Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term The Fulcrum has started Phase 2 of the series has commenced.
One month in and we’re getting clarity on President Trump’s priorities. He’s certainly fixated on bureaucratic waste. He has controversial innovator and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, leaning into that effort, playing the real-life host of the decidedly un-celebrity Apprentice. The career civil servant at the Department of Veterans Affairs? You’re fired! The lifelong administrator at the Small Business Administration? You’re fired!
Trump’s also hyper-focused on global affairs: courting Vladimir Putin (again), attacking Volodymyr Zelenskyy (again), practically pulling permits for developing Gaza into the next “French Riviera,” slapping tariffs on Chinese imports, repatriating Black South African landowners from their post-apartheid homes, chastising the French President for correcting him in real time, along with threatening Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada under some present-day Manifest Destiny.
And, of course, America’s 47th president hit the proverbial jackpot with his executive order that imposes a 90-day pause on all U.S. foreign development assistance programs. That move united his interest in reducing government waste with his focus on foreign affairs.
But how is President Trump doing with Project 2025’s “four broad fronts that will play a big role in deciding America’s future?” How well does his early agenda map onto Project 2025’s broad ambitions?
As a reminder, Project 2025’s Foreword, written by Heritage Foundation’s President Kevin Roberts, identifies four goals for the Trump administration:
1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls the “Blessings of Liberty.”
Trump has addressed each, even if some have received more of his administration’s attention than others. Most obviously, “front” number two—on dismantling the administrative state—has commanded the most air time. In Roberts’ words, Project 2025 “lays out how to use many of tools including: how to fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government; how to restore the American people’s constitutional authority over the Administrative State; and how to save untold taxpayer dollars in the process.”
Indeed, the Trump administration has followed this particular roadmap to a tee. He has fired the “un-fireable,” shuttered agencies, muzzled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) talk throughout the government, and, at least according to those inside the White House, “saved untold taxpayer dollars in the process.”
The President’s accomplishments on the other three “fronts” are a little less clear.
Let’s take a look at the first goal, centered around families. “Today, the American Family is in crisis,” writes Roberts in Project 2025. As evidence, he cites the danger of fatherlessness, the damage to children by using terms like “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” the harm of exposure to DEI programs in schools and workplaces, and on and on. It is quite obvious that the Trump administration has followed Roberts’ script in prohibiting DEI programs in places receiving federal funds, outlawing certain transgender people from participating in sports, and bolstering “ parental rights.” However, he has taken it a step further by targeting programs that have historically helped families. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP as it is more commonly known, is one such program. First introduced in 1939, this initiative helps families—and especially children—get adequate daily nutrition. 41 million individuals, or about one in every eight Americans, receive the benefit. The Republican-controlled House, with President Trump’s presumptive approval, hopes to cut billions from that assistance program.
With respect to Trump's campaign pledge to secure the borders, there have been multiple executive orders—on immigration, invasion, and terrorism —that mirror the Project 2025 strategy. However, many of these orders are being challenged in the courts, so the verdict is out as to their enforceability and legality.
This brings me to liberty. Project 2025 speaks much of liberty and freedom but often refers to freedom for select groups, not for all. Curiously, Project 2025 advocates for removing terms like "sexual orientation," "gender identity," "diversity," "equity," and "inclusion" from federal rules and regulations and frames this as somehow promoting liberty. Equally curious is Project 2025’s insistence that the elites on the left define liberty too narrowly. Roberts claims, “It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live.” Fair enough. But it works both ways, doesn’t it? I’m not sure we need the Heritage Foundation to tell us how to live either.
I’ve been saying for a long time that freedom—America’s most indispensable value—is neither the prerogative of the left nor the right. Encouraging Americans to “live freely” is not a woke concept possessed only by the left as it is portrayed in Project 2025 and by the Trump administration. But neither is it a libertarian idea, claimed exclusively by the right. It is an enlightenment idea celebrated by our Founders and hailed by those like Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King. Roberts and Trump believe in a certain vision of liberty, but it’s a narrower conception than America needs right now. “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want,” Roberts insists, “but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like.”
No. That’s not what our Constitution grants us. Our Constitution grants us a freedom essential to human dignity, a freedom that encourages the pursuit of happiness, a freedom that braces America’s experiment in self-governance, and a freedom that fosters human flourishing. The trick now is getting all of us to agree.
Samples of Phase 2 articles about Project 2025
- Project 2025: Part II
- Department of Education
- USAID
- Department of Homeland Security
- Changes to the Department of Veterans Affairs
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Pursues Partisan Agenda
- Elon Musk’s attack on the Department of Labor
Samples of Phase 1 articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- Voters oppose the far-right playbook
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
- A blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change
- How anti-trans proposals could impact all families
- The Federal Reserve
- A threat to equitable education
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.