A ‘Second Revolution’
Terry H. Schwadron
July 8, 2024
Sudden recognition of Joe Biden’s wrestle with whether to continue running for reelection has raised the prospects of a Donald Trump win.
And with it, there is renewed attention being paid to the public Project 2025 goals being set out as Trump’s agenda by the increasingly right-wing Heritage Foundation — though Trump said on Friday he wanted to distance himself just a tad from its goals. Despite the fact that the project goals are drawn by and from his appointees and advisers, Trump senses some negative public response that he would just as soon not own.
The project does have the continued backing of lots of MAGA organizations, however, and argues that it is offering these ideas as Trump’s own agenda, elements of which Trump talks about, like immigration, taxes and the need for personal loyalty. In that context, remarks by Kevin D. Roberts, the very right-wing head of this very right-wing organization, stand out even in the noise that is the out-of-control presidential election campaign that pits a Biden perceived as feeble and aging against a Trump. a convicted felon who cannot address a fact or a truth without making it about his personal gain.
Last week, Roberts told a friendly radio interviewer he is an insurrectionist who is open to violence: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be,” he said. He since has doubled down when asked about his comments.
Roberts suggested multiple times that resistance will be met with force. Though Heritage has no military wing, Roberts, a former Texas public policy adviser, sounds a lot like a right-wing militia leader.
“The radical left has taken over our institutions,” he said, vowing that his “second revolution” would coincide with a new “great awakening” that would bring America to God. “God’s law can, in fact, be a huge influence on the civil laws. . . Our definition of ‘freedom’ is not the freedom to do whatever the heck we want, but the freedom to do what we ought.”
Or what Roberts — apparently thinking for Trump — thinks we ought to do. Heritage presents Project 2025 as an aggressive plan that wants to rebuild America as a white-dominant, Christian nation, brimming with religiosity, with vast plans for round up migrants and undocumented citizens, replace federal workers with loyalists, send the military into U.S. streets, pump as much oil as possible while denying climate change, and use the FBI and Justice Department and other agencies for retributive prosecutions against perceived political critics.
Trump is Heritage
Trump’s campaign website at Agenda47 and his remarks do a good job of reflecting the Heritage agenda. Beyond a campaign debate that showed Biden in such poor light, what has ignited scrutiny of Project 2025 is last week’s Supreme Court immunity decision that basically depicted hands-off legal protection for anything that Trump might do as president.
It is an agenda of intimidation. As Roberts describes it, that which Trump cannot get through fealty, he will order through might.
And what Project 2025 underscored strongly — for all political views — is that a singular person elected as president is not really left alone to press forward his personal ideas. Rather the candidate is a team leader for those seen and not seen who forward the agenda. In this case, neither Trump nor Project 2025 leaders avoid presenting the communal ideas as his.
The court enshrined a presumption of criminal immunity for any “official” acts of a president — just as Trump is presenting himself as an authoritarian who sees himself king-like in his zeal to eliminate regulations, cut taxes for the wealthy, shut the border and end government health and aid programs.
For Trump, the “left” is any politician, judge, prosecutor, scientist, journalist, military expert who disagrees with whatever he wants to do. In the last week, he has redoubled on vows to bring criminal charges up to treason against members of the Special House Committee on Jan. 6, former and current leaders of the FBI and Justice, prosecutors and network journalists who do not support him.
Apparently so long as he describes his behavior as “official,” we’re supposed to look the other way.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at NYU who studies fascism, called out Roberts in social media posts as a “fascist” who was “celebrating” the newfound power of the president to “kill people and pay no penalty” while “feeling empowered by the ruling to threaten the American people.”
Lots of columnists and politicians alike may avoid that term, but see proposals that are well beyond “conservatism,” veering towards racist policies that are lined up next to religious goals.
Roberts, who previously ran the Texas Public Policy Foundation, is pushing the MAGA movement to embrace his vision of a government whose function is to execute God’s “wrath on evil.” He was president of Wyoming Catholic College from 2013 to 2016.
What is so striking is that Biden is seen as too old to defend our democracy, while Trump, who attacks it directly and is signing onto this “second revolution,” somehow is seen as merely presenting a different point of view.
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