How many listeners remember the TV show “Hogan’s Heroes”? Set in a POW camp during World War II, it was, if you can believe it, a comedy about American and British POW’s running rings around bumbling Nazis at the camp. One major character was a fat German Sergeant named Shultz who when observing the shenanigans of Hogan and his heroes would loudly proclaim I KNOW NOTHING…. NOTHING!
Of course, the fact that he never interfered with Hogan and his heroes was very significant if one wants to get serious about the fact that this was in the middle of World War II.
The Sergeant Schultz refrain was what popped into my head when I read that Trump had posted to social media that he “knows nothing” about Project 2025 --- the right-wing’s blueprint for the second Trump Administration. (Yeah! Right!!)
Here are Trump’s words doing his Sergeant Schultz imitation: "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them,"
He probably is telling the truth when he says he knows nothing about Project 2025 because he is so stupid and un-curious he knows nothing about ANYTHING to do with running the government. He certainly hasn’t read any of the 900 odd page tome, or even an executive summary of it. However, to say he has no idea who is behind it is one of his most ridiculous lies. As Newsweek made clear, the project is the product of many of his former colleagues --- his strongest supporters.
[See Kate Plummer, “Donald Trump Allies’ Project 2025 Comments Resurface after He Denies Role.”]
According to CNN.com, Trump has an, “…..extremely close relationship with many of the people who launched Project 2025 or helped contribute to it. Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, and the group’s roadmap for the next administration includes contributions from others who have worked for the former president, including his former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli and former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn. John McEntee, Trump’s former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office and one of his closest aides while in office, is also a senior adviser for the project.”
[Alayna Treene, Steve Contorno and Kate Sullivan, “Trump seeks to distance himself from pro-Trump Project 2025,” CNN.com, July 5, 2024.]
CNN followed up with reporting that discovered ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY people who had previously worked for Trump are involved in the creation of Project 2025. [Here. ]
I continue to urge people to inform themselves about Project 2025. It is a dangerous model for further erosion of what we call American democracy --- already terribly flawed by the existence of the Senate, the Electoral College and the ability of nine un-elected Supreme Court Justices to re-write the law of the land whenever they want to. But if Trump is re-elected, Project 2025 will spell the loss of even more of our democratic rights.
In this note I will focus ONLY on some of the recommendations in project 2025 on how to nationalize the impact of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. In subsequent commentaries, I may discuss some of the other elements.
If you listen to Trump and note both the change in the Republican platform about abortion rights and the attempted scrubbing of extreme pro-life views from Vice Presidential candidate J.D.Vance, you would think that people in states that currently protect abortion rights have nothing to fear from a Trump Presidency. Nonsense. In fact, a tremendous amount of gaslighting is going on about that issue. Notice at his debate with Biden, Trump insisted that the Dobbs ruling by the Supreme Court returned abortion decisions to the states.
First of all, we don’t know that. An extremist Federal Judge in Texas ruled that the abortion pill, mifepristone, was incorrectly certified by the Food and Drug Administration. When the case came to the Supreme Court, they kicked the can down the road by asserting that the group of doctors who filed the original lawsuit against the drug had no “standing” --- as in they couldn’t demonstrate that they might be harmed by the availability of that drug. The Court invited people with standing to sue and some Justices suggested that an old 19th century law the Comstock Act might be applicable and could be used to ban mifepristone from the mail.
[For some very disturbing details see Tierney Sneed, “Supreme Court abortion case brings 19th century chastity law to the forefront,” March 29, 2024. This law was enacted in 1873 “to ban the use of the mail to transport a wide range of “lewd” materials, including pornography, birth control, and drugs or other instruments used for abortion.” It has been a dead letter since Roe was decided in 1973 and was rarely enforced before then. However, some have suggested that even absent a Court ruling, a second Trump Administration could ban mifepristone by executive order without even needing a Court decision. This is serious stuff!]
We’ll see what the current MAGA Supreme Court says when someone with standing brings a case involving mifepristone.
Meanwhile, Project 2025 has a whole bunch of proposals related to making abortion harder to achieve, even in states where the voters and Legislators have enshrined the right to abortion.
[One can access a pdf of the entire report here --- the section that includes their anti-abortion proposals begins on page 449 ---]
On page 454 we read: “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” The goal is to prohibit federal dollars from being spent on what Project 2025 calls “abortion travel funding.” Right now, the Department of Defense promises to pay for active-duty military personnel to travel to a state where abortion is legal should their current assignment find them in a state that prohibits abortion. Project 2025 proposes to prohibit that and if they control the government, it will be very easy to do that.
Worse than anything Project 2025 is proposing is a request that Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance made last June. See Veronica Riccobene, Helen Santoro and Joel Warner, “J.D.Vance Wants Police To Track People Who Have Abortions: Trump’s vice-presidential pick pressured regulators to let police access the records of people who cross state lines for abortions.” The Lever, July 15, 2024.
Combining this with the proposal from page 454 that every state report the RESIDENCE of people getting abortions in their states reveals the sickening nature of these two proposals when put together. So, if someone from Texas comes to Ohio to get an abortion (because the voters of Ohio approved the right to abortion in its Constitution even as they were electing JD Vance to the Senate --- go figure!) Project 2025 wants Ohio to report that woman – Why? So Texas can prosecute her??
In other words, women living in states that outlaw abortion will need a carefully protected new “underground railroad” to get them safely to and from an abortion friendly state without the police in their home state arresting them for breaking their state’s law in another state. This is how abortion decisions are being left to the states. Back in the 1850s there was wholesale defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law in the North. Let us hope that if Trump wins, God forbid, there will be similar resistance to such repression all over the country.
Some more from Project 2025:
On page 472 we read that the federal government should,
“ … [w]ithdraw Medicaid funds from states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment. The Weldon Amendment declares that no HHS funding may go to a state or local government that discriminates against pro-life health entities or insurers. In blatant violation of this law, seven states require abortion coverage in private health insurance plans, and HHS continues to fund those states. HHS under President Trump disallowed $200 million in Medicaid funding from California because of the state’s flouting of the law, but the Biden Administration restored it.
HHS/CMS should withdraw appropriated funding, up to and including 10 percent of Medicaid funds, from states that require abortion insurance coverage. DOJ should commit to litigating the defense of those funding decisions promptly to the Supreme Court in order to maximize HHS’s ability to withdraw funds from entities that violate the Weldon Amendment.
Additionally, California has announced that it will discriminate against pharmacies that do not carry chemical abortion drugs outside of California. California’s discrimination takes the form of cutting state contracts with such pharmacies and clearly violates the Weldon Amendment. The violation should likewise face the penalties discussed above.”
So, in states that currently support abortion rights, if the people in that State through their State Legislature mandate that private health insurers must cover abortion procedures and mandate other laws related to how they issue state contracts, Project 2025 proposes that the federal government come down like a ton of bricks by withholding Medicaid funding. And project 2025 wants the Department of Justice to defend such actions before the MAGA Supreme Court.
We must realize, Project 2025 is fascism’s wish list. I have just given readers a tiny slice of what they have in store for us in a second Trump Administration. Make no mistake about it --- their proposals will be enacted by a second Trump Administration even if Trump himself has no idea what those policies are.
Please do not be fooled by the Republican Platform and JD Vance’s changed website. They are coming for ALL of our rights.
Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author with Howard and Paul Sherman of the recently published second edition of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.