Reading Project 2025 as a Manifesto PDF Free Download
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26 February 2025
Reading Project 2025 as a Manifesto
verfassungsblog.de/reading-project-2025-as-a-manifesto/
Ruth Houghton
Aoife O’Donoghue
26 February 2025
Manifestos have very often prefigured constitutional crisis, revolution, the overthrowing of
legal orders, and set the terms of what follows. Project 2025, or the 2025 Presidential
Transition Project, can be read as a manifesto, and one that is now well on its way to
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being implemented. Examining it through the lens of constitution (re)making sets out
some of the terms in which it could be opposed, including by counter-manifesto.
Constitutional Change and Manifestos
The US started with a manifesto. The US Declaration of Independence is a firm
articulation of a claim to have the necessary constituent power to make a new state. It
throws off the legitimacy of the old legal order – the British constitutional imperial structure
– and sets out the basis for the “new world” it was seeking to create.
Manifestos are more common in law than we may presuppose. War Manifestos were long
part of the apparatus of legality in warfare in international law. The French Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, for instance, remains part of French constitutional
law. The Haitian Declaration of Independence was key to establishing black sovereignty.
There are also the manifestos that challenge exclusionary practices of constitutional law;
for example, feminist manifestos such as Olympe de Gouges’ which claimed that the
Citizens in the French Declaration must include women, as they too fought the revolution,
claimed in other words constituent power on behalf of women to make the new state.
These types of political manifestos (and the constitutions they go on to inspire) are a form
of utopian legal blueprint for the imagined state they are demanding and creating. They
pre-figure the legal order that they wish to come into place. Where manifestos might
outline how power should be wielded, how citizenship will be bestowed and how human
rights will be guaranteed in this ‘better place’, the constitutions that follow set up these
terms. The liberal utopianism of the US Constitution was not utopian for all, of course.
The two-thirds solution embedded racist citizenship into its roots while the continued
absence of the Equal Rights Amendment has meant that women’s bodily autonomy and
equality of citizenship are continuously bombarded and reliant on the judiciary for their
protection.
What Frankenberg describes as the ‘constitution as political manifesto’ turns what were
revolutionary, political or normative claims into mere statements to be confirmed, declared
or reaffirmed in constitutional form. Through legal performance, they take on a form of
apparent immutability. If we are in a ‘post-constitutional moment’ (as Russell Vought
argues), or witnessing the counter-constitution (as Kim Lane Scheppele labels it), then it
is imperative that constitutional scholars expose this myth of immutability and start to
critique the claims to constituent power that are emerging. What then can we learn from
reading Project 2025 as a constitutional manifesto and the ways in which it aims to
remake the state?
Project 2025 is very much a manifesto. It lays out a vision that is both backward looking,
in that it claims to be bringing the US constitution back to its roots, while also forward
looking in laying out a very clear utopian blueprint. Blueprint utopias (in contrast to, for
instance, feminist utopias which tend towards a “critical” model, that rejects an end state)
are very often invoked in imperial or authoritarian projects. They are the utopias that
people most often are referring to when they talk about oppression.
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While both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance distanced themselves during the election
campaign from Project 2025, and Project 2025 says all over the front page of its website
that it is not a Trump plan, the first few weeks in office suggest its contents certainly are
one of the blueprints for the re-ordering of the US Constitutional system. Many of the
document’s authors either worked with previously or are now part of the administration.
The document was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a US right-wing think tank. It
describes itself as a ‘historic movement’ to ‘take down the Deep State and return the
government to the people.’ Now, that phraseology might make some immediately
sceptical, but then again, calling George III a tyrant probably did in 1787 also. To
construct a potential constituency from its audience, it states
“If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both
a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on
day one of the next conservative administration.”
The use of “we” is a common tactic employed by manifesto writers to attract likeminded
individuals and/or to construct legitimate constituent power. These can be read as
prefigurative claims to have the power to bring about these fundamental changes to the
constitutional structure of the US. It established a collective “we” that is positioned against
an ‘other’, here that ‘other’ are those who they describe as radical Left, but also the many
others targeted in the Project.
Reading Project 2025 as a manifesto exposes how in today’s legal reality, it is a blueprint
for what is happening. A quick comparison between the demands and recent Executive
actions suffices. It is a long document, but the elements they themselves highlight is a
good starting place.
A Gendered Pattern
The website’s front-page states that one aim is to ‘[b]an biological males from competing
in women’s sports’. Of course Trump’s Executive Order goes further, but in the main text
of Project 2025 there is a clear link made between trans people and pornography and
what it describes as ‘radical gender ideology’. If we place that alongside the Project’s aim
to dismantle Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DEI), and Trump’s Executive Orders to
‘maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family’ a
gendered pattern emerges.
The project claims that they are ‘[r]estoring the family as the centerpiece of American life’.
But what we get here, is an almost stereotypical move from making trans people non-
citizens by removing their identity, then moving into family, and from here of course,
undermining the rights of all women. A return to social-science and biblical definitions of
the family is one where women, and their bodies, are confined and controlled. The
definition of women and men contained in another Executive Order, is one that begins,
biologically inaccurately, from conception, where, according to Project 2025, life begins.
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Reading Project 2025 as a utopian manifesto facilitates and necessitates an exploration
of the underpinning fundamental values at the core of the project. In her approach to
utopia, Ruth Levitas reminds scholars to be “archaeological” in their study of utopian
projects; to ask who is included and who is excluded, and to consider the harms and
exclusions that ground the political demands. The gender ideology is not hidden beneath
the surface in Project 2025. Blueprint utopias might invoke an inevitable final destination,
but what Levitas and theories of utopianism provide are the tools to interrogate how these
blueprints are constructed, disseminated, and ultimately to start to expose their hideous
harms that inform their “dreams”.
Project 2025 is also deeply sceptical of climate change, promoting, for instance oil and
gas exploration in Alaska and ending wind energy development. Another Trump
Executive Order goes about ‘Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential’ while
rescinding a Biden Executive Order that supported offshore wind.
Overthrowing the Constitution
Many of the Executive Orders are being challenged before US Courts, the Just Security
blog has an excellent tracker for keeping up to date on these cases. The reaction of the
Executive to the judiciary is important. The Executive Order that denies birthright
citizenship, guaranteed under the 14 Amendment to the US Constitution, is being held
up across four courts. The order itself is damaging to ideas of the rule of law, to introduce
an Executive Order that quite obviously contradicts the constitution.
But J.D. Vance’s reaction to the judiciary holding up executive orders was to state that
‘[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power’. Project 2025 argues
there is a duty to protect the powers and privileges of the President from encroachments
by Congress, the judiciary, and the administrative components of departments and
agencies. Dismantling the notion of the separation of power as a fundamental
commitment within US constitutional law and creating an all against the President
scenario.
Project 2025 emphasises the need for political appointees to be answerable only to the
President. The Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies Executive Order partially brings
that into place; it removes vast swathes of oversight and accountability, leaving just the
President. Project 2025 is also clear that it wishes the administrative state to be
dismantled. For instance, it wanted the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) to be
‘prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character’. The CDC is now delaying releasing
information on, for instance, bird flu.
Project 2025 is very clear on what it sees as the extent of power the Executive Office
ought to hold, stating ‘the overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably
expensive, and in urgent need of repair. Nothing less than the survival of self-governance
in America is at stake.’ This is a manifesto call to action, and we should take seriously
how far they will go to implement this plan
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Stop Project 2025
What we have seen over the past few weeks is the implementation of a manifesto that
aims to completely alter the US legal order while adamant that it is returning to its roots.
In ‘dismantling the administrative state; defending the nation’s sovereignty and borders;
and securing God-given individual rights to live freely’, Project 2025 foreshadows the
basis on which the Trump Administration is acting. And whilst it might not offer the whole
basis, thus far it has given us a fair indication of travel.
Reading Project 2025 as a manifesto heralds a warning of what is potentially to come, it
offers a blueprint for the US Constitutional structure it seeks to prefigure. But what
reading these sorts of texts as manifestos also highlights is the need to be alert for the
counter-manifestos that are emerging – in other words, the resistance to Project 2025,
which was present even before Trump’s election – whether that is in the form of women’s
magazines outlining their projections for the state of women’s rights if Project 2025 is
implemented, to the (albeit overly commercialised) t-shirt people can buy in support of
“Stop Project 2025”.
Manifestos as prefigurative constitutional documents are more common than we imagine.
Though Project 2025’s handbook for constitutional re(making) is rare in both its detail and
the speed at which it is being implemented. Regarding it as such, enables the possibility
of opposition on its own terms, a counter-manifesto to prefigure a new and different
constitutional future to one currently being constructed.
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SUGGESTED CITATION Houghton, Ruth; O’Donoghue, Aoife: Reading Project 2025 as
a Manifesto, VerfBlog, 2025/2/26, https://verfassungsblog.de/reading-project-2025-as-a-
manifesto/, DOI: 10.59704/87c574cf1c761059.
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