How Trump fast-tracked Project 2025 and why it's worse than you think

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

71% : " Johnston, who has studied Trump's rise for decades, puts it bluntly: "Trump believes he is our king.
69% : " Now though, Johnston, who is currently a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, says Trump has become more successful because he is surrounded by people who have dreamed of dismantling the government for years.
56% : They have set about erasing federal language around gender identity and reproductive health, targeted DEI initiatives, dismantled climate policies, and have been busy stacking the bureaucracy with loyalists.
50% : In 100 days he's managed to lay off 12,000 federal workers in the name of government efficiency, alienate countless allies, threatened to invade Greenland and take over the Panama Canal, humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky, told Canada he wants to see it become the 51st state (prompting a historic win for Mark Carney) and imposed tariffs on Europe and elsewhere that signal an end to free trade.
48% : Steve Bannon once promised they'd "deconstruct the administrative state".
46% : "Steve Bannon said they were going to deconstruct the administrative state.
44% : He handed Elon Musk the keys to the federal government and shuttered the United States Agency for International Development, triggering lawsuits from federal employee unions and mass protests.
43% : " Not that any of this is being admitted by Trump himself, of course.
40% : DOGE and ICE have ramped up enforcement: raiding clubs, arresting judges, and launching task forces with culture war missions like targeting "anti-Christian bias".
40% : "You'll start hearing stories - a working mother whose child is dying because of the cuts they made to Medicaid.
37% : But in their quest for control, Johnston believes Trump's team has overplayed their hand - particularly in targeting Medicaid, the federal health insurance plan which disproportionately supports Trump's own red-state base.
35% : But Trump hasn't just followed its recommendations - he's outpaced them.
33% : They damaged the Environmental Protection Agency.
29% : Johnston said he wouldn't be surprised if it directly or indirectly revisits that immunity decision because it can't live with Trump claiming that he doesn't have to follow the orders of the courts.
28% : No one can accuse Donald Trump of easing his way slowly into the job the second time around; of slouching back in his chair in the Oval Office, Fox News on the big screen, remote in hand.
28% : David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of The Making of Donald Trump and It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America says that his second book, which was published during Trump's first administration, showed that they set out to destroy the federal government - an endeavour they're continuing in his second.
22% : " If Trump loses the next election in 2028 - assuming he leaves the White House, which some doubt - and a Democratic president gets the keys, Johnston said he or she could dispense with all Trump's executive orders en masse.
14% : "And if you're carrying out illegal acts on behalf of Donald Trump, you're not going to be protected.
11% : Donald Trump pulled it off in less than one." At his 100th day rally in Michigan, Trump made a direct attack on "communist radical left judges" for trying to seize his power, warning, "nothing will stop me".

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