Trump’s Project 2025 Is the First Step in a Global Far Right Plot to Dismantle Western Democracy
In this exclusive extract from his vital forthcoming book 'Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy Democracy from Within' Nafeez Ahmed exposes the forces pushing democracy to the brink
The far right is taking the world by storm. From the Republican Party in the US to the Conservative Party in Britain, it has already influenced some of the most powerful governments in the Western world.
Across Europe, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Sweden have seen far-right parties in government. The second largest political party in Germany, and the third largest in France, are far right. Even in Britain, where the 13 year rule of an increasingly extreme Conservative Party was routed by a Labour victory, the third largest party in the polls is the far-right Reform Party run by Nigel Farage.
Now in the United States, the world is watching as an incoming second Trump administration prepares to run a government where the combined wealth of its key cabinet members amounts to some $344 billion – higher than the GDP of 169 countries. The richest of those, of course, is the Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk under whose ownership the X social media platform (formerly known as Twitter) – widely seen as a kind of global public square – has become a hotbed of white supremacism, misogyny and conspiracy theories.
Trump’s return, more than anything, is a warning sign not just to Labour, but to mainstream parties – whether of the left or right – across the West. Even amid electoral setbacks and failures, the data is clear: extreme nationalist populist movements have developed a shockingly persistent stranglehold over Western politics and culture, one that is inexorably growing in popularity – with bizarre and dangerous consequences.
While all eyes are on Trump, we must remember that he is merely a tool and a vessel. And what he does in the United States on behalf of his far-right network of billionaire donors is just the beginning.
The Making of a New Form of Fascism
We are watching in real-time as the vested interests that brought Trump back into the White House attempt to replace the American republic with a new form of postmodern networked fascism.
For the first time in history, a US presidential candidate had openly promised, just weeks after being targeted for political assassination, to completely end American democracy: once he is elected, Donald Trump said, Americans ‘don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.’
Not long after, Britain was wracked by its worst far-right riots in decades, as angry, disenfranchised louts laid waste to towns and cities to target the evil trifecta of Muslims, migrants and mosques – all whipped up by disinformation about the tragic murder of children at a Taylor Swift dance concert.
English Defence League founder ‘Tommy Robinson’ (real name: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) spread fake news by blaming an Islamist migrant arriving illegally in Britain for the murders – it turned out the suspect was in fact a 17-year-old British-born boy with autism whose parents were devout Christians of Rwandan origin.
Elon Musk amplified Robinson’s fake news on his X platform and claimed that a coming ‘civil war’ in Britain was ‘inevitable’ – a tweet that was in turn amplified by Russian state media.
Following Trump’s 2024 election victory, Musk has continued using X to target the UK: signal boosting Robinson’s fake news film Silenced which defames a 16-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy who was being bullied by racists (and which a High Court ruled would lead Robinson to be jailed if he breached the court’s order by continuing to promote it). Musk also signal boosted a petition calling for another UK general election.
A few years ago, this turn of events would have seemed unbelievable. But back in 2010, I had predicted where much of the West would find itself over the ensuing decade. I warned that ‘the entire mainstream party-political system’ would end up being ‘completely discredited’ due to being unable to deal with the structural causes of escalating economic crises, ‘while mainstream policy solutions serve largely to contribute to them, not ameliorate them … The collapse of the mainstream party-political system across the liberal democratic heartlands could pave the way for the increasing legitimisation of far-right politics by the end of this decade.’
Even so, I have been surprised at how prescient that statement was. We now stand at an alarming inflection point. For the first time since the Second World War, there is a real prospect that the democratic experiment may come to either an abrupt and violent end or a protracted, if still precipitous, decline.
This is the largest and most consequential crisis of democracy the West has ever faced. The rise of the far right as a global movement threatens to undermine the very foundations of free societies across the world, from the US to the UK, Europe and beyond.
How did we get to this point of such deep fragility in our democracies? Why is this happening? And how do we fight back?
I wrote Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy Democracy from Within to help citizens everywhere answer these questions, to understand the nature of this crisis, and to inform the struggle to repair and enhance our democracies. Drawing on 15 years of investigative reporting, Alt Reich reveals for the first time how the far right has shape-shifted over the last 100 years from a fringe pariah into a mainstream force operating in the heartlands of Western power.
Project 2025 is Underway
In the run-up to the 2024 elections, the Trump campaign team went to pains to disassociate itself from the negative publicity around Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project.
Project 2025 was published as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership series that has run in tandem with every presidential election since 1981. Due to the Foundation’s extremely strong ties to the Trump campaign, its supporters, its donors and wider networks, it was widely recognised that Project 2025 was intended to provide the comprehensive blueprint for a new Trump administration following a Republican election victory in 2024.
Now, walking back on the denials from Trump himself and those around him, the transition team is brazenly installing key Project 2025 authors and leaders into his incoming administration. One of the most prominent of these is Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), perhaps the most powerful department in the American Government which oversees the entire federal budget. Vought, who led the OMB in Trump’s first term, is one of Project 2025’s key architects and co-authors.
In secret recordings from July, Vought revealed in private that his team had been drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos to lay the groundwork for “shadow” agencies that could rapidly takeover the US government and rapidly execute Trump’s plans if he won. Trump, he had said, is “very supportive of what we do.”
Other Project 2025 advisors and contributors nominated to join the Trump administration include Brendan Carr, Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Communications Commission;
Tom Homan, who will lead Trump’s plan for mass deportations; John Ratcliffe, the next CIA director; and Stephen Miller, who will oversee Trump’s agenda as his Deputy Chief of Staff for policy.
To be clear, Project 2025 is a fully fleshed out, step-by-step blueprint for the Alt Reich. It is perhaps the clearest and most detailed articulation yet of a new form of fascism that represents the consolidation and culmination of decades of heterogenous far-right agitation.
Its 900 pages present a comprehensive policy plan to conquer the American Government. This includes a plan to replace as many as 50,000 federal employees with handpicked conservative loyalists. It advocates a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory, holding that the President holds absolute authority over the executive branch. This would then give the President unprecedented power to completely remake the state, including restructuring the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, slashing the budget for the Department of Justice, abolishing the Department of Commerce and the Department of Education, ending the independence of the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission, and limiting funding for scientific research only to projects aligning with conservative principles.
The US immigration system should be functionally crippled, without regard to the health or wealth of the American economy and people.
Environmental and climate change regulation should be gutted, to pave the way for maximum fossil fuel production. Abortion as health care should be rejected, and access to contraception limited.
A renewed focus on the family should take inspiration from ruthlessly repressive regimes like North Korea, and the state should assume a theocratic aspect by integrating Christianity into government.
Freedom, Project 2025 documents state, ‘is defined by God, not man’. Protections against discrimination based on sexual or gender identity should be torn down, along with affirmative action and all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes.
Even more perniciously, Project 2025 advised that the President should invoke the Insurrection Act to target opponents of the Government, with the military immediately deployed within the homeland to support domestic law enforcement.
While it might be hoped that the US legal system, and existing checks and balances, impede the implementation of this plan, Project 2025’s authors have already thought through this: they recommended a carefully calibrated series of steps to systematically deconstruct legal constraints from Trump’s first potential day in office.
America is the Testing Ground – The World is the Goal
This sounds like the plan of a far-right lunatic fringe. But it is far more than this. Project 2025’s support from 100 of the country’s most influential conservative organisations illustrates that this pernicious Alt Reich ideology has penetrated the centre ground of US conservativism.
But it would be a huge mistake to believe that Project 2025 is just about America. It is seen as an inspiration for far-right movements all over the world. No clearer indication of this can be found than in the fact that its host organisation, the Heritage Foundation, has played an instrumental role throughout the post-war period in disseminating far-right theories often hatched by sympathisers with Nazi ideology across the world, particularly in the UK and Europe.
These longstanding transatlantic ties, backed by the movement of funds and personnel, mean that the Heritage Foundation has huge soft power influence and ideological impact on conservative ideas and values across the Western world.
Mainstreaming Eugenics
In Alt Reich, I tell the story of how the Heritage Foundation was used as a fulcrum to expand an emerging new vision – combining virulent hostility toward minorities with extreme free market ideology – across the West. Heritage became one of the most influential players in the Atlas Network founded by Sir Antony Fisher, who also with Heritage Foundation colleagues seeded the Manhattan Institute in New York and the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.
All three organisations played a pivotal role in mainstreaming the ideas of a man called Charles Murray, the author of the veritable bible of scientific racism, The Bell Curve. Murray’s research effectively rehabilitated the claims of Nazi eugenicists about race and IQ, and attempted to paint them with a sheen of scientific legitimacy. Shockingly, I discovered, this ideology can be founded lurking at the heart of the global resurgence of the far-right.
The Atlas Network now includes 479 organisations across 92 countries. Many of these organisations harbour sympathy with the ideas promulgated by Charles Murray and other scientific racists, amalgamating them with a mix of libertarian, extreme market and anti-welfare ideologies that see minority groups of various kinds as a threat. Heritage Foundation co-founder Ed Feulner remains deeply involved. He teaches on the faculty of the Atlas Network’s Think Tank MBA, a worldwide training programme funded by the Bradley Foundation – which had previously financed Murray’s work on The Bell Curve (that began at the Manhattan Institute under Feulner’s directorship).
Through 2024, Ed Feulner also sat on the advisory council of the American Project – founded by Trump ally and 6 January insurrectionist Patrick Byrne and former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn (both of whom hold dubious ties to Russian officials) – which funnelled millions of dollars to 2020 election deniers.
In other words, the overarching vision and moral architecture underlying Project 2025 is not confined to the US but is being actively projected around the world through the work of hundreds of allied think tanks.
No wonder that in May 2024, Donald Trump posted an anti-Biden video on his social media platform Truth Social including a strange reference to a ‘unified Reich’ (which he then deleted after a backlash, his campaign team blaming an external contractor).
Whoever wins or loses elections, these developments show that the Alt Reich genie is out of the bottle and will not be put back in purely through electoral politics. Trump is not the driving force of the Alt Reich, but merely one of its symptoms. With or without him, the Alt Reich will continue to metastasise through new voices, ideologues, books, tweets, videos and memes.
By the same token, Project 2025 is not simply an end in itself, but a stepping stone to a far broader Alt Reich vision. The same forces behind Trump want to remake the world order in its entirety. Extreme nationalism encompassing a shapeshifting matrix of anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism (along with myriad forms of Otherisation toward different minority communities) is its most potent instrument of subversion, designed to undermine Western democracies from within by fracturing societies and turning people against each other.
The long-term objective of the Alt Reich’s most influential backers is the establishment of a network of fascist regimes subordinating people to the rule of techno-capital.
This article is an edited extract from Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy Democracy from Within by Nafeez Ahmed, published by Byline Books and available exclusively for pre-order here. Ships in time for Christmas.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is a renowned systems theorist, change strategist and award-winning investigative journalist, formerly of The Guardian and VICE, who 15 years ago predicted the meteoric rise of the far-right across the West. A bestselling author of seven books including A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, he is Byline Times' Special Investigations Reporter At Large.
His work has been officially used by the 9/11 Commission, the London bombings coroner's inquest and cited in the Congressional Record, as well as in the UK House of Commons and House of Lords - including in multiple parliamentary select committee inquiries. He is founding Executive Director of the System Shift Lab and Director of the Futures Lab at Unitas Communications where he has advised several UN agencies, the US and British governments, and several governments in the Global South. He has twice been featured in the Evening Standard's list of the top 1000 most influential Londoners.
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