Opinion | Why Trump Cant Shake Project 2025

In 2024, the deep state that defeats Donald Trump might be his own.That, after all, is what Project 2025 was actually meant to be.The 900-page tome that Democrats hoist in front of the cameras is a festival of policy options, detailed down to the sub-agency level.

But options for whom? Not for Trump himself.Even the most wonkish of presidents can only engage on a small fraction of what the executive branch does.

And Donald Trump was not the most wonkish of presidents.When he said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and has no intention of doing so, I believed him.But Project 2025 — and much else like it that has gotten less press — is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own.

The presidency is not one man, Diet Coke in hand, Fox & Friends on TV, barking orders.It’s 4,000-or-so political appointees — nearer to 50,000 if Trump again uses Schedule F powers to strip civil-service protections from vast swaths of the federal government — trying to do what they think the president wants them to do or what they think needs to be done.

They do that by setting policy for the more than two million civilian employees of the federal government and by writing regulations that the rest of society must follow.Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem.They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled.

Part of this reflected Trump’s erratic leadership style and the constant conflict between the warring factions inside his White House: the traditional Republicans clustered around Mike Pence and Reince Priebus; the MAGA types led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller; the foreign policy establishment that spoke through H.R.McMaster and Nikki Haley; the corporatists led by Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn.

Read any book on the Trump presidency, and you will be ...