Schmidt is a syndicated columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's "Cross-Partisan Project 2025" relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
After reading the 45-page section on the Defense Department and related arms of the government, it is pretty clear that Project 2025’s recommendations would give nearly unlimited power to the president and that its overly partisan attacks on our institutions would make the United States less safe.
The second section of “The Mandate for Leadership. The Conservative Promise” is titled “The Common Defense” and also covers the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the intelligence community and Media agencies.
Christopher Miller, who briefly served as acting secretary of defense at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, wrote the chapter on the Defense Department and is widely quoted in the section’s preamble. Right out of the gate, Miller calls the DOD “a deeply troubled institution,” claiming the department “has emphasized leftist politics over military readiness.” He writes that “recruiting was the worst in 2022 that it has been in two generations” and blames “the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates have taken a serious toll.” (Enlistments have been dropping for decades.)
Paragraph three of the introduction throws out this incomprehensible and undefined sentence:
"But this is now Barack Obama’s general officer corps.” A serious policy report should be devoid of innuendo but unfortunately this sentence is only one example of pejorative statements made against past and present presidents.
The section should of course focus on ensuring that America’s best and brightest choose military service, but Project 2025 suggests the following when it comes to recruitment: “Should rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed forces and discourage our nation’s finest men and women from enlisting.”
It is really not clear that any of the above is actually happening within the DOD nor impacting recruitment.
Project 2025 does admit that China poses the most significant danger to the U.S. from abroad and sets to make recommendations. It prioritizes a denial defense against China and, in general, the needed reforms suggested are strategic.
Following the portion on China and the need to secure our Southern border, the document is full of frightening authoritarian nuggets. The most concerning line in the entire section reads: “The recommendations outlined in this section provide guidance on how the next President should use the federal government’s vast resources to do just that.”
Project 2025’s recommendations include giving the president the power to reduce the number of generals. “The next President should limit the continued advancement of many of the existing cadre, many of whom have been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess.”
Presidents do have the power to remove generals under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. That said, traditionally generals or admirals have been relieved of their posts for misconduct or a failure to perform their duties. Relieving a group of them as a political act by a president would tarnish the perception that the military is apolitical.
Project 2025 recommends that the president usurp Congress’ constitutional mandate when it comes to national defense. “The President should examine the recommendations of the congressionally mandated Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform and develop a strategy for implementing those that the Administration considers to be in the best interests of the American people.”
These suggestions are being made based on occurrences that are not taking place, like “using the Army as a test bed for social evolution.” and “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs.”
It is ironic that while Project 2025 wants to diminish the administrative state, it proposes appointing a special assistant to the President who would liaison with Congress, DOD and all other interested parties on the issue of recruiting and retention.
According to Pew Research, most Americans continue to express positive views of the military: 60 percent say it has a positive effect, while 36 percent say its effect is negative. Promoting this kind of negative propaganda of our military forces is irresponsible and would ultimately leave the country less safe.
Project 2025’s partisan recommendations for our common defense should be of great concern to all Americans because, if implemented, it would grant vast powers to the “next conservative president.”
Americans should be united in our desire for safety and security. Instead the proposals put for by the Heritage Foundation in Project 2025 would only make us more divided and therefore much less secure.
More 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
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.