was that it was a plan to seize power.

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The problem Project 2025 was designed to solve is that during Trump’s first term in office, he heard these words a lot: “Sir, you can’t do that.” He heard it from regular government employees who had been in the bureaucracy for years, and he heard it from people in his cabinet, people he had appointed. They said, “You can’t do that because it’s against the law,” or because it was against the Constitution. And he really hated hearing that.

So Project 2025 was designed to ensure he would never hear it again. The real point of Project 2025 was a plan to pack the administration full of loyalists and break down any element of independence in the government—particularly the independence of the FCC, which is not supposed to answer directly to the president, and the Department of Justice, which is really not supposed to answer directly to the president. It’s supposed to answer to the law and to justice, not to be the president’s personal instrument of revenge against his enemies. But that’s what it has become.

The people Project 2025 put in place are not just loyalists to a conservative agenda or the Republican Party, but loyalists to Trump personally. People who are loyal first and foremost to Trump and not to the law or the Constitution.

And that is what they’ve done in his second term in office. The whole federal government has been remade to centralize all power in one person.

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So you can see how Democrats coming up with a Project 2029 that’s just a bunch of warmed-over policy proposals is not really an answer to this. The real answer is that we have to restore the Constitutional limits on the president, and we have to restore the power of Congress as a check on the president. And the Congress really does have enormous power—but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. The Constitution gives more power to Congress than anyone else, and we have to have a plan to use it.

We can’t wait until 2029. We need a Project 2027, the plan and the will for Congress to assert its power and really represent the people and their interests. And we need to start doing it the moment we get to Congress next year.

That’s why I’m running. Democrats have not even been playing the same game as the Republicans. We’re talking about getting these technocratic reforms passed, while they’re trying to change our basic form of government to something authoritarian, with an all-powerful president and attacks on our very ability to hold elections. We need to realize that this is the game and start playing it.

And this is what got me in the race. I realized I could spend another two or three years as a writer shouting warnings that “Democrats should do this” or “Democrats should do that,” or I could decide that I’m a Democrat, too, and I can offer to do what needs to be done to save our democracy.

I’m the only candidate in the race who is putting those issues front and center in my campaign, the only one with a background that prepares me to understand how our entire form of government is being changed and what we need to do to restore it.

Support my campaign so we can bring this fight to the US Congress!

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