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November 8, 2024 - 10:00am
Donald Trump will return to Washington with the wind at his back: an electoral rout and at least one chamber of Congress. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, one jubilant former senior official in his administration told me that “2016 was a hilarious unexpected rebuke to the swamp”. But 2024, the same ex-official went on, is “America saying ‘Fuck you guys, we’re sending the felon back to finish the job.’”
Trump, long spurned by Washington elites, assembled his own merry band of high-profile supporters over the course of his third run, coasting into election day with two fresh and enthusiastic endorsements from Joe Rogan and Megyn Kelly. From stand-up comedians to podcasters to athletes, Trump’s celebrity support ultimately reflected the broad coalition that turned out for him on Tuesday. As one headline in The Federalist this week put it: “The social stigma of being a Trump supporter is gone.”
What will the President-elect do with this power? Unsurprisingly, he claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” during his acceptance speech, promising that “this will truly be the golden age of America.” Meanwhile, pseudonymous Ruthless co-host Comfortably Smug — a GOP consultant offline — was posting on X: “Can you believe we tricked the Libs into believing Project 2025 wasn’t real???”
Project 2025 was, of course, always real — although Trump’s involvement never amounted to the charges laid out by the media narrative. Still, the genesis of the effort lay in 2017, when Trump came to D.C. and tried to make big changes with a limited pool from which to hire loyal soldiers, entrenched liberalism in the federal bureaucracy, and no plausible policy agenda. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation regrouped after his loss in 2020 and tried to address those problems, whether he ran for office again or not.
Will it work? As we chatted, the aforementioned senior official in Trump’s first administration sketched out some plans: the President-elect should call on Congress to stay in session for the first 100 days of his administration, holding off on recess or holidays “until they pass his main promises through reconciliation”.
The source listed those promises as tax cuts, a border bill known as HR2, a voting bill called the SAVE Act, and opening up energy resources. “Don’t lose momentum, pass as much as can be done in January for him to sign on Inauguration Day and stay in with no breaks until it’s finished,” they said. Ominously for Democrats, the source said the presidential transition was “now in full force”.
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