Our readers weigh in on Project 2025
Our By Invitation column by Paul Dans, who led Project 2025, the presidential transition plan for Donald Trump, sparked a lively response from readers. Here is an edited selection of some of their letters.
I write in deep dismay at your decision to publish a By Invitation (April 29th) from Paul Dans. That a publication with The Economist’s reputation for liberal-democratic analysis would grant a platform to a figure openly advocating the dismantling of constitutional checks and balances, the ideological capture of federal institutions and the subordination of law to executive will is both disappointing and dangerous.
Mr Dans’s rhetoric masks authoritarian ambition in the garb of “restoration”. He equates bureaucratic independence with tyranny, redefines judicial autonomy as illegitimacy, and offers Donald Trump not as a politician within the constitutional order, but as a kind of American Caesar. He does so with a language of demolition, of institutions, norms, and professional class expertise, that replays the core logic of every autocratic movement that has cloaked its goals in populist grievance.
The irony is staggering. The column claims to honour American constitutional principles while endorsing a programme that would erase them. The call to purge the civil service, defang the judiciary, punish ideological nonconformity and empower an unbound executive is a blueprint for illiberal rule.
If your aim was to expose the ideological core of Trump 2.0, you’ve done so, but at the cost of laundering it through the prestige of your masthead. Platforms matter. So do editorial choices. And publishing this piece without meaningful critique or rebuttal makes you not a neutral observer of rising authoritarianism, but its inadvertent accomplice.
Neil Heckman
Mannheim, Germany
Mr Dans has the constitutional separation of powers dead wrong when he states that “An agency independent of the president is one independent of the people”. It is Congress, and not the executive, that is the true representative of the people and determiner of agencies. Our representative government is designed so that the people we elect to make and change laws are required to respond to their constituents. They represent the people. The executive implements those laws; it was never meant to decide solely what our nation’s institutions and programmes should do in service of our democracy. Take a refresher course in the constitution Mr Dans.
Bea Lingenfelter
Manteca, California
Mr Dans wrote about a leftist activist judiciary “powered by universities and Big Law”, intent on squashing the MAGA agenda. Has he not followed the trajectory of recent Supreme Court decisions? The court has curtailed the powers of the administrative state (Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and SEC v Jarkesy), increased presidential powers in granting immunities for official acts (Trump v United States), opened the floodgates for money in politics (Citizens United v FEC and McCutcheon v FEC), rolled back abortion rights (Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation) and expanded corporations’ “religious rights” (Burwell v Hobby Lobby and 303 Creative v Elenis).
MAGA sympathies may be underrepresented in universities and Big Law firms, but the highest court in the land actively furthers the movement’s aims rather than undermining them.
Jonas Rave
London
If Project 2025 is following the tech motto of move fast and break things, then mission accomplished. You’ve broken the American economy and inflicted damage to the world economy; you’ve broken the trust of our allies both near and abroad; you’ve broken the spirit of our hard-working federal employees; and you’ve broken the link between federally funded research and America’s leadership in science, tech and health.
This plan of action does not reflect a serious understanding of our problems but the trademark simple solution to complex problems this administration favours. I find it more akin to ideas jotted down on a bourbon-soaked cocktail napkin after a long night of drinking. If this is Make America Great Again, please stop. I cannot take much more greatness.
B. Hannah
Fort Myers, Florida
I’m not generally sympathetic to the arguments made by the likes of Mr Dans, but I do agree with him that the $7trn budget “is not serving the American people, but rather those who serve themselves from government largesse.” Making government spending more efficient and maximising its service to the American people is a noble and necessary goal. However, the Trump administration’s efforts to do so would ring much less hollow if they weren’t also accompanied by efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy, which does actually feel more like those in power serving themselves.
Travis Bott
Sacramento
Mr Dans gets a C- at best for his effort to articulate the case for Project 2025. Not a single defence of tariffs over other means of strengthening manufacturing, not a single “proof point” that the bureaucracy is a problem, and not a single argument why the sky-high budget deficit can only be fixed by smashing the bureaucracy. And when decrying the lack of MAGA academics, he might want to ask himself why thoughtful tenured professors, who have job security for life, are not backing his poorly substantiated project. Perhaps academia is not the problem.
Mike Harris
Adjunct professor
Syracuse University London
The comparison of Mr Trump’s first 100 days to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal is not just historically incoherent, it is politically cynical. Roosevelt built institutions to protect the vulnerable during a time of crisis. Mr Trump aims to dismantle them in the name of power, not reform.
Moreover, the claim that a bloated “administrative state” is to blame for America’s woes ignores the real drivers of our deficits: mandatory spending and tax cuts for the wealthy, including Mr Trump’s own 2017 legislation. The notion that unelected bureaucrats are the enemy is a smokescreen for concentrating power in the executive branch and gutting oversight.
Mr Dans invokes populism, but Mr Trump’s policies favour the elite, hollowed out public services and eroded institutional trust.
Nicoletta Barolini
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
Mr Dans uncomfortably sounds more like a leftist activist than a sober conservative. The system is broken, he says, and a gut rehabilitation is needed. In the 1960s Jerry Rubin thought money was the foundation of the system and that tearing down fences would help fix it. And Maximilien Robespierre opposed the idea of moderation during the French Revolution. But as John Cleese has noted, moderates are the enemy of extremists from both the left and right.
Michael Meek
New York
Your invitation to Paul Dans to explain the first 100 days of this administration is greatly appreciated by this long time reader of The Economist. I, who have voted for Democrats since Bill Clinton, need to learn what 40%-plus of the voting population is excited about.
Ken Krechmer
Palo Alto, California