Against All Enemies
The Blame, Revenge and Fictions of Project 2025
Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.
~ Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
If you belong to the myeloma community and keep up with existing advocacy organizations, you may have noticed only one has commented on the implications of Trump administration actions. Indeed, if you go back to last summer, when the far rightwing think tank Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document became known to most Americans, they have expressed nothing.
To be charitable, they might be using the fact that the word “cancer” can’t be found in Project 2025 as their excuse. After all, it’s not even in the footnotes. Considering the events of the past six weeks, however, it’s still a poor excuse because omission of the word speaks rhetorical volumes what about Project 2025 and the Trump administration should mean to disease communities everywhere.
And I can’t stress this enough: Cancer is not an afterthought of this administration, it is not a thought at all.
Nothing. Nada. Nichts. Rien. Niente. Or, to make it more comprehensible to the powers behind the hoped-for crown, Ничего.
You’d think organizations claiming to educate and advocate in the interests of their constituents would understand these implications and publicize them. But you’d be wrong.
Remember Project 2025? If not, its creators hope you won’t. Unless you know the secret handshake. Which makes the silence of myeloma and other cancer organizations all the more ominous.
With the confirmation of its “principal author,” Russell Vought, as Director of Office and Management and Budget (OMB), the tepid attempts to distance the Trump campaign from Project 2025 have been revealed as outright lies. Not that the disingenuous political Kabuki was hard to decipher.
Project 2025 responds to a rare critique from the political Right about the first Trump administration. Conceived to avoid chaos and missed “opportunities,” its purpose is to discipline and convey a strong sense of inevitable power. Under Vought’s leadership, the creators of Project 2025 had almost four years to brood, plan, and work on it. Its authors boldly[1] call it the “Playbook.”
Since then, so-called issues like renaming the Gulf of Mexico, creation of a mythical Gaz-a-Lago, and blaming anything and everything on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies are meant to distract from its agenda. Tragically, the human cost is widespread, not just in the United States.
According to a TIME magazine report just days into the new administration “nearly two-thirds of the executive actions Trump has issued so far mirror or partially mirror proposals from [Project 2025], ranging from sweeping deregulation measures to aggressive immigration reform.”
With a self-imposed 180-day deadline, expect activity to remain frantic at least through July 20, 2025.[2]“Promises made, promises kept” is, for them, not only a call to arms, it’s a declaration of using any means necessary to achieve unconditional victory. Alignment is its mantra.[3]
A word-for-word analysis would run into many thousands of pages to decode and correct this 887 page rant. But it’s worth considering Project 2025’s opening pages and subtitle, The Conservative Promise, which are actually “Four Promises.”[4]
Each promise is a questionable premise its authors accept as doctrinal fact. Project 2025 permeates every corner of the executive branch to empower “the next conservative President [to] champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism.” With language rooted in Senator Joe McCarthy’s rhetoric from the 1940s-50s to invent a mythical “Red” cadre within the federal government, Project 2025 defines socialism with meaningless, inflammatory rhetoric of “Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, [or] whatever name it chooses.”
Project 2025’s pièce de résistance can be found a few sentences later:
Nighttime satellite images of the Korean peninsula famously show the free-market South lit up, with homes, businesses, and cities electrified from coast to coast. By contrast, Communist North Korea is almost completely dark, except for the small dot of the capital city, Pyongyang, where a psychotic dictator and his cronies live. The same phenomenon is on display in the infuriating fact that four of the six richest counties in the United States are suburbs of Washington, D.C.—a city infamous for its lack of native productive industries.
Get it? American government is the equivalent of North Korea; Washington, DC is no better than Pyongyang. The irony escapes them, of course. Virtually every author of Project 2025 is Washington, DC region careerist. Like Vought, who was Trump’s OMB director the first time around, many have worked for Republican administrations. When out of power, they cash in at party-linked think tanks, trade organizations, and as lobbyists for corporate interests.
They are stark examples of what the comic-strip character Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Since they equate Washington with Pyongyang, is it any wonder that they see Russia as role model for this country? I’ll have more thoughts on that in the coming month.
The framing of the first goal alone conveys a certain creepiness:
In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones…
The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives—and the life of the nation—is the family.”
Note Project 2025’s intentional use of font distinctions for “entire…natural…unnatural…real people…community…government.” This is a dog whistle, a barely-veiled nod to QAnon[5] conspiracisms as well as trans- and homophobia.
For those who live outside the U.S. and may not keep up closely with American politics, this is not a joke. It is an actual, distinct constituency in today’s Republican Party. It strays as far as possible from the ideals expressed in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, the first-ever Republican president, in the Gettysburg Address. For the soldiers tasked to implement Project 2025, government is not “of the people, by the people, for the people, [that] shall not perish from the earth.” Instead, it is wrapped up in their definition of “the other,” a threat to “real people” to “restor[e] popular sovereignty,” reasoning
…the task of reattaching the federal government’s constitutional and democratic tethers calls to mind Ronald Reagan’s observation that “there are no easy answers, but there are simple answers.”
Project 2025’s authors seem not to know the difference between the definitions of “simple” and simplistic. In any event, radical plans have been on daily display since January 20, 2025. Arbitrary firing of tens of thousands of federal employees, many in the name of DEI confirm this.
Legal, deliberate decisions made by publicly elected members of Congress that have taken years to implement are being replaced with by an unaccountable, anonymously staffed extra-governmental agency. Reports of 19-25 year-olds with limited life experiences making these decisions are really part of an elaborate crypto currency branding exercise meant to benefit the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk.
A recent New York Times story confirmed that Musk has little-to-no understanding of how constitutional government works. He is using his presidentially-mandated authority to take over the reins of governing without congressional or judicial accountability. Project 2025’s Orwellian, Steve Bannon-fabricated slur “administrative state” is the guiding light for this reckless zeal, not the Constitution or the 238 years of experience informing it.
Skipping ahead to Project 2025’s 54 pages[6] on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), we find one of its very few factual statements (I’m giving them a benefit of a doubt, it was the only one I could find):
For good or ill, HHS activities personally impact the lives of more Americans than do those of any other federal agency.
From there it goes rapidly downhill, listing grievances, blame-casting, and creating nonexistent issues to be “solved” with dubious, simplistic assumptions. Starting by framing “Five Goals,”[7] they must be read in the context of “Four “Promises” cited above, grouped into three general categories:
policies to “restore” the wholesomeness of “the American family” by targeting transgenderism, LBGT policies, and abortion issues (26 pages);
privatizing current federal health obligations and programs (17 pages); and
revising the historical record of the Covid-19 pandemic to fit their narrative (5 pages), much of it centered with an odd focus on Dr. Anthony Fauci and groundless insinuations that NIH scientists are corrupt profiteers.
Sprinkled in the confrontational, poorly sourced rhetoric are a few nebulous, confident statements of doing something about drug prices. What is left unsaid, the real point, is in the first sentence of the second paragraph:
As a result of HHS’s having lost its way, U.S. life expectancy, instead of returning to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic, continued to drop precipitously to levels not seen since 1996 with white populations alone losing 7 percent of their expected life span in just one year.
Use of “white populations alone” as the example betrays the real agenda of Vought and Project 2025, one that has been hammered home and meekly accepted, indeed aligned, by media, corporations, and state and local governments throughout the nation in the past six week: DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies. Revenge to fit their Covid-19 narrative is, as the Louisianans I grew up with would say, lagniappe.
Riffs on this theme can be found throughout Project 2025, seemingly closer in logic to a spoiled child’s temper tantrum than a well-reasoned policy document. There’s no hiding the fact that this is mostly about two things. First, characterizing white people as exclusive and intentional victims of federal health policy. Second, completely rewriting and ignoring the actual history of the Covid-19 pandemic for political expediency.
It's also just plain lazy. A shallow dive into actual statistics shows white males have a slightly higher death rate than Black females, but both have far higher death rates than white women. Neither, however, is as significantly high as the incidence and death rates of Black males.
With respect to the Covid-19 pandemic, I am reminded of Stalinist and North Korean posters that rub out and alter historical evidence with ideologically edited posters and “history” books. But being able to distinguish them requires some education, and other parts of Project 2025 were created to prevent this from ever happening. And those who choose to teach actual history will be muzzled and/or fired.
Consequences for issues including health care access, research, and medical professionals will only get worse. Every agency at HHS is being eviscerated to some degree. Among the targets is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which discarded a long understood principle of congressional oversight and science issues: prohibiting political interference to dictate the parameters of public health and medical research. It must be read in full and in original, lest I be accused of manipulating Project 2025’s actual words:
By statute or regulation, CDC guidance must be prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character. For example, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children “should be” masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building. Such decisions should be left to parents and medical providers. We have learned that when CDC says what people “should” do, it readily becomes a “must” backed by severe punishments, including criminal penalties. CDC should report on the risks and effectiveness of all infectious disease-mitigation measures dispassionately and leave the “should” and “must” policy calls to politically accountable parties.
The immeasurable harm of the past six weeks may take years or decades to reverse, if ever. According to one PhD recently fired from CDC’s vector-borne diseases division, the so-called process has been “very dehumanizing for everyone.” The same is true at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which, for decades, has been considered the “crown jewel” of government.
Taking the shine off that jewel is centered on calling into question the ethics and motives of scientists. Although virtually everyone affiliated with NIH is motivated by a curiosity to understand and solve diseases and disabilities across the medical spectrum.[8] Project 2025 characterizes them as grifters and profiteers, especially when it comes to everyone who did their best to end the Covid pandemic.
This suggests obvious questions: Why was Covid-19 mortality higher then? Did the botched response have anything to do with the Trump administration, sending mixed messages and trying to have it both ways – deny its severity while working frantically to develop vaccines? Remember when President Trump wondered if sticking a light up a person’s rectum might cure Covid or that a veterinary medicine was an effective treatment? Project 2025 doesn’t. It prefers blame:
In May 2022, documents…revealed that NIH Director Francis Collins, NAIAD Director Anthony Fauci, and Fauci’s Deputy Director, Clifford Lane, all received royalties from pharmaceutical companies between 2009 and 2014. Nonprofit watchdog Open the Books[9] estimates that from 2010 to 2020, third parties paid more than $350 million in royalties to NIH and its scientists, who are credited as coinventors. Most problematically, in the years when they received payments, Collins, Fauci, and Lane were NIH administrators, not researchers, with no plausible claim to be scientific co-discoverers.
Translation? “Government bureaucrats” who “controlled” our lives and supposedly “profited” from the most consequential public health threat of our times were responsible, as the opening of Project 2025 claims, for HHS “having lost its way.” Much of the blame and villainization, according to this propaganda, belongs to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci.[10] Perversely, this is now dogma for an administration responsible for leading this nation.
The slurs used against medical professionals who devote their lives to public health brings to mind a great lecture I witnessed years ago by the late Johns Hopkins’ noted prostate cancer researcher Don Coffey. He was a genuine, self-deprecating character. His distinctive accent was instilled when he was raised in a West Virginia holler. A shortish, balding man with long hair flowing down the back of his head, Coffey was easy to underestimate at first glance. On second glance, it was harder not to admire his deep intellect.
He began his lecture by showing a picture of two guppies with differing color patterns. “What in the world do two guppies have to do with cancer research?” he growled loud, extending every syllable to its limits in posing a rhetorical question about a 1980s NIH research project. “Ah’ll tell you,” he continued, “this research led to our understanding of genetic differentiation,” a concept that is now at the core of cancer research and treatment. “Do you think anyone other than NIH would fund this? Think about that the next time you hear a politician spout off about research they don’t understand.”
I’ll admit, when I first heard this talk more than 25 years ago, it took a while to sink in. Now it’s a part of my educational DNA. I feel certain that the authors of Project 2025 have no idea about that lesson. Certainly the twenty-somethings now making decisions about government functions and employees don’t. I’m fairly certain that neither Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump, or Vice President Vance do.[11]
Although only 54 of the 887 pages of are devoted to HHS, as I wrote above, the entire document touches cancer, disease, and disability issues without ever mentioning them.
One of the first actions of the first Trump administration in 2017 was to allow coal companies to “have a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams,” repealing an Obama era regulation. The newly unleashed toxic sludge would have its strongest impact in Coffey’s native West Virginia. From there it would be slowly diluted and flushed through tributaries, eventually passing New Orleans on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Knowing what we, in the myeloma community, should know about cancer incidence, here’s what I know will happen. Children and expectant mothers in West Virginia would be disproportionally impacted with disease incidence. In some – we can’t predict who, but actuarial tables can give us percentages – it would plant genetic seeds that will “blossom” into a variety of cancers years or decades from now.
The same is true of people who are exposed to train chemical accidents, of people who are exposed to the smoke and debris left behind from wildfires, of people who live near oil and chemical refineries, of people in war zones exposed to the carcinogens left behind bomb explosions, and on and on. The 833 pages of Project 2025 provide the “Playbook” for the Trump administration to direct policies that, if implemented, will exchange profits reaped today for unknown, but certain, disease that will be sown for generations to come.
At the same time, the totality of the consequences of Project 2025 will create new apartheids of health – those who can afford it will do fine, those who can’t will be on their own. Health care will become more of an exclusive privilege. Research will be dependent on possible profits and immediate needs. The idea of planning and preparing for events that may never happen is, according to current thinking guided by Project 2025, a cost, not an investment or prudent insurance.
A short essay from my college days that has lingered in my mind ever since first reading it, “What has posterity ever done for me?”[12] begins with provocative, unsettling questions.
Will mankind survive? Who knows? The question I want to put is more searching: Who cares? It is clear that most of us today do not care – or at least do not care enough. How many of us would be willing to give up some minor convenience – say, the use of aerosols – in the hope that it might extend the life of man on earth by a hundred years? Suppose we also knew with a high degree of certainty that humankind could not survive a thousand years unless we gave up our wasteful diet of meat, abandoned all pleasure driving, cut back on use of energy that was not essential to the maintenance of a bare minimum. Would we care enough for posterity to pay the price of its survival?
Applying these question to Project 2025 exposes its Achilles’ heel, one apparently shared with at least the 49.8% of Trump voters. Their political views and choices are too often determined by immediate personal experiences; what they can see, touch, own. “I heard that…” or “someone told me” is also authoritative enough. Perhaps an enlightened might consider fates of their grandchildren. Perhaps that’s not fair.
Yet the actions of the executive branch, its enablers, and supporters over the past six weeks, not to mention the past 30 years, make it difficult to reach any other conclusion. Whatever posterity they may have in mind is one grounded in a sense of exclusivity; one set of rules for “us,” a different set for “the others.” It comes down to who is included and excluded. And who has power as well as how it is excercised.
In American political and governing today, Project 2025 is the “Playbook” for future rule- and lawmaking for the foreseeable future, not the Constitution. It’s impossible to conclude otherwise based on the horrors confronting the world daily over the past six weeks. Indeed, plans are currently being made to rewrite the Constitution, replacing it with a partisan, elite world view of their choosing, much like cutting puzzle pieces to make them fit the way one wants, not to adhere to the ones that exist.
Unsurprisingly, the number of lies concocted by the second Trump administration are coming with greater speed and ferocity as compared to the first. The difference now is orchestration. The players, if they haven’t yet rehearsed, are nonetheless in line, following Tennyson’s dictum that “Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why,” leaving out the part about “to do and die.” That’s left for “them,” the “others”: the people, institutions, and contrived enemies who, according to their own words, are to blame for seemingly every national and global ill.
This administration’s conductors are expected to spread lies, nurture willful ignorance, and embody hubris with large doses of arrogance and condescension in domestic and foreign policy. They do so with a complete disregard of existing law, tradition, and decency to create a social and political cacophony of shock and awe. Not just in the United States.
A disinterested observer cannot help but be impressed by their success so far, although it’s hard for me to believe that kind of animal still exists. To be dispassionate about this reactionary revolution – whether pro or con – is impossible. A relative few will profit, most will pay. Immediate greed has no problem with imperiling billions of people, not to mention future generations in perpetuity.
Much like it is now commonly known that all cancers have a genetic cause, an oncogene, I think the political genetics of our current global catastrophe can be traced back to a self-pitying, ascendant narcissism dependent on each individual’s Weltanschauung. It is unlikely to respond any Project 2025 policy “therapeutic.” See the terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 for evidence.
As I watched the pathetic display of engaging the trap set for Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy this past week in the White House, I once again experienced the horror I felt watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11. A friend immediately wrote me that it felt much like November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In each case, it was immediately clear that unimaginable, unpredictable eras and ages were born.
The global impact of September 11 was immense. For the only time in history, Section Five of the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) – an attack on one member summoned the support of all other member nation to defend – was invoked. Global sympathy for the United States had never been as genuinely widespread since the conclusion of World War II.
Spontaneous mass demonstrations of support erupted across the globe. The French newspaper Le Monde famously declared, “Nous sommes tous américains,” which became the rallying cry “Je suis American” – “We are all Americans.” People throughout the world came together with an immediacy once though unimaginable.[13] Tragically, subsequent policies led by the Bush/Cheney administration squandered virtually all accumulated global good will.
This time, however, no terrorist attacks can be used as justification for what is yet to come. These wounds are self-inflicted.
History’s ultimate verdict of this past Friday might well be greater than those events when it considers the ramifications of the disgrace that took place in the Oval Office. History will point to Project 2025 as its source. And History will cite Russell Vought’s comments as its gospel:
We want bureaucrats to be traumatically effected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.
Mull that over in your mind a few times a day, especially with each bit of news spewing out of Washington, DC with each passing hour. And don’t forget to remind yourself that those villains include the people who have devoted their lives to treating and curing diseases like cancer.
Peruse some of the pages of Project 2025. Then little will be surprising.
Photo: Detail, Artist Unknown (Netherlandish), Emperor Heraclitus Slays the King of Persia (ca. 1485-1495), Art Institute of Chicago.
[2] While critiques of comparisons between the early days of Nazi Germany and the Trump administration seem extreme to many, it would help immensely if it stopped providing compelling examples. Project 2025 mirrors the tactics of the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltuung, the rapid alignment and coopting of governing processes with personnel and political party goals.
[3] Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem confirmed the lack of initiative and independence that is to be expected from executive department heads in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. When asked if low-level crimes like shoplifting might lead some detainees to be sent to Guantanamo Bay due to potential overcrowding at domestic detention centers, Noem responded, “You know, I don’t know what the president will decide as far as utilizing it.” Noem unconsciously confirmed that federal department and agency leaders will not have operational flexibility.
[4] Project 2025, pp 1-17, 1: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children, 2: Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people, 3: Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats, 4: Secure our God-given individual right to enjoy “the blessings of liberty.”
[5] QAnon is a movement of conspiracists who follow and believe an anonymous source named “Q” who supposedly works inside some federal agency “exposing the Deep State” that “actually controls” the United States. And to top it off, a core tenet of their conspiracism is that Democrats, especially their leaders, traffic in children because they are pedophiles who kidnap, abuse, and murder children in order to maintain a secret cabal of power. This is not made up. It is a fringe group of millions that actually believe these things and want to set up government rules to “prevent” them. Many parts of Project 2025 are meant to legitimize and placate them. (Quotations marks are mine.)
[6] Project 2025, pp. 449-502 (48 pages of narrative, 6 pages with 87 footnotes).
[7] 1. Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity, 2. Empowering Patient Choices and Provider Autonomy, 3. Promoting Stable and Flourishing Married Families, 4. Preparing for the Next Health Emergency, 5. Instituting Greater Transparency, Accountability, and Oversight.
[8] An estimated 83% of NIH funding, which is less than one percent of annual, congressionally-approved spending, is distributed to all 50 states.
[9] The “nonprofit watchdog” citied is a Substack article written by Adam Andrzejewski, “Substack Investigation: Fauci’s Royalties and the $350 Million Royalty Payment Stream HIDDEN by NIH,” May 9, 2022. Andrzejewski’s “analysis” is based on numerous out of context claims and was never peer-reviewed for accuracy.
[10] Over the past 34 years, I have had the honor of meeting hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists and staff who have served in various roles in government-supported health care and medical research. This claim is despicable and should have no place in public discourse. Fauci’s honorable record of service, as with all scientists this administrations vilifies, speak for themselves.
[11] I was a constituent of Vance when he was a U.S. senator from Ohio. Having observed him for a couple of years in office, especially in his complete lack of understanding or response to the train accident and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023, I feel confident in asserting that he has no interest in anything other than personal gain.
[12] Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry of the Human Prospect (Norton, 1975).
[13] Consider this excerpt from the prologue of Andrei Cherney’s The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour (G.P. Putnam’ Sons, 2008):
“But nowhere was there greater outpouring of humanity and emotion than in the German capital of Berlin. There 200,000 people gathered along the broad avenue leading through the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. No one was sure why so many turned out…
“One woman stood still, alone in the crowd, lost in her thoughts as families and couples marched past her. She was old and stooped. Her hair was wild and she wore a dark, heavy coat even on the warm day. She was openly sobbing.
“Two young men approached her and asked why she was crying. She seemed startled, as if roused from slumber. ‘I love Americans,’ she said quickly, in a way that was so imploring they understand that it grabbed them and shook them by their lapels. She started to go on, to say more, to explain, but before the words came out, her gaze widened and warmed, the tears replaced by an ineffable joy. Her shoulders straightened just a bit. The wrinkles seemed to flee her face.
“A distant, happy memory danced across her eyes as she looked upward, toward the sky. She began softly, in a whisper, ‘You see, I was a girl during the Airlift…’”
Well said. My problem with our current president is that he lies so much that I’m not sure about anything. Yesterday I filed my taxes and my accountant said that next year I would not have to pay taxes on my social security maybe!