Remember when Donald Trump didn’t have anything to do with Project 2025, let alone any intention of implementing it should voters put him back in the Oval Office?

No? Me neither. Mostly because there was never such a point in time.

Although I’m certainly open to the idea that Trump didn’t read Project 2025 — it’s hundreds of pages long, after all — it was conceived with a second Trump term in mind, and it was blueprinted in part on Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, which the MAGAsphere holds up as a kind of sociopolitical paragon.

Contributors to the document include MAGA mainstays like Stephen Moore and Peter Navarro, as well as OMB director Russell Vought, who wrote a lengthy section on the presidency which begins by lamenting the existence of “a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

That’s propaganda from Vought and it’s also just a bald-faced lie. There was no “sprawling” bureaucratic conspiracy in the US, and anyone who has any sense about them understands (and understood from the get go) that positing one was just a pretext for purging independent technocrats and experts from the government so the administration can replace them with loyalists. Or not at all.

If you don’t understand that — or don’t believe it — then you don’t know much about autocracies and how they’re established. It really is just that simple. We can disagree on policies, but trust me when I tell you there’s no room for ambiguity regarding intent here. The idea was and is to replace the existing system with an extreme version of unitary executive theory in which most checks and balances are rendered toothless.

That’d be problematic enough on its own, but it’s made immeasurably worse by the fact that it’s being carried out with the aim of enforcing an avowedly anachronistic, and in some sense Medieval, social agenda which whitewashes American history, questions established science to appease the outermost fringes of the electorate and seeks to establish Christian nationalism as a sort of official credo to the deliberate detriment of multicultural democracy.

It is, in a word, nuts. You are too if you support it, and that’s coming from me: A well-to-do white man born in the deep South, and thereby a card-carrying member of the favored caste.

I’m a political scientist, but I’m not a political activist. I’ve never voted in my life. Not one single time, in any election anywhere for anything. I reiterate that at regular intervals to make this point: I’m only as “biased” as the policies are crazy. If the policies aren’t crazy, I couldn’t give a damn, to be honest.

I realize all of that’s disappointing to some of you who desperately want a hero, but I can promise you it’s refreshing for the silent — i.e., non-commenting — majority of readers who want reassurances they aren’t being subjected to the irritable harangues of a hopeless partisan.

If you were to tell one of the handful of people in the world who really know me — who knew me prior to my reincarnation as a documentarian of markets, macroeconomics and social trends — that I’m a virtue crusader determined to foist his vision for a just, liberal society on the rest of humanity, they’d have a good, hearty incredulous laugh. Then they’d tell you I’m a selfish, egotistical, hopeless narcissist who can take democracy or leave it as long as I’m left to pursue my interests unfettered.

So, if the question is whether you can trust me when I say these policies — the Project 2025 policies — are crazy, the answer’s a resounding “Yes.” Absolutely you can trust me. Because I wouldn’t waste my time nor yours carrying on ceaselessly if we weren’t all in grave danger, which we absolutely are.

That’s the context for Trump’s candid admission on Thursday that he’s a Project 2025 fan. We all knew that, of course. It’s his project, after all, in the sense that it was designed specifically for a scenario where he returned to office.

But he pleaded ignorance about the document repeatedly during the 2024 campaign, and it’s no secret why: Because it’s a blueprint for autocracy, and on the off chance enough voters came around to that reality to cost him the election (he needn’t have worried), he wanted plausible deniability. Now, a year later, he doesn’t need that plausible deniability anymore, and that was evident Thursday when he identified Vought on TruthSocial as “Russ Vought, of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”

I realize that may not stick out as an especially remarkable statement, but it most assuredly is. Here’s a man who said he didn’t know anything about Project 2025, holding it up in all-caps as the most important credential on his OMB chief’s entire CV.

In the same post, Trump said the out-loud part even louder (he said the quiet part out loud earlier this week), describing a meeting with Vought as a planning session “to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies [should] be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

Again, I’m left to marvel at the extent to which simply having the gall to publicly narrate the dismantling of American democracy is enough to inoculate Trump in the court of public opinion. I talked about that dynamic here on Wednesday. Thursday’s TruthSocial post was just another example of the same thing, and a flagrant one at that.

The idea of a US president meeting behind closed doors with his OMB director to discuss a strategy for leveraging a government shutdown to target and eliminate entire agencies on ginned up allegations of a partisan conspiracy isn’t just wild, it’s comically nefarious. To say it out loud, on social media, would be like John Gotti recording his own Ravenite conversations and posting them to his own, verified YouTube channel.

Trump took it a step further, as is his wont. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” he went on. Some of that’s just him trying to embarrass Democrats into caving, but it’s still hard to know what to say about a president openly admitting that he’s in the process of subverting democracy.

“Hats off,” I guess? It’s tragic, sure, but if half the country’s this oblivious, then you have to ask whether it’s our fault for being so stupid or his for taking advantage of our collective stupidity.

“The government you elect is the government you deserve,” after all. I suppose if you elect one bad enough, you deserve to lose the right to elect one at all. And make no mistake, that’s where this is headed.