- Cory Doctorow on how the Project 2025 document is an anthology of often contradictory right-wing fantasies;
- How Europe is recruiting American scientists, since America under Trump doesn’t want them;
- Short items about tariffs, tariffs on movies made outside the US, reopening Alcatraz, how everything good is Trump and everything bad is Biden, and how Trump’s family is enriching themselves.
Locus Online, 5 May 2025: Cory Doctorow: Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives
The very savvy science fiction author Cory Doctorow writes a column for Locus Magazine every two or three months. His latest, posted on the website today, tells me something about Project 2025 I hadn’t heard about before. To be fair, he’s drawing on the work of one Rick Perlstein, writing for The American Prospect (though I can’t find the link to this particular column). Here’s Cory:
One of the central controversies of [Trump’s] campaign was Project 2025, a 900-page document overseen by the Heritage Foundation, a powerful, billionaire-backed Christian nationalist group. Project 2025 is full of far-right proposals that rightly frightened and enraged ordinary people.
…
But only one analyst identified the most important aspect of Project 2025: Rick Perlstein, a historian of right-wing movements (author of the essential histories Nixonland and Reaganland). In his American Prospect column, Perlstein pointed out that the most significant part of Project 2025 was its contradictions.
Now, Perlstein wasn’t concerned with inconsistency for its own sake. The point wasn’t, Look at these dopes, they can’t even get their story straight!
Rather, Perlstein pointed out that, time and again, Project 2025 presents multiple, contradictory, mutually exclusive plans, on virtually all of its major themes: monetary policy, defense, immigration, industrial policy, all the big ones.
Perlstein says that whenever you find these contradictions, you are looking at an unresolvable fracture in the Trump coalition. Project 2025 is a kind of anthology of cherished dreams from allies in Heritage’s orbit. Normally, the compiler of such a document would resolve conflicting proposals by evaluating the consequences of thwarting each proposer, and telling the less powerful that they didn’t make the cut.
Presumably, this happened several times in the compilation of Project 2025. The contradictions that survive in the document – and remember, there are many – represent conflicts between parties who are so powerful that none of them can be safely refused. These are people who are on the same team, but not on the same side.
Hmm, a collection of writings by different people that are not consistent. What does this remind us of?*
Cory relates this to a pattern in history, exhibited even in THE HOBBIT.
Many’s the victory party that turned into a night of the long knives. It was easy for the USA and the USSR to fight Hitler together, but after Adolf blew his brains out, all bets were off as both sides moved to seize as much of Germany (and as many German rocket scientists) as they could.
Trump stitched together an impressively diverse coalition to win control of the Senate, Congress and the White House. By “diverse,” I mean these people barely agree on anything. As Perlstein says, that is the core lesson of Project 2025: that this movement is full of equally matched power-brokers who hate each others’ guts and want diametrically opposing outcomes.
With examples. Then, finishing:
The long knives are already out. After Project 2025 became synonymous with dystopia, Trump distanced himself from it and ordered the Heritage Foundation to shut up about it. But Heritage, stung by the criticism, insisted on volubly, publicly defending its honor, declaring itself to be the HR department of Trump’s White House-in-waiting. This pissed Trump off to no end, and was noticed by Heritage’s archrivals, the America First Policy Institute, who swooped in and maneuvered Trump into granting it the hiring authority that Heritage so jealously guarded.
The fracture lines are appearing. Project 2025 is a map to some of the most important ones. More will come in the days and years ahead of us. For opponents of the Trump agenda, Project 2025 is a cheat book telling us where to find the weak spots in his coalition.
Every sudden political change is really a coalition in disguise – and coalitions who attain victory are their own worst enemies.
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Speaking of moving in to seize scientists…
Politico Europe, Giorgio Leali, 5 May 2025 (via): Von der Leyen, Macron knock Trump’s war on universities as ‘gigantic miscalculation’, subtitled “The European Commission chief and the French president are trying to woo American researchers with a new program called ‘Choose Europe for Science.'”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday slammed U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign against American higher education as she unveiled a half-billion-euro plan to attract foreign researchers.
“The role of science in today’s world is questioned. The investment in fundamental, free and open research is questioned. What a gigantic miscalculation,” von der Leyen said. “Science has no passport, no gender, no ethnicity or political party.”
Appearing alongside French President Emmanuel Macron at Paris’ storied Sorbonne University on Monday, von der Leyen said the “Choose Europe for Science” initiative would put forward a €500 million program from 2025 to 2027 to attract foreign researchers to “help support the best and the brightest researchers and scientists from Europe and around the world.”
Happy, MAGA?
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The New Republic, Michael Tomasky, 5 May 2025: Donald Trump’s Biggest, Dumbest Lie Is … Really Big and Really Dumb: subtitled: “The president is peddling hot nonsense on what tariffs can do for America—and the person he’s conned the most seems to be himself.”
With numbers.
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In other news today, Trump wants tariffs on movies made outside the US because foreign films are a national security threat (?!); he wants to reopen Alcatraz because a local Florida TV station showed the movie Escape from Alcatraz the other night, and he and MAGA are obsessed with locking up bad bad people; and Trump thinks everything good is because of him, and everything bad is because of Biden. I think he’s mentally ill. Also, *of course* Trump and his family are making deals to enrich themselves.
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*It reminds me of the Bible.
