Written by Jerry Elman, April 4, 2025
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
—James Madison
A Government That Still Looks Like Ours—But Isn’t
Imagine walking into a federal building in Washington five years from now. The Constitution still hangs behind glass. The flags still wave. The Pledge of Allegiance still opens school days. On the surface, nothing appears broken. But beneath the marble and metal, something unrecognizable is taking root.
Federal agencies have been gutted. Civil servants dismissed. New rules dictate what can be taught, which books are banned, and who gets to feel safe. Policies are no longer debated in public—they are declared by executive fiat. And the people running those agencies aren’t experts or public servants. They’re loyalists, chosen for their ideology and obedience.
It’s not a coup. It’s not a dictatorship. It’s something far more insidious: a restructuring of American governance under the illusion of continuity. The blueprint for this transformation exists, published in broad daylight. It’s called Project 2025.
And its goal is not to rewrite the Constitution with ink—but to render it meaningless through control.
A Vision 60 Years in the Making
Project 2025 is not a sudden invention. It is the culmination of more than six decades of conservative planning—a political vision that took root with Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, matured under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and has now crystallized into a well-funded movement that sees democracy not as sacred, but as something that must be tamed to serve a higher ideological purpose.
Goldwater believed government was inherently the enemy of liberty. Reagan declared in his 1981 inaugural that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” That message became gospel to a new generation of conservatives—politicians, think tanks, televangelists, and billionaires who would spend decades building an infrastructure to dismantle the very government they aspired to run.
Now, with Project 2025, that long-term vision is laid bare: a government stripped of independent checks, re-staffed with partisan loyalists, and governed from above by a president whose powers are nearly absolute.
The Enemy Within: How Immigration Became the ‘Invasion’
James Madison warned that tyranny would come “in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” That enemy has now been declared: immigrants.
The language of Project 2025 and its advocates is unmistakable. Immigration is not described as a challenge, or even a crisis—it is an “invasion.” This is not accidental rhetoric. It’s military language, designed to frame migrants—many fleeing war, famine, and gang violence—as enemies of the state.
In this worldview, the U.S. is under siege, and the president becomes a kind of wartime commander-in-chief. Immigration policy becomes national defense. The Constitution’s guarantees of due process, asylum rights, and human dignity? Collateral damage in the name of sovereignty.
And when a people believe they are at war, they will tolerate anything done in the name of victory.
The Evangelical Crusade Behind the Curtain
Project 2025 is not just political—it is deeply evangelical, shaped by a specific vision of Christian America. Its leaders speak not of pluralism, but of “moral restoration.” They see secular government as a threat to divine order, and believe America’s decline stems from the rejection of biblical authority in public life.
The plan calls for:
- Restoring prayer and religious instruction in public schools.
- Expanding public funding for Christian private schools through vouchers.
- Rolling back LGBTQ+ rights under the guise of religious liberty.
- Elevating a specific interpretation of Christianity as the foundation for policy.
This is not about freedom of religion. It is about freedom for one religion to dominate, while others are tolerated—or silenced. The Constitution’s First Amendment was written to protect belief from the state. Project 2025 seeks to infuse the state with belief, so that law becomes an extension of theology.
The result is a government that claims divine legitimacy, and a citizenry increasingly divided between those who conform—and those who are cast out.
The Billionaire Class Has Chosen Sides
This movement has not grown in isolation. It has been nourished, funded, and shielded by a class of billionaires who see in Project 2025 a chance to remake America in a way that protects wealth, silences dissent, and deregulates everything but morality.
Libertarian tycoons like the Koch network, political donors from Silicon Valley, hedge fund magnates, and fossil fuel barons have all found common cause with the Project 2025 vision. For them, it is the perfect marriage: authoritarian control to protect their economic dominance, cloaked in the language of patriotism and faith.
They see regulation as theft. Taxes as tyranny. Unions as threats. And democracy? A nuisance—too messy, too slow, too unpredictable.
They fund think tanks, pay for disinformation campaigns, underwrite politicians, and fill the airwaves with narratives designed to make you believe this is about “freedom.”
But their freedom is not for everyone. It’s the freedom to dominate. And Project 2025 is their crowning achievement.
The Constitution’s Skeleton: Still Standing, No Longer Alive
The genius of this movement is that it does not destroy the Constitution. It simply hollows it out. The text remains. The courts remain. The elections happen. But the meaning fades.
- Agencies are repurposed to serve the president, not the public.
- Civil servants become tools of enforcement, not guardians of law.
- Rights become conditional, dependent on religious and political alignment.
- Immigration becomes invasion.
- Opposition becomes sedition.
- Dissent becomes betrayal.
All of it, wrapped in flags. Signed in the name of liberty. Defended with the words of the very Constitution being dismantled.
This Is Not Just About Trump
Let’s be clear: this is not just about one man. While Donald Trump’s name may appear most often in the headlines, Project 2025 is a machine—built by strategists, funded by billionaires, and evangelized by media outlets, pastors, and influencers.
If not him, it will be someone else. The playbook has been written. The infrastructure is in place. The appetite has been whetted.
We Are the Last Line of Defense
The Constitution cannot save us. It is only as strong as the people who defend its spirit—not just its text.
If we do nothing, Project 2025 will march forward—not as a revolution, but as a reformation, changing the shape of our country without ever admitting it has done so.
We must:
- Speak out.
- Stay informed.
- Protect independent journalism and education.
- Refuse to accept the framing of neighbors, immigrants, or teachers as enemies.
- Defend civic institutions, not for their perfection, but for their necessity.
But here is the deeper truth—one that should shake us from complacency: the movement behind Project 2025 knows exactly what it is doing.
- They have studied every institutional weakness.
- They understand the bureaucratic plumbing of government more deeply than most voters ever will.
- They know the laws, the appointments, the schedules, the procedures, the loopholes.
- They know which judge to file with.
- They know which phrases to use in press releases.
- They know how to make authoritarianism look like reform and theocracy sound like morality.
- They know the script—and they’ve spent decades rehearsing it.
And the opposition? It is shocked, confused, still clinging to the belief that this is just politics as usual.
- It is splintered, tangled in fights about tone, language, ideology, purity tests.
- It has no unified message, no counter-strategy that even comes close to the laser focus of this movement.
- And most damning of all, there is no single leader—no one rallying voice—standing clearly and forcefully against it with the vision, discipline, and courage needed for this moment.
What that means is this: the forces seeking to dismantle constitutional democracy in America are not improvising.
They are executing a plan.
A methodical, deliberate, and coordinated campaign to change what government is, what citizenship means, and who holds power.
And unless the rest of us recognize this—not just intellectually, but emotionally, morally, and urgently—we will lose something we may never get back.
The Constitution will remain, but its light will flicker.
And when our children ask how it was allowed to happen, the answer will not be that we were overpowered.
It will be that we were out-organized, out-messaged, and too slow to believe it was real—until it already was.