The autocracy of Project 2025 begins at home

There is a lot to be scared of in Project 2025—the 920-page document assembled by the right-wing nightmare factory Heritage Foundation as the plan for the next Republican presidency—beginning with how likely it is to be put into effect if Donald Trump wins. Though Trump himself denies any involvement, over 100 members of the first Trump administration contributed to the document. (The plan for the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, was written by Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights under Trump, who was dubbed a “radical anti-LGBTQ activist” by the Human Rights Coalition.) J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP pick, has even closer ties to the Heritage Foundation than Trump himself: “[Vance] is absolutely going to be one of the leaders—if not the leader—of our movement,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told Politico in March.

Yes: the document is as terrifying as the involvement of Vance or Severino (or Trump) would lead you to expect. But it’s also so big that it’s hard to focus on any one horrifying policy: you can get so hung up on the recommendation to disband the Department of Education, for example, that you miss the bit where all public school students would also be required to take an entrance exam for the armed forces. 

There is, however, one clear thread that ties together the document’s demands—whether it’s calling for disbanding government institutions, targeting LGBTQ2S+ people or restricting bodily autonomy and what we traditionally refer to as “women’s rights.” The goal of the Trump administration, Severino writes, should be to reinstate the nuclear family as the de facto model for all power and the centre of American life. 

“Families comprised of a married mother, father and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” writes Severino. “Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] are fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”

The anti-feminist implications are obvious. The defence of the “nuclear family”—specifically, a straight, white family where the father exercises unquestionable authority over wife and children alike—is at the heart of several recent GOP offensives. There is the drive to get rid of no-fault divorces (on the grounds that they are “unfair to men” and make it too easy for wives to leave). There is the mission to outlaw all abortion (Project 2025 lays out an agenda for a total ban via resurrecting the Comstock Act, which would make it impossible to send abortion pills by mail). There is the push to go after reproductive technologies like IVF, which extend the window of fertility and thus make it easier for people with uteruses to delay child-bearing. (One of Project 2025’s most bizarre passages implies that people may be made to carry unused IVF embryos to term and raise them, because “HHS policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them.”) 

It’s also obvious that the strong, married families being referred to don’t have queer parents. Much of the document is focused on the supposed persecution of Christian businesses, and their right to discriminate against LGBTQ2S+ customers; this includes Christian adoption agencies who refuse to let queer couples adopt (though the Supreme Court recently affirmed those agencies’ supposed right to discriminate in Fulton v. Philadelphia). A section on “Adoption Reform” notes that “many of the faith-based adoption agencies that serve these children are under threat from lawsuits” because “they cannot in good conscience place children in every household due to their religious belief that a child should have a married mother and father.” 

More than that, though, Project 2025’s veneration of the nuclear family leads to a regime of terror for kids, particularly queer and trans kids. The document lays out a vision of “parental rights as co-equal to other fundamental rights—like free speech or the free exercise of religion,” capable of trumping them in some instances. If “parental rights” are to carry more legal weight than the First Amendment (and they already do, in the eyes of conservatives pushing book bans) they certainly would outweigh any child’s right to privacy, dignity or safety. Project 2025’s recommendations for the Department of Education (yes, they are making recommendations to the department they want to disband) include revising the anti-discrimination measure Title IX so that it only protects cis girls, and passing legislation that would forbid public education employees to use a trans student’s chosen name or pronouns without parental permission. That same legislation would also permit public school employees to misgender trans students if using the correct pronouns is “contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions.” 

At its most extreme, Project 2025 would ban any public expression or acknowledgment of non-normative sexuality or gender identity, nominally because of how “children” would be affected. This is from the document’s introduction: 

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children … has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

It is fairly clear, from the references to “transgender ideology” and “the sexualization of children” (which mirrors conservative accusations that LGBTQ2S+ people are “grooming” children by existing in the public eye) that “pornography” here does not mean dirty pictures. It means anything that portrays human sexuality and gender outside of the Mom-and-Pop family model, specifically content about and by queer and trans people. 

In the words of The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant, “Project 2025 is not targeting ‘pornography’ as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography.” Grant also points to the common thread here—women’s freedoms and children’s freedoms and queer people’s freedoms and trans people’s freedoms are all grouped, for conservatives, under the nebulous heading of “gender ideology,” in which strict control of citizens’ gender and sexual lives is key to shoring up the world as conservatives believe it should be. 

“The nuclear family is the best form of governance known to mankind, not the state,” former GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently wrote on LinkedIn, and often claims in his speeches. It’s a common conservative rallying cry—and Project 2025 shows us what that world would look like. It is a fantasy of return to a time before queer people existed publicly, or had any legal right to fair treatment; it is a blueprint for a country where heterosexual marriage is the only option, where Dad wields absolute control over the woman he marries, and where Dad and (conditionally) Mom wield that same life-and-death power over their kids. To the extent that government infringes on (white) (straight) men’s ability to control their families, it is an obstacle; to the extent that it protects queer people and women, and makes it possible for them to survive outside the family, it is a threat. Institutions are dismantled, protections are scrapped and the state is replaced with a thousand tiny dictatorships whose boundaries extend no further than the front lawn. 

Autocracy, like so much else, begins at home. It will not end there: once government has been dismantled, all power will be concentrated in the hands of a corrupt few, and specifically in the hands of a white, male strongman who lords it over his people with all the force and violence of a dyed-in-the-wool patriarch. The appeal of Trump, and Trumpism has been well documented—especially for disenfranchised white guys whose aggrieved entitlement makes progress feel like oppression—but its tendency to harm even those people is also established fact. With Project 2025, as with a second Trump run for the presidency, we have no way to claim we didn’t know what was coming. The question is whether we care enough to choose a different fate.