“In reality, Project 2025, an initiative put together last year by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to plan for the next GOP administration, was shaped by longtime close allies of Trump. Detailed planning for a second Trump term agenda along these lines is very real, and though the Project 2025 initiative itself has seemingly fizzled out, other groups have picked up the slack.
Furthermore, many of Project 2025’s key proposals — to centralize presidential power, crack down on unauthorized immigrants, deprioritize fighting climate change, and eliminate the Department of Education — are fully and openly supported by Trump.
Yet Trump’s intentions are less clear on a vitally important issue where Project 2025 made some particularly extreme proposals: abortion.
The project’s plan called for using presidential power to aggressively restrict abortions in several ways. Trump, wary of these proposals’ unpopularity, has said during the campaign that he won’t support some of them. He also evidently feels hesitant to outright disavow the social conservatives who have long been a key part of his base.”
“In the abstract, Americans don’t want a dictator. But if it’s their preferred leader, many are willing to throw checks and balances out the window so favored policies can be jammed through.”
“Understanding the full scope of Vance’s answer requires a quick recap of how Trump’s lawyers wanted January 6, 2021, to play out. The so-called Eastman memo outlined the necessary steps to prevent a transfer of power. It proposed that officials in a handful of states won narrowly by Joe Biden should submit alternative slates of electors and that then-Vice President Mike Pence should invoke his unilateral authority “without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session [of Congress] or from the [Supreme Court]”—to count only the Trump-supporting slates from those states.
If state legislators in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other disputed states failed to take the bait, there was a backup plan in which Pence would cite “all the evidence and the letters from state legislators calling into question the executive certifications” as grounds for refusing to count the votes from seven disputed states.
“At the end of the count, the tally would therefore be 232 for Trump, 222 for Biden,” Eastman wrote. “Because the 12th Amendment says ‘majority of electors appointed,’ having determined that no electors from the 7 states were appointed…TRUMP WINS.”
It’s unknown whether this would have worked. Certainly, it would have drawn an immediate lawsuit from the Biden campaign, but it’s unclear how the Supreme Court would have viewed its role in such a dispute.
Crucially, Pence refused to play his part in the scheme. For doing so, he’s become a pariah in Republican politics—though he deserves to be remembered for maintaining his courage in the face of both a literal and metaphorical partisan mob.
Vance indicated in the All-In interview that he would be willing to do the opposite. Asked twice whether he would refuse to certify the election, Vance fell back both times to his claim that he would have simply asked states to submit alternative slates of electors and allowed Congress to have a debate about what to do.
That’s a cowardly response that fails to give a clear answer, but there can be no doubt about the signal Vance is sending. He is effectively saying that he’d have followed the path outlined in the Eastman memo—a path that would allow the vice president to claim he was merely letting Congress debate the outcome, and then use the chaos and uncertainty created by that same debate to throw out the results from certain states in pursuit of a different outcome.”
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“It’s also worth engaging with the underlying notion here: that the country or Congress needs to debate the results of the election. That is also nonsense.
The country did debate the 2020 election. For months. Votes were cast, results were tallied, and the Electoral College determined the winner. The final certification of the results is not the time or place for that debate to take place. Indeed, the Trump campaign took advantage of many other opportunities that are built into the system to challenge results in specific places, and none of those efforts found systemic fraud or other reasons to doubt the outcome.”
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“What Eastman proposed (and what Vance is nodding along with) is a reversal of all that: a substitution of the vice president’s and Congress’ opinion for the will of the voters. That’s not constitutional, democratic, or even populist. It’s just authoritarian.”
“Vance repeatedly downplayed the radicalism of Trump’s agenda by saying things that were not strictly untrue but which conveyed a (beneficially) false impression of the ticket’s positions.
He used this gambit most shamelessly when defending Trump’s commitment to democracy. Confronted with his running mate’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — in part, by fomenting an insurrectionary riot at the US Capitol — Vance declared that Trump told the protesters on January 6 to protest “peacefully,” and that he “peacefully gave over power on January 20th as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
On January 6, 2021, Trump did call on his supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol. But also told them to “fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And while the former president did eventually leave office of his own volition, he first attempted to coerce election officials in multiple states to help him retain power by nullifying results.
Similarly, in defending Trump’s proposal to put a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports, Vance suggested that the policy was bipartisan common sense, observing that Joe Biden himself had preserved some of “the Trump tariffs that protected American manufacturing jobs.” But this was virtually a non sequitur: Imposing tariffs on a select number of goods that one deems to be of strategic importance and imposing a 10 percent duty on all imports, including agricultural products that the United States cannot possibly produce domestically — are dramatically different propositions. Vance’s line is a bit like suggesting that it isn’t controversial for the government to nationalize all industries because both parties support the existence of public schools and veterans hospitals.
Finally, and most subtly, Vance muddied the waters on abortion by expressing empathy for his adversaries on the issue. The GOP vice presidential candidate said that a dear friend of his told him that she felt that she needed to have an abortion because carrying the pregnancy to term would have locked her into an abusive relationship. Vance said that he took from that conversation that Republicans needed to earn “the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us. That’s one of the things Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do.”
To an inattentive voter, this could make it sound as though Vance was calling for the party to regain the public’s trust by rethinking its opposition to abortion rights when, in actuality, Vance was merely saying that Republicans should make life easier for the women whom they force to give birth — such as through public spending on child care, a policy Vance endorsed during the debate but which has scant support among other Republicans.”
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“Vance also utilized the more straightforward and time-tested technique of making stuff up.”
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“Finally, Vance attempted to steer the conversation away from policy proposals and toward various good things that happened while Trump was president and bad things that happened with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in power. Voters may be lukewarm on Trump’s economic proposals, such as cutting corporate taxes, but many do remember his tenure nostalgically, due to the fact that his first three years in office saw relatively low unemployment and low inflation.
Vance sought to spotlight this fact by saying that “Donald Trump delivered for the American people: rising wages, rising take-home pay, an economy that worked for normal Americans.” And he asked rhetorically, “When was the last time an American president didn’t have a major conflict break out” on their watch, before answering, “The four years Donald Trump was president.”
In reality, unemployment was already trending lower and wages were trending higher for years before Trump took office, and they did not dramatically accelerate upon his election. Meanwhile, Trump ordered the assassination of a top Iranian official, thereby nearly triggering another Middle Eastern conflict.
It is unclear why Kamala Harris bears responsibility for, say, the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine but Donald Trump does not bear any responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither had direct agency over either of those events, and Harris was not even president when the former occurred.”
“Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González claims the regime forced him to sign a letter recognizing Nicolás Maduro as the winner of July’s disputed presidential election.
“Either I signed or I would face consequences,” González explained in a video posted to social media. “There were very tense hours of coercion, blackmail and pressure.” The letter, according to González, was a condition for his escape to Spain, where he arrived on Sunday after weeks in hiding.”