A brief overview of what we can expect from the second MAGA administration
Project 2025 is around 900 pages long, but it is broken up into subsections regarding each part of the federal government that the MAGAs intend to convert into a vehicle for the promotion of their culture. I’ll be going over Project 2025 section by section over the next couple of months, but first, I wanted to offer something like a coherent overview of what to expect. A lot of the changes that we will see will be odd little bureaucratic changes that are working toward a system that promotes their ideology; this is what Project 2025 focuses on. We will also see some changes and trends that are not in Project 2025, but that simply follow logically from what we know the Christian Nationalist position to be.
1. The Economy
Since the beginning of the neoliberal era (which may be either be when Reagan took office or when Bill Clinton took office depending on your analysis), the Democratic Party has been far better at managing a capitalist economy than the Republican Party. There’s been a clear cycle where the Republicans trash the economy by transferring money from the working class and giving it to the rich, sabotage assistance programs that might help working class people get a leg up, cut regulations that allow capitalism to function predictably and somewhat safely, and dramatically increase the national debt. Then, the Democrats get control of the government and somewhat repair the damage, but get blamed for what the Republicans did, because those repairs take time.
This reflects both well and poorly on the Democrats because their skill at growing the economy comes at the expense of everything else. They are unable to prioritize the things that really matter, including, for example, the ability of our planet to sustain human life, or not doing genocide, or authentically valuing children, families, and communities. They had almost gotten to the point during the Biden administration where their influence would have started to aid working class people (obviously, they had to help the economy of the rich first) when the election happened.
Without a doubt, this next MAGA administration will wreck the economy. If you make less than $100,000 as a household, you will definitely be in big trouble, and there will be many people in the upper middle class who are going to lose their jobs as essential bureaucratic functions are stripped out of the federal government. Importantly, though, this wreckage may not become evident until closer to 2028. In the short term, it might seem great from the average American’s perspective.
The MAGA administration will fuck around with trade in such a way that the products we get from China will become expensive. I would not be surprised if consumer electronics doubled in price.
The MAGA administration will end all federal government incentives for clean energy, including EV tax credits.
The MAGA administration will destroy the economic safety net just when Americans need it most.
The number of homeless people will skyrocket, and the number of people dying as a result of homelessness will skyrocket.
2. Women’s Rights
It would be extremely surprising if the new MAGA administration did not push through a national abortion ban. I’m not going to hypothesize about how they might do that, but it does look like they will have majority control of all branches of government as well as the President having been granted God Mode by the Supreme Court. In the short term, they will not, however, ban sterilization procedures, which will become even more wildly popular than they are now. Birth control will become more and more difficult to obtain; if things are going well for the MAGAs, birth control will be made illegal (they will claim it is abortion).
Programs to assist families living poverty will be cut dramatically, and that will end up affecting women more than men since women are more often the custodial parent in families where the parents are not married. If things are going well for MAGAs, they are likely to make no-fault divorce illegal, and may be able to make all divorce illegal, which ultimately will force many a woman (and her children) to continue to live with an abuser.
For women who believe trans women are a threat to them in bathrooms and women’s sports, the new MAGA administration will be beneficial in eliminating those supposed problems.
In the short term, I do not think they will go after a woman’s right to hold a job and control a bank account or credit card, but that will certainly come next if things are going well for them. However, protections for rape and gender-based discrimination will be revoked in a long process that can be expected to conclude with a dramatic drop in the number of women holding jobs, especially in red states. This will, in turn, dramatically harm the ability of businesses and organizations to function, which will in turn exacerbate the ongoing damage to the economy.
On the up side, I think the MAGAs could be convinced to use tax money to provide a stipend to stay-at-home mothers. Indeed, Project 2025 mentions providing “support” for women as caregivers, both as caregivers to children but also as caregivers to elderly relatives. This is something that the Democrats were not capable of considering because of their devotion to neoliberal capitalism (which treats all workers as identical cogs in the machine) and pantsuit feminism (which is a capitalist version of feminism that values working outside the home far above caregiving).
3. LGBTQ Rights
There’s no hope on this front. They will slowly grind down all the protections for LGBTQ people until there is nothing left. Medical options for trans youth, including puberty blockers, will likely become illegal. Trans youth will be actively outed to their parents by schools and other institutions, and we’re likely to see parents of trans youth referred to the authorities in red states. For adult trans people, insurance will likely stop covering anything related to your transition (if it ever covered that).
If you are trans or gender nonconforming (i.e., you do not perfectly fit the bizarrely specific conservative beauty standards for women), I recommend that you work towards carrying a gun in public so you can defend yourself from an attack should you need to use the restroom. For trans men and women, you may end up in a legal situation where you are forced to use the wrong bathroom.
Depending on where you live, it could become very difficult to get a job if you are out as an LGBTQ person, or even if something about your appearance makes people suspect you might be LGBTQ.
4. Protections Based on Race, Ethnicity, and Religion
Protections based on race, ethnicity, national origin and religion will be eliminated through legislation but primarily through changes in the executive branch and re-interpretation of the Constitution. This will take a while. They will claim that protections based on race, ethnicity and national origin discriminate against white Americans, and they will claim that the First Amendment refers exclusively to religious freedom for Christians.
MAGAs will continue to use prisoners for slave labor, and will likely increase the percentage of the population that is incarcerated back to 2008 levels or higher. The US is already the world record holder in that regard, but I bet MAGA can beat that record. They never hated the Soviet gulag system in and of itself, they just hated the fact that it was nazis who were sent there.
5. The Environment
I expect a net increase in carbon emissions under this MAGA administration. On one hand, the wrecking of the economy would be expected to reduce the amount of carbon produced, but on the other hand, they’ve made it clear that they will destroy all regulations related to pollution. Renewable energy makes a lot of economic sense, and my guess is that while the MAGAs will try to stack the deck against renewables, they’ll continue to be embraced by many corporations, and, similarly, EVs will still be in demand.
Let’s be clear: the Democrats were never going to save us from climate change; this is just an escalation rather than a change of direction. The biggest change you will see is the environmental devastation we’ve previously outsourced to the global south appearing right here in the USA. If we’re being honest, isn’t that where it belongs?
6. Food and Water Safety
Food and water safety will get dramatically worse under this new administration. Moreover, mechanisms for reporting food and water safety issues will be hobbled, so it will be less likely that you will find out that your cinnamon has lead in it (for example). You’ll just keep using the tainted food without every discovering you were being poisoned. In addition to the direct misery this will cause human beings, it will also contribute to the ongoing destruction of the US economy; lead-poisoned people make terrible workers, it turns out.
7. Education and Libraries
Education is not currently funded well enough to overcome the cultural and economic problems we face in the US. Quality education is not really something that capitalists can make money off of, so it doesn’t get the kind of investment it needs. Shortages in certain kinds of workers are dealt with by increasing the number of H1B visas rather than by investing more in education. To be fair, the feed stock of our educational institutions is already resistant to education when it arrives in kindergarten classrooms, so the funding that would have been required to improve the citizenry would have been immense.
Under this new MAGA regime, however, it will become far, far worse. Fascism thrives in a culture of ignorance, and so it alters its environment specifically to make people more stupid. The content of education will be reduced to a tasteless gruel consisting of conservative propaganda and sterilized STEM. Eventually, sex education will be eliminated, teen pregnancy will skyrocket. Wealthy school districts will be able to afford to ignore federal meddling and some will choose to retain effective, objective educational programs, but most private schools are religious, and they will have more funding (on average) than public schools. In some areas, there simply will not be schools, and the idiots living there will “home school” their kids; tragically, you can only teach someone what you know, and if you know nothing, that’s what you can teach.
Public libraries and school libraries will be sanitized. Any books or librarians that do not support the conservative cultural agenda will be removed. Yes, it will start with controversial books about sexuality, but eventually, they will ban books on things like Keynesian economics, democracy, and Hinduism.
As a result of all this, the US will continue to fall behind the rest of the world in terms of education and technological advancement, but at a faster rate than prior to the MAGA takeover. If you thought the COVID generation was damaged, wait until you see the people emerging from MAGA’s version of education.
8. Violence and Crime
As poverty increases, we can expect incidents of violence and crime to increase. Undoubtedly, money allocated to law enforcement will increase dramatically, but, mysteriously, crime will not decrease as a result (it’s not mysterious — police do not prevent crime). The increase in domestic violence may be truly staggering.
9. Gun Rights
The MAGAs are likely to eliminate restrictions on suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns. I don’t yet have an opinion on what they will do about machine guns. I’m not sure if they will eliminate the background check system; in the long term, they may retain it, but repurpose it to prevent “leftists” (Democrats) and “pedophiles” (LGBTQ people) from buying guns. The effect of these changes will be minimal.
10. Israel
If Trump continues to be the President, which I don’t think we can count on, he may not be as enthusiastic about sending billions of dollars in weaponry to Israel. He’s likely to take a more hostile approach to Israel, in the sense of telling them to stop fucking around and “finish the job”; they won’t be able to deliver on that without getting billions more in weapons, and that would piss Trump off. We do know that he is looking forward to clearing Muslims out of Gaza so he can build a hotel there.
I would not be surprised at all to see the MAGAs demand that Israel rebuild the temple in Jerusalem in return for more military aid. Remember that MAGAs are led by Christian Evangelicals, a group of people who desperately want to usher in the end of the world, but in exactly the right way according to their fucked-up version of Christianity. Rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem would likely require that the Dome of the Rock (the third most holy site for Islam) be destroyed which would likely start a regional war.
It is unclear whether Trump would bomb Iran or get the US involved in a regional war, because Iran is now in a coalition with Russia, Trump loves Russia, and Russia may ask him not to do that. Trump is generally averse to participation in foreign wars because it is expensive and his feeble intellect fails to grasp how foreign wars are materially beneficial to the imperial core. He probably doesn’t even understand that there’s an empire.
In any case, Israel is in much greater danger with a MAGA administration in control of the US, at least partially because the Israeli government is an extreme danger to Israel and the MAGAs are likely to encourage it to do stupid shit. It is certainly possible that the situation with Israel could turn into a world war, but the Democrat’s position on Israel wasn’t much better in that regard.
11. Ukraine
Russia will take Ukraine.
12. Global Influence
US influence on global politics is likely to fall like a rock. With the US government looking completely idiotic and Trump actively pulling US resources from important global political organizations (like NATO), other governments will look elsewhere for support, like to Europe, China, Russia, etc. Most countries will completely lose faith in US leadership. Chinese leadership will take advantage of the chaos and idiocy in the US and attempt to fill the void in international politics. The MAGAs are threatened by China’s ascendancy and will probably try to get people excited about going to war with China, but they will likely be distracted by domestic affairs, and will be turning American military might inward — they may even pull troops out of some of the approximately 800 US military bases on foreign soil to deal with any domestic conflict (i.e., protests that they will call terrorism) but especially to deal with the “bloody” mass deportation program that Trump promised.
13. Immigration
That mass deportation promise was probably Trump’s most popular idea, so it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to avoid doing it. MAGAs literally believe that millions of rapists are streaming across the southern border and raping white women. It will be interesting, let’s say, to see if they go after naturalized immigrants or limit their violent deportations to actual illegal immigrants. I would not be surprised to see certain corporations exempted from the deportations so they can keep using illegal immigrants to prop up their profits, because the immigrants were never actually the point. It’s possible that MAGAs could leverage the “bloody” mass deportation program to remove political enemies from the country, specifically; i.e., people who are native-born could find themselves stateless and stuck in a foreign country with no money. The MAGAs plan to throw a tremendous amount of money at border infrastructure, including Trump’s wall.
14. Reorganizing the Federal Bureaucracy
The MAGAs will assure that every federal agency is under their complete control by replacing all managers with MAGAs. Low-level workers that do not comply will be fired. Some of the changes that they will be making to the organization of federal bureaucracy are a waste of time and won’t really change anything. It’s in the nature of the conservative mind to completely fail at organizing anything (because they don’t understand logical hierarchy), so they’re doing things like putting FEMA within the Department of Transportation. To be fair, though, splitting the Secret Service into a security detail under the DOJ and a financial enforcement detail under the Department of the Treasury does make sense. I just think we will end up with a bureaucracy that is more disorganized, just disorganized in different ways than it is now, after wasting a lot of time and energy on those changes, and it is probably the chaos that is the point, because chaos is easily leveraged to make change.
15. AI
Under a MAGA-controlled US government, the process of weaponizing AI and similar automation against American citizens will accelerate using dramatically increased law enforcement funding. Unlike liberals, conservatives (i.e., fascists) understand power and will want to have direct control of the means of violence. This would include things like the automated gun turrets used in Israel and South Korea, and the automated robot soldiers like the dog-bot with the gun on its back, but it would also include using AI as an internet-based tool to discover and disrupt any organizations trying to resist the MAGA agenda.
16. MAGA Crimes
The various crimes of Trump and his MAGA supporters will simply go away.
CONCLUSION
Our “democratic institutions” cannot hold up against a President who has been granted the power to literally kill anyone he wants as long as he claims his action was job-related, and who can pardon the individuals who actually got their hands dirty. The 2028 election is unlikely to happen, and we will see what kind of strategies MAGA will use to disrupt it during the 2026 midterm elections. Every time the MAGAs make a change to how the US government functions, liberals will cry about it, and MAGAs will enjoy their tears. I doubt Elon Musk’s involvement in this process will change things much; his motivation for getting involved is primarily just so more people are forced to look at him because that is the kind of asshole that he is.
The elites are just going to let this all happen even though they have tools at their disposal to stop it. Stopping it would create chaos that would hurt the ability of the elites to make money, and letting it happen introduces opportunities for higher profits. The Biden administration, specifically, though blessed with God Mode from the Supreme Court, will not do anything to stop it.