Project 2025: A High School Essay… ? (And Rather Poor at That; And a Disastrous Flop)

The Perched Eye blog is 16 years old,  beginning from 2009 with President Barack Obama's election. The Perched Eye is eclectic ...  we strive to see and write about the styles and directions of American politics and culture, with an occasional comment on the impact of new technologies. We hope our observations attract and sharpen the eye of the reader... in today's world the 'pen' still remains unblunted.  Pericles 21, Author.

PROJECT 2025 IS A DEBACLE!

Project 2025 was supposed to be the conservative GOP's solution to their notions of America's problems - government size and inefficiencies, immigration, crime, economic waste, and more, much much more.

But 10 months later, '2025 has turned out to be more of a superficial, strung-together essay written in ignorance of adult, real world consequences.

 '2025' can still sound with its catchy, but empty phrases that ring around the brain for second or so ....until one realizes how much real-world pain and destruction they've caused. And 2025 is especially painful and damaging to the very audience '2025 was claimed to be written for...Trump's MAGA base.

’25's authors - Heritage Foundation? The Federalist Society? Clubby elitists, Elon Musks managerial-IT flying monkeys … have turned out to be naive, inexperienced (and generally underaged) phrase mongers who apparently sat around at exclusive country spots and downtown gathering places patting each other on the back for ‘smart’ phrases they believed would solve America's governance 'problems (as hey saw it) and incientally preserve 'their' way of life whatever that meant. 

But 'lo and behold' 2025 quickly began to wreck not only the democratic institutions Musk's minions claimed to want to help (but seemed to detest) but 2025  just as quickly threatened their own safety, economic security and peace of mind. (2025 continues to affect America like a bad hangover.)

To the casual eye, a first ‘reading’(look-scan) of the voluminous ’25 tome might have impressed one by the apparent ‘work’ that went into compiling such a lengthy target list of hated institutions that included Medicare, SNAP and USAID..essential elements of America's social safety net and its global diplomatic outreach.

But after ten-plus months we've realized  that that the list is superficially lacks real thought and consideration of consequences, linkages and of what 2025's erasures actually might mean for America and America’s allies and global economic alliances.

’25 reveals its authors have neither sophistication of thought and planning nor an even elementary notions of basic business school principles.

Project 2025 has proven have a startling lack of insight and foresight about consequences.

For example, in the agricultural arena, ’25’s targeting of immigrant farm labor (for deportation) was quickly implemented by masked non-uniformed vigilante raiding-crews…decisive yes but depleting a critical tool needed to plant and harvest America’s crops…in many sectors resulting in fruits and vegetables rotting in fields.

And then the tariff issue. The quickly enacted so-called defensive tariffs actually revealed a shocking gnorance of what ‘tariff’ actually means and who pays tariffs…it’s not the nasty foreign (-er) source, it’s America who collects tariffs at incoming ports. The application of high (and shifting) tariffs on close allies revealed ‘25’s ignorance of global trade interdependences and consequences...America’s historical trading partners have been forced to find more favorable trading partners…amongst America’s long established enemies. T

2025's resultant shift and warping of post World War 2 trade alliances and partners has gotten out of control. We've has even estranged CANADA!

Project 25 even successfully sold itself to the very domestic groups it has turned out to wreck: agribusiness, auto manufacturers, ‘protected’ immigrants whose protections are being canceled (Cubans especially), cancellation of birthright protection, and many more reversals of immigrant policies that appear to target people of color.

In other words, Project 25 seems to be at root a 'plan' implemented by a klan-like cabal of threatened white male elites who hide their race-fears and race-elitism behind hollow sophistry…that fooled and distracted so many groups that were the actual targets.

BORN TO FOLLOW?: CURRENT MAGA GOP'ers - AMERICA'S LOST, WANDERING AND FLOUNDERING, OTHER-DIRECTED PERSONA

 The Perched Eye blog is 14 years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the styles and directions of American politics and culture, with an occasional comment on the impact of new technologies. Our observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.

Classical sociological psychology has a descriptor for a personality type that seems to characterize Donald Trump’s MAGA wildly, often destructive, anti-democratic supporters (as was Hitler’s Nazi Germany adepts).

This ‘’type’ is the “Other Directed Persona” (ODP, aka “Outer-Directed”), (The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, 1950, Riesman, Denny, and Glazer. (A portion of every population is from birth, Other Directed, now an acknowledged psychological type (APA) …and propensity.)

The Other Directed Person seeks life direction from an external, especially a charismatic source, as contrasted to the Inner Directed Persona (IDP), who has an inner, independent core of ethics and guiding principles.

In the words of David Brooks (The Crowd Pleaser, NYTimes, Feb 9, 2012):

“The other-directed person is attuned to what other people want him to be. The other-directed person is …pliable and yearns for acceptance. [In other words, vulnerable perhaps to a fault of being too easily influenced…so desperate is the need to feel less lonely]

The other-directed personality type emerges in a service or information age economy. In this sort of economy, most workers are not working with physical things; they are manipulating people. The other-directed person becomes adept at pleasing others, at selling him or herself. The other-directed personality type emerges in a service or information age economy. In this sort of economy, most workers are not working with physical things; they are manipulating people. The other-directed person becomes adept at pleasing others, at selling him or herself."

Trumpists are, deep down, easily manipulated, easily led…even to purposes not in their real interests, and eager to follow…even to self-harm and disaster for them and theirs. For these reasons, the ODP represents an immense danger to their object of worship as well as to themselves.

The Other Directed Persona is a problem for society, especially for a society that claims it is democratic…because the Other Directed lacks independent thought, preferring to have a pre-packaged path of thinking to be followed without having to go through the effort of figuring out ones own truth.

America’s respecters of democracy need to carefully watch Donald Trump and his Other Directed minions, the MAGAs!

Trump’s followers did not spring up spontaneously with his arrival on the political scene. Nor did they appear just in the past 50 years. ‘Trumpists’ are of a ‘type’ who have existed probably since humans climbed down from the trees.

The ODP seems to have been born just to wait in the wings for a leader to appear who is willing, and able, to hoist a flag and wave a carrot in front of them, the Other Directed horde.

The Other Directed Persona is like a dumb Mule blindly trudging after the proverbial ‘dangling carrot.’

The MAGA supporters of Donald Trump are ODP ‘mules’, and Trump is aptly both the orange carrot and the false leader.

The pre-packaged ‘carrot’ is usually, and most effectively, an appeal to the base emotions of the ODP in the form of a set of slogans anchored by a written ‘screed’, often a book or a set of written down recollections of a leaders declarations during an afterward sacredly-held pilgrimage (‘jihad’).

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (1925–26, Munich, Bavaria, Germany) is perhaps the most notorious such ODP Carrot, ‘mule captivating’, screed in the past several centuries.

Earlier examples of such mass-movement tomes are the “Qur’an” (‘Koran’, eng.), the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (610–632 CE, Mecca and Medina, West Arabian Penninsula).

And, of equal significance to the Qur-an are the much earlier Christian and Gnostic“Gospels” attributed to Jesus of Nazareth by his disciples (Holy Bible, 1st-3rd c. CE Gospels, Greek-Hebrew origin canonical and apocryphal texts;) and then as later translated, the 1610–1617 King James Bible. (Also meriting mention are the recovered Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts containing both canonical and apocryphal content.)

In the last millennium, the Christian Bible has guided perhaps the most influential and militarily powerful mass movement in history — but it has been both a positive and often a not-so-positive factor…as it has also provided rationales for political oppression, wars of aggression, and punitive atrocities.

Notably, the Trumpist mass movement currently claims the Christian Bible as its guiding light to ‘make America great again’ (MAGA)’. (As it was claimed by Adolph Hitler for Nazi Germany’s right to expansion.)

Seemingly, a percentage of every randomly selected population group is from birth, Other Directed…America, be watchful!

SHOULD DONALD TRUMP BE INCLUDED IN AMERICA'S OFFICIAL GROUP TO ATTEND QUEEN ELIZABETH’S STATE FUNERAL

The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally commenting on the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted. 

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Whether or not Donald Trump should be included in the official American contingent to Queen Elizabeth's state funeral is the sort of dilemma that helped destroy the Weimar Republic (Germany, 1920s) and assisted the rise of Adolph Hitler, i.e., a democracy faced with an anti-democracy antagonist (Hitler, Trump) who insists on his democratic-principle ‘rights’ to speak as he wants, although his words incite anti-democracy mob acts. 

The Weimar Republic's historically-proven, correct handling of the early Hitler would have been to keep him in prison for the full 5 years of his 1924 sentence for insurrection and treason… instead of letting him use democracy’s own principles to get out of prison after only 9 months…during which state-supported time and state expense, Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf”… which was a factor largely accountable for the murders and war-killings of about 60 million humans. Once free, Hitler climbed the political ladder supported by his Brown Shirt mob (‘MAGAs), who he later ‘cast aside’ (canceled, murdered, eradicated) when they became a political embarrassment. (MAGAs are now learning that lesson!)

Donald Trump. Trump has proved himself to be an “anti-democracy factor” and has been impeached for an attempted insurrection and failed coup (the "Jan6" 1921 event). 

Whether to include Donald Trump to attend Queen Elizabeth's state funeral as part of the official American contingent, is American democracy’s dilemma. Trump's presence at Elizabeth Regina’s state funeral would appear to be a cruel jibe at the good that Elizabeth symbolizes, and a joke on America itself. 

Trump should not be invited by the current American President to attend per traditional protocol -Trump flaunted, scoffed at, ignored, tainted, and rejected that sort of polite democratic tradition long ago.  (IMO, Trump should be ‘allowed’ to sit this one out, tune into the funeral from one of his 'shady' mansions, and wait for his indictment. Maybe harsh, but 'Jan6' and ‘Weimar’ …history, dammit.)

THE REVERSAL OF ROE v WADE - THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FAILED ITSELF THROUGH POLITICAL NAÏVETÉ AND BICKERING

 The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's first term. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally summarizing the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.                 ____

This post responds to 'Jamess's June 25, 2022, article in the DailyKos  (Simply Amazing! The "Common-law experts" that Alito relies on -- Weren't Even Americans). 

Yes, we know that Alito's twisted-history argument leading to the reversal of Row v Wade is bogus. But the Jamess title implicitly carries two lessons for Democrats  -  become grownups, both politically and sometimes personally, and stop the Democrat Party's inclination to drown itself with ego-centered bickering?’  

The lessons from the Trump debacle are: 

POLITE DISSENT, viz., A SPLINTERED BALLOT LOSES EVERYTHING; and 

STOP INTERNAL BICKERING - UNIFY ON BASIC RIGHTS (COMMON GOOD) 

To repeat: the new reality of American politics for Democrats and progressives is that loyal dissent by ballot-splintering factionalism or by abstaining from voting is just 'patio chest-pounding' and the Dem intra-Party bickering is a self-destructive privilege, so 1950s', of a less complex past when we did not lose sleep over Republican or Democrat election winners. (Dems also have their MAGA aspects, too.) 

The Dems lost the 2016 presidential election, IMO, because of their 'naive' internal splintering. 

Democrat Party Loyal Dissent as expressed in do-or-die factionalism and abstaining from voting weakened the progressive vote and helped bring on a regression in America's cultural tone. Within weeks after his inauguration, Trump veered America from Obama's mid-road tone to a hard right wing direction. 

The sudden sharpness of Trump's  right-hand turn ofAmerican governance stunned and demoralized Democrats. More stunning was the barely hidden grift and greed behind Trump's foreign policy and his regressive use of America's national resources. Under Trump, government operations were hidden behind a personal, transactional style that created and favored policies that yielded financial gains for Trump, his family members, and for his corporate supporters. 

As Trump's government operations became more personally transactional, they also became less transparent, And our foreign policy was made a shambles.

Major examples illustrating Trump's radical shifting of America's foreign policy alliances were his November 2017, approval of Phillipine dictator Rodrigo Duterte's bloody campaign to rid the Phillipines of homosexuals and criminal suspects by murdering them on-site by roving right-wing para-military execution squads . 

Then came Trump's September 2018, declaration of "love" for Kim Jong Un, dictator-for-life of North Korea, a rogue nuclear state. 

This was followed by Trump's 2018 expressing that America should withdraw from NATO ... because NATO is a concept outside America's direct interest (which we now strongly suspect really meant that America's NATO membership offended Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, thus interfering with Trump's negotiations with Putin to construct a Moscow Trump Tower... with huge financial gains for Trump and his family.

This was the cess-pit where Trump had quickly, with a near-savant's nose for money, had lowered America.

America's regression under the Trump presidency could have been avoided if Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College. Hillary won the popular vote, but lost the election because of Democratic Party vote-splitting factionalism .... and additionally, as is now known, because of Russian intelligence's proxy operations that exploited America's addiction and vulnerability to its world of extremely profitable internet social media platforms. Facebook was front and center among Russian intelligence's social media targets leading up to the 2016 election.  (Russian interference in the 2016 election was known perhaps shortly before and then after the election...but this knowledge quickly was buried under Trump's threats and misinformation  programming.)

Dems must grow up from naive 'do-or-die' idealism ....look around at the pitchfork regressionism that followed Hillary's  2026 'loss' to the Trumpists.  

America's fall into regressionism has been recently capped by the American Supreme Court's June 24, 2022, anti-abortion reversal of its 1973 Roe v Wade decision that had legalized abortion for the past half-century.  

DEMS MUST LEAVE THEIR HIGH SCHOOLISH DREAM STATE AND BECOME ADULTS ABOUT AMERICAN POLITICS  (Yes, Dems feel outraged and disbelief about the Trump camp’s lies and disinformation...and their control of major parts of American governance, e.g., the Supreme Court, which Trump reshaped with the hypocritical support of the Mitch McConnell-led Senate and which is steadily eroding American life.  

But Dem reactions must be within Constitutional (legal) boundaries... because that is a core Dem message.  

Also, Dems can’t do a ‘progressive version of ‘Jan 6’  without becoming what is detested ..along with bloodshed. (MAGA supporters must be ‘itching’ for an excuse to use their automatic weapons on a destructive Dem protest… that is today’s reality). 

A solution to the Democratic Party's current stasis - Dems must first define what lessons have been learned from the 6+ years of the ‘Trump Era’ (his campaign years until Jan 20, 2021 … and in the future).  

LESSON #1: DEMS MUST STOP NAIVE INTERNAL BICKERING...while sustaining their major strengths which are INCLUSIVENESS and PROMOTING THE COMMON GOOD.  

The Dems lost sight of this in the 2016 election which they lost through their own egotistic, (childlike), internal-splintering of Dem voting power by offshoot, dissenting yet liberal Dem candidates who insisted on having their place on the November 2016 election ballot ...regardless of consequences.  

And we saw the consequence: HILLARY CLINTON’S 2016 ELECTION LOSS WAS THE RESULT OF THE DEMS’ OWN FACTIONAL CONTRARINESS ...that splintered the anti-Trump ballot from within the Dem party. 

The era of idealist sincere (but naive) LOYAL DISSENT VOTE, ‘I’ll show them, I just won’t vote’ or ‘I’ll vote for a splinter group, Ha!', ended on the morning after the 2016 national election.

A unified Dem voting bloc would have boosted Hillary’s Electoral College count beyond what was needed to win, but Dem self-centeredness prevented that.

LESSON #2: The Electoral College must be central to the DEM's future political calculus.  The Electoral College is a reality even if it is poisonous and a dinosaur CREATED FROM and sustained by entrenched structures that originate from America’s slavery past.  It seems the Electoral College will live on for a good while under America's two party system.

As stated above, Hillary’s substantial 2016 popular vote win meant nothing because Dems still lived in their own version of the MAGA dream that ‘proper’ America was or should still be life as it was in the 1950’s. 

In summary - ‘when are the Dems going to be adults about American politics and stop the Democratic Party's inclination to internal self-destruction?’ There is so much more to lose by bickering within the Dem bloc. 

SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL TRAVESTIES HIMSELF FOR TRUMP, AGAIN - BY ENGINEERING A SENATE IMPEACHMENT ACQUITTAL

Former President Donald Trump recently escaped a second Senate impeachment trial conviction (February 13, 2021) mainly due to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell's cowardly and Machiavellian plotting motivated to curry future support from Trump and his facist, violent, neo-Nazi base. (BEWARE, McConnell, Trump has no reciprocal sense of loyalty and you will live in real fear of his transactional, fickle, chaotic, paranoid mind-set  that can impromptu-ly unleash his armed henchmen upon your soul, home and family!)

(Does an image of the Hitler's 1930's 'Brown Shirts' come to mind? It should - one of Trump's few reading materials as an adult were 'Mein Kampf'' and "My New Order (Hitler's speeches)" which Trump reportedly kept by his bedside (according to an ex-wife)!). 

So, even though Trump lost the election and voted out of office, America faces another four years of Trump's sniping attacks on our leaders and democratic systems. (Furthermore and sadly, it seems Mitch McConnell's political 'skills' and expertise lie in dark, Machiavellian obstruction.)

And, as far as the Democrats are concerned, Trump's proxy, McConnell, will continue obstructing President Biden's work to save America from the Pandemic and economic collapse ... both the result of Trump's incompetence, self-agrandizing policies and treasonous complicity with America's declared state enemies.

This blogger views Trump's continued effect on the forthcoming years with a mix of foreboding and morbid curiosity. 

Just how frequent and damaging to our democracy and with what forms will Trump's psychotic ways dump more chaos and confusion onto America?  The answer is very likely, 'often and smelly', as Trump's style is about everything.

And what about Mitch McConnell? Will McConnell receive his anticipated rewards for his lickspittle loyalty to Trump in engineering the Senate trial's 'Acquittal-by-default?', the failure to convict by lack of a quorum majority? 

One feels that McConnell will not be rewarded to the extent he expects. But McConnell will survive politically because even Trump knows his interests are best served with a live lapdog than a powerless junior senator replacing a McConnell let lapse by Trump's vindictive urges.

But, though Trump will let McConnell survive, it will be just 'survival' in mental pergatory. The next years will not be a bed of roses for McConnell. Trump must now see McConnell for the servile 'nothing' McConnell truly is. And Trump will beat on and defile McConnell with scorn like a moldy old drum because Trump now knows McConnell is his 'bitch'.

This blogger sees a self-resurrecting Trump rewarding McConnell's lickspittle boot polishing with deserved scorn, not so much for McConnell cravenly saving Trump from a Senate conviction but mostly for the minor lapses in McConnell's total loyalty and subservience in the last 5 years.

'BEWARE' Mitch McConnell ... despite your eager knee-scraping to lap up Trump's disrespect and treating you like the servile puppet you are, Trump will 'engineer' ways to belittle and besmirch you, to spite and spit on you ... just because.' Enjoy Trump's hell, Mitch.

AND... behind the Senate's failure to convict Trump of impeachable misconduct as president, Trump's treasonous self-agrandizing acts against the Republic, we must address the glaring question: 'how is it that McConnell is the most powerful senior senator in America?', although he is a prime example of America's 'leak in the dam' of our form of democracy because he 'represents' the 7th most impoverished state in the nation with one of the least-educated and small populations? 

How can McConnell play a leading role for America from the context of representing one of the most demographically and economically marginal state 'anomalies', his home state of Kentucky? From that context, it seems McConnell hasn't a clue about the needs and path forward to a modernized, multi-cultural America with new industries and more jobs.

The answer to why McConnell has disproportional influence is America's 'leak-in-the-democracy' construction - seniority and no-term-limit rules ... which are employed to insincere unpatriotic advantage by the former Confederate states, with their race-based gerrymandering and other means of voter suppression.

McConnell, as a Senator of one of America's most impoverished, uneducated and nationally supported small states, surely can't have a clue about the needs and path forward for a modernized, multi-cultural America. 

McConnell doesnt have the home-state context and personal outlook to help formulate solutions for a future America with new industries and more jobs. 

(Again, sadly, it seems McConnell's chief self-serving, self-preserving political 'skills' and expertise lie in dark, Machiavellian obstruction.)