Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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 The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
The preamble of the Constitution sets up our national aspiration of a government by “We the People” as the basis of a democratic republic predicated on “justice.”
These powerful words have withstood the test of time for over 250 years:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
And of course, in the Pledge of Allegiance, we describe a nation that provides “justice for all.”
Justice, and how we define and implement it, is critical to the health of our democracy. Yet, to this day, our nation has many diverging views on what “justice for all” truly means and how this justice should be implemented in the laws of the land. This debate is not only a matter for our legislators but has also been a focal point for philosophers and theologians for centuries.
In the abstract, justice is simply fairness. However, when it comes to specifics, the debate rages across the land on what fairness means with respect to race, sexual orientation, gender and more.
Nowhere is this debate more apparent than in Project 2025, an 887-page manifesto prepared by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The playbook, designed as a guide for the first 180 days of a future Trump administration, highlights the Department of Justice as a critical battleground for establishing a conservative vision of justice.
Chapter 17, titled “The Department of Justice,” argues that reforming the DOJ is crucial to the success of the entire agenda outlined in Project 2025. The authors make a bold claim:
"Not reforming the Department of Justice will also guarantee the failure of that conservative Administration’s agenda in countless other ways.”
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a key architect of Project 2025, underscored this priority when he told The New York Times in January, “[W]e just disagree wholly that the Department of Justice is independent of the president or the executive branch.” This perspective is emblematic of a broader strategy to bring the DOJ under close control of the executive, emphasizing that “the DOJ must be refocused on the rule of law and away from its current role as a political weapon.”
Robert’s statement on the DOJ’s use as a “political weapon” by the current Democratic administration stands in direct contrast to a statement he made regarding the department and the 2020 election:
“With respect to the 2020 presidential election, there were no DOJ investigations of the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance. ... The Pennsylvania Secretary of State should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted for potential violations.”
This juxtaposition speaks to the vast reach and changes proposed in Project 2025 for the Justice Department, the essence of justice in America and what “justice for all” might come to mean.
Project 2025’s proposed reforms include replacing career civil servants with a "vast expansion" of political appointees, overturning the current “politicization and weaponization” of the DOJ, and conducting a thorough review of the FBI. The vision is to shift the DOJ towards a more conservative interpretation of law enforcement and justice, which includes prosecuting voter fraud, transferring responsibility to the DOJ's criminal division, and halting investigations of groups engaged in lawful and constitutionally protected activities.
How might some of these reforms be specifically implemented? The answer is exemplified in this one radical sentence: "Promptly and properly eliminate ... all existing consent decrees.”
The Justice Department typically hands down consent decrees to local jurisdictions following investigations into police wrongdoing. As just one example, these decrees have historically compelled jails to improve their conditions or police departments to consider their tactics and report back to the Justice Department. This change would drastically impact the oversight of local law enforcement and the protection of civil rights.
The implications of Project 2025 on justice in America extend beyond the DOJ. The cultural agenda embedded within the project is also significant. As stated on the fourth and fifth pages of the playbook:
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
Understanding how the proposed changes to the Department of Justice intersect with Project 2025’s cultural agenda is crucial. Together, they have the potential to fundamentally alter and undermine the application of justice in America, challenging the very foundation of our Constitution’s preamble: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
More in The Fulcrum 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
- 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
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
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.