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
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.