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The basic question about what Trump and his legally and morally bankrupt administration are doing is WHY.

Why would anyone want to cut off people who are receiving healthcare through Medicaid?
Why would anyone want to reduce the number of families that depend on Food Stamps?
Why would anyone want to stop using the food surpluses American farmers produced to feed starving families in famine hit areas like Sudan and instead burn them?
Why would anyone want to cut research for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, AIDS, ALS, cancer, and a host of others?
Why would anyone want to cut essential staff for emergency services such as FEMA?
Why would anyone want to shut down the suicide hotline for LBGTQ young people?

Why would Donald Trump – and the people around him – want to do such cruel things, inhumane in some instances? 

One answer is Trump himself, specifically, his sociopathy, a term that refers to “a pattern of antisocial behaviors and attitudes, such as manipulation, deceit, aggression, and lack of empathy.” Psychologists such as Trump’s own niece, Mary Trump, believe this drives much of what he does.

Certainly that helps explain his role in these things being done, but he is not acting alone, and it is clear that Trump has no serious interest in policy because he is not a serious man. His interests are money and power. Something else is at work to produce the level of malevolent actions we are seeing. 

What I want to suggest is that the “something else” which explains Trump’s destructive actions is Project 2025’s goal of reducing the size of the federal government.

It’s the age-old Republican fight to undo FDR’s New Deal that brought our nation out of the Great Depression. It really is as simple as that. Project 2025 is all about ending the New Deal era that began under FDR that resulted in the growth of the federal government to the size it is today.

The method by which this goal is being achieved is by cutting staff and the services they provide and programs they direct. Reduce staff and you reduce services and programs. If staff and recipients get hurt in the process, Trump’s OMB Director, Russel Vought who was a major contributor to Project 2025, says it’s the price that has to be paid to cut government spending. 

The “big lie,” of course, that Trump and Project 2025 insist is driving them is their effort to eliminate waste and fraud, only studies have shown that private industry has far more waste and fraud than the government because it is less regulated. There’s a reason DOGE didn’t cut waste and fraud. They couldn’t find any that made the difference they were claiming. 

As soon as it became clear that DODGE was actually a bust, the Republican budget bill emerged that will shape the government in the image Project 2025 is promoting, a bill that was “beautiful” only to anti-government Republicans, but ugly as sin to the American people. 

The truth is, New Deal programs and government services in general such as food and housing assistance, medical care, education support, nutritional programs, consumer and financial protections, Social Security and Medicare have overwhelming support. 

Knowing this to be the case, Project 2025 is coming in the back door. That’s what cutting staff is all about. With no staff, programs cannot be run, services cannot be offered, and eventually the size of government is radically reduced. 

I call it replacing the New Deal with a Raw Deal. It’s what happens when ideology drives actions rather than policies. 

All of this is, of course, the consequence of the last election wherein a majority of those who voted elected an administration led by an incompetent buffoon who has surrounded himself with ideologues. No outside force imposed any of these senseless and inhumane actions on us. According to Trump, in fact, he is doing exactly what he was elected to do.

Doesn’t matter if he’s right. He was elected and that was all Project 2025 needed in order to get to work undoing the New Deal and in the process hand power back to the states and put the American people at the mercy of an unregulated capitalism.

The really, really hard part is that until Democrats gain control of the House and the Senate in 2026, there is not much anyone can do to stop what Trump is doing, especially since the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is ruling one case after another that Trump can gut the government as he wishes.

Republicans in Congress are not supporting Trump’s cuts to staff and programs and services because they are afraid of him. Instead, he is the means by which they can do what they have been wanting to do for years. 

That’s why the outcome of the 2026 mid-terms is so critical. But that will depend on the degree to which people are paying attention. Trump is a master at distractions. The more chaos he creates, the less attention people will pay to his being the reason for the chaos. 

At bottom, though, what we are talking about are values, about the kind of society we want to have. If individualism and everyone for themselves and the survival of the fittest are your values, you love Project 2025.

If, on the other hand, you value diversity, equity, and inclusion, justice and compassion, good character and being a good neighbor, if you value community, you hate Project 2025.

Those of us who hate it must now engage whoever can and will help defeat Trump and Project 2025 in next year’s mid-terms so that the mistake the nation made last November won’t be fatal.

Can it be done? Yes, but the fact that Trump was re-elected means the unthinkable has already happened so nothing can be taken for granted.

Winning this battle not only won’t be easy, as we have already found out, and neither will it be quick. We didn’t get into this tragic mess overnight, and its ultimate end will not come soon. 

But it helps to know why we are having to fight in the first place. Project 2025 wants to end the kind of government we have known all our lives, a government for the many and not the wealthy few. 

It’s a righteous cause to fight for its survival, the kind of good trouble Congressman John Lewis got into throughout his life and called on us to do the same. 

I know we are standing on the right side of history just as he did. That is exactly how I want to be remembered, and I am confident that I am not alone.