Subtle! Donald Trump Basically Reads From Project 2025 in 1st Speech as President

Last year, Trump pretended to know nothing of the far-right’s dystopian agenda for his second term. But in his Inauguration Day remarks, he essentially cruised through a Project 2025 checklist and called for America to pursue its "Manifest Destiny." 

By Kylie Cheung  |  January 20, 2025 | 2:58pm
Photo: Getty Images Politics
Subtle! Donald Trump Basically Reads From Project 2025 in 1st Speech as President

Here I was, thinking all this time that Donald Trump didn’t know how to read. Alas, minutes after being sworn in as our 47th president, Trump sounded like he was reading almost verbatim from the sprawling, 900-page Project 2025, the far-right Heritage Foundation’s dystopian agenda for Trump’s second term. In his 30-minute first speech as president, Trump essentially cruised through a checklist of stomach-churning phrases and talking points from the document. 

To uproarious applause from complete and utter losers, Trump proclaimed that the White House’s formal position from here on out is that there are “only two genders.” He railed against so-called “social experiments” promoting diversity and inclusion in the U.S. military and schools. Children, he said, will no longer be “taught to be ashamed” of who they are in classrooms that dare to teach the objective historical realities of slavery, nor will schools be able to push “radical political theories.” He pledged to put an end to the nonexistent “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” He declared a “national emergency” at the southern border, invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to wield the military to carry out mass deportations.

He also went on a rant about weeding out “government censorship and [bringing] back free speech to America”; he called for “colorblind” and “merit-based” policies; he cheerfully spouted, “Drill baby, drill”; and he performatively condemned the “establishment [that] has extracted power and wealth from our citizens”—all while the world’s wealthiest billionaire CEOs sat behind him (and in front of Trump’s cabinet) on the Capitol dais, grinning and clapping.

Trump further vowed that the “golden age of America” (which I would actually argue was back when we were all on Tumblr), “begins right now.” He went so far as to insist that he survived the July assassination attempt on his life to guide the U.S. to pursue the nation’s “Manifest Destiny.” (In reality, he survived because the twerp who tried to kill him had awful aim!) The Manifest Destiny is a historical movement that effectively justified the colonization and genocide of Indigenous people, encouraging white, U.S. settlers to see it as their “destiny” to claim the entire continent.

Project 2025, mind you, is rife with language about “the Left’s social experimentation with the military,” about left-wing “Big Tech censorship,” about “[eliminating] critical race theory and other radical ideologies in executive agencies,” about ending “the war on oil and natural gas,” and about “[rescuing] America’s kids from familial breakdown” by “focusing on the nuclear family” under the “male-female dyad.” The tone and policy demands of Project 2025 are present in nearly every line of Trump’s speech. For someone who claimed on the campaign trail that he had no idea what Project 2025 was, it sure sounded like not only has Trump read it, but like he was practically reading it aloud in his remarks. Memorably, in 2018, the Heritage Foundation gloated that Trump had implemented two-thirds of their agenda for his first term within two years of his presidency.

Of course, Trump added his personal touches of pure incoherence to the speech, calling for the repossession of the Panama Canal and reiterating his childish, characteristically Trumpian pledge to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. That’ll bring down the cost of eggs!

He also promised to “launch American astronauts” to Mars, as the camera panned to his giggling 53-year-old “First Buddy,” Elon Musk. Trump—who notoriously took out a full-page ad falsely accusing five Black men of rape—even had the audacity to shout out Martin Luther King, Jr., as Monday marks MLK Day, pledging to make the civil rights icon’s “dreams a reality.”

At Trump’s second speech minutes later in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall which was open to visitors, he gave a series of indecipherable remarks, in which he most notably referred to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as unjustly persecuted “hostages,” and cried about the cold weather that supposedly forced the inauguration ceremony indoors. To be clear: It was 21 degrees in D.C. on Monday morning, with a wind chill that made it feel like it was in the “mid-teens.” But the last time the Inauguration was held indoors was for Ronald Reagan’s second Inauguration in 1985 when it was seven degrees with a wind chill of -25. Sounds like Trump and his supporters are a bunch of snowflakes!!!!!

We now brace for Trump to fulfill his pledge to immediately sign 200 executive orders on his first day as president. Those executive orders are likely to include horrific environmental policies that will speed-run our descent into climate apocalypse, while some reports say Trump will sign an order to end birthright citizenship. 

Notably missing from Trump’s speech were any references to abortion and reproductive rights—which, of course, are far more popular than he is. On the campaign trail, Trump went to almost comical lengths to avoid talking about the issue, despite simultaneously boasting about being the one to kill Roe v. Wade. But that doesn’t mean he’s not going to take executive action on abortion. Quite the opposite, experts expect him to immediately reinstate the global and domestic gag rules via executive order; the policies revoke federal funding for global and domestic organizations that offer referrals for abortion services. 

Early in Trump’s speech, he declared that he won with a “mandate,” citing his popular vote victory and a clean sweep of all swing states. Of course, all polling suggests that key components of his platform—mass deportations, abortion restrictions, sweeping attacks on LGBTQ identity—are deeply unpopular, and that he largely won with the help of the Democratic Party’s appalling incompetence and repeated, unforced errors. 

There’s no sugarcoating it: Trump’s reelection, his house of horrors of an inaugural address, and the influential figures who once shunned him but are now embracing him are all deeply disturbing. Yet, the work remains the same. We’ve known the details of Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s speech and likely blueprint for his administration—for well over a year. Now comes the work of fighting back against it.

 
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