Project 2025, Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook on Christian nationalism, is already in motion. While the media debates Trump’s disingenuous disavowals of the masterplan, the real story is the extent to which the Supreme Court has already begun implementing it.
Project 2025 seeks to degrade civil rights nationwide by outlawing abortion, mandating Christianity and reducing LGBT+ citizens to second class status.
But these culture war flashpoints are merely a ruse, a distraction for the media to consume while its backers disguise their real objective. Project 2025 is a massive undertaking financed by fossil fuel wealth to protect fossil fuels, abetted by Supreme Court justices with ties to Big Oil.
Trump’s connection to — and disavowal of — Project 2025
Project 2025 was launched by the rightwing Heritage Foundation with Trump’s blessing.
In 2022, Trump described Project 2025 as “the groundwork,” a detailed plan “for exactly what our movement will do ... when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
Despite Trump’s embrace, emerging details about Project 2025 have become so unpopular that Trump now claims to know nothing about it, and says he has “no idea” who is behind it.
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Trump can’t plausibly claim ignorance, at least not outside the MAGA bubble.
As Politico reported, Project 2025 is the brainchild of Trump’s closest advisers, who helped write the plan’s main components to protect fossil fuels: Bernard McNamee, who served in Trump’s Energy Department, urges the repeal of climate laws; Perry Pendley, who led Trump’s Bureau of Land Management, argues that fossil fuel extraction is more important than preserving federal lands and monuments; and Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief of staff, wrote the plan to gut EPA staff and reduce EPA enforcement of environmental regulations.
Supreme Court advances Project 2025’s agenda
While many pundits have acknowledged the implausibility of Trump’s “lack of knowledge” about Project 2025, few (none?) have noted that the Supreme Court has already begun to implement its key objectives.
This is the hidden reality of Project 2025: Trump’s remaking of the Supreme Court in his authoritarian image has already enabled the Court’s majority to adopt key components of the plan:
Abortion: The high court facilitated Project 2025’s anti-abortion goals with the Dobbs decision. In overturning Roe v. Wade after 50 years of protected abortion access, Justice Samuel Alito summarily declared that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause could no longer protect women’s medical privacy, because the Supreme Court previously determined “that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification.” After Roe deemed abortion access a “liberty” protected by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Alito and his Catholic colleagues ruled that “classification precedent” and ancient common law history were more important.
Bribery: SCOTUS implemented Project 2025’s deference to a strong (and crooked) chief executive in Snyder v. the United States. Republicans on the Supreme Court declared in Snyder that bribing an elected official isn’t bribery if it’s paid to the official after the fact, because then it’s really more of a “gratuity.” Despite (because of?) two justices facing backlash for accepting lavish gifts from donors with cases before the Supreme Court, the majority in Snyder weakened the federal anti-corruption statute, 18 U.S. Code § 666, which made it a crime for officials to corruptly solicit, accept or agree to accept “anything of value intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with” any business or transaction worth $5,000 or more.
Weakening federal regulations: The Supreme Court continued implementing Project 2025’s goal of killing the administrative state and stopping “the war on oil and gas” in Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo. In Loper, Republicans on the Court overturned the well-established Chevron doctrine, the law of administrative agencies for the last 40 years, ruling outrageously that judges should not rely on federal experts’ scientific or medical expertise, but should rely instead on their own personal opinion, bias and scientific ignorance in interpreting statutory ambiguities. This ruling, coupled with other recent cases eviscerating the regulatory power of the EPA, will cripple climate initiatives in service to Project 2025 donors for years to come if this rogue court is not stopped.
Advancing Christian nationalism: The Supreme Court helped advance Project 2025’s Christian nationalism in 303 Creative LLC and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. In 303 Creative, the conservative majority designated the right to refuse to do business with gay people not as discriminatory conduct but as “free speech,” and held that requiring web designers to serve same sex couples was “coercing” them to make “statements” with which their Christian religion disagreed.
In Kennedy, the court’s religious bloc ruled that a football coach could lead his team in prayer on a public school football field despite Establishment Clause precedent dating back to the 1940s. Until Kennedy, courts prohibited school prayer because of the coercive pressure it put on atheist, Jewish, Muslim and other non-Christian students to either pray along or be ostracized. In both 303 Creative and Kennedy, the court’s extreme bloc distorted the 1st Amendment’s shield – freedom of religion – into a sword: Christians’ freedom to impose their religion on others.
Biden’s extraordinary response to a rogue court
Each of these decisions, punctuated with the shocking presidential immunity ruling that presidents can break criminal laws with impunity, is in lockstep with the authoritarian goals of Project 2025.
This Trump-packed Supreme Court is so extreme, its roughshod violation of legal precedent so dangerous, that even President Joe Biden, an avowed institutionalist who has long resisted Supreme Court reform, now urges it.
Last week, Biden wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post outlining the Biden-Harris proposal to rein in the court, starting with term limits of 18 years.
He correctly noted that the United States “is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court,” and attributed the court’s current dysfunction to lifetime appointments. Biden’s candid observation that “what is happening now is not normal” was an understatement many Americans won’t understand for years, after the damage is evident.
Biden, like many Americans, was aghast when the Supreme Court’s Republican majority granted Trump broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. As Biden put it, “If a future president incites a violent mob to storm the Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power — like we saw on Jan. 6, 2021 — there may be no legal consequences.”
Or, for Trump extremists on the Supreme Court, that was exactly the point.
Without recusal, justices in bed with Big Oil will impede climate action
Term limits must be accompanied by an enforceable Code of Ethics requiring justices to recuse from all cases in which they are conflicted. This last point will continue to stick, because each of the six Republican-nominated justices is in bed with fossil fuels.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a “highly active and respected member of the American Petroleum Institute for more than two decades.”
Justice Samuel Alito’s family leases over 100 acres of land for oil and gas private development.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who has accepted over $4 million in “gifts” from conservative donors, has been in fossil fuel investor Harlan Crow’s pocket for years.
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Not only do Coney Barrett, Alito and Thomas have direct, personal ties to fossil fuels, all six conservative justices belong to the Federalist Society, and are backed by the Heritage Foundation.
Both of these organizations, funded in large part by secret money, are driven by fossil fuel wealth, and it is no mere coincidence that Big Oil affiliated Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News amplifies their false messaging. Although they use non-stop culture wars to distract the voting public, they and Project 2025 exist largely to advance climate change denial to protect their own formidable, private wealth.
Project 2025 and its uber-wealthy puppeteers aren’t going away, regardless of what happens in November, because climate wars to hold Big Oil accountable for climate destruction are just getting started. Voters need to understand that American, Russian and Hungarian authoritarians are weaponizing Christianity in a coordinated attack to distract from their true efforts to protect fossil fuels.
Court reform, as embraced by Kamala Harris but deemed “dead on arrival” by Trump republicans, has now become an election imperative. The media needs to step up, expose the dark money ties between Project 2025, Trump and the six conflicted justices defending fossil fuels. Most critically, anyone concerned about rising temperatures and disappearing water sources needs to vote in November as if their lives depend on it.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
