The Three Branches of the reactionary revolution

The Man Who Stole America, Chapter Five

The Three Branches of the reactionary revolution

(The Man Who Stole America, Chapter Five)

Emanuel Pastreich

So many of my friends and associates expressed to me their shock and disbelief that suddenly Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the first suffering from early dementia with no qualifications in politics and no understanding of policy, and the second a wealthy speculator without any formal role in government, or formal qualifications, seized control of the department of the treasury, are firing qualified government officials left and right, and treat the entire federal government as their personal possession. They seem to feel that they can just sell off parts of the federal government to their friends in IT, or in private equity, as they see fit. The link to the constitution has been taken down from the White House website in a profoundly symbolic action.

Of course, this news political reality was a shock for many, most certainly, and forms a political, economic and above all cultural earthquake for the United States. Suddenly the entire government was reshaped in a period of weeks and months and there is no meaningful resistance to be found. For people like myself, however, who have spent time in Washington DC, have friends in the federal government, there is nothing at all surprising about this course of events.

The analogy of the earthquake is quite helpful for understanding this phenomenon. Keep in mind that although the earthquake lasts for a minute, or less, it can permanently alter the landscape and can dramatically change lives. At the same time, the tremendous pressures that build up beneath the surface of the earth, invisible to everyone, increase and increase for hundreds of years. The sudden earthquake is only sudden for the ignorant humans who roam on the surface and not all that sudden if you could see beneath the surface.

The Trump and Musk earthquake came out of the blue, and shocked many who thought that perhaps Trump might fight the “deep state” rather than destroy the only part of the government that works and prop up the military and intelligence.

But the shifts beneath the surface in the United States whereby the function of government was outsourced to private consulting firms, military contractors, not professors or experts on the staff of congressmen, started to make policy, and the government itself was made dependent on contractors for every single task so that there was no longer a federal government that was detached from the profit-seeking consulting firms that fill up Washington DC, those shifts took place over more than thirty years.

I was living in the Washington DC area from 2005 to 2007 and I watched hundreds of fancy buildings for security consulting firms and private intelligence outfits go up, and people get rich from these private efforts.

That trend so weakened the government that Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and more importantly the billionaires who back them but remain in the shadows, felt that at last the time had come to establish a complete dictatorship in government wherein the constitution linking government to citizens was tossed in the garbage and serving the needs of private equity and investment could be made the primary function of government.

The tremendous pressures that built up in Washington DC, under Republican and Democratic administrations, through economic ups and downs, pressures to eliminate all institutions that support interactions between government and citizens and that have a function other than generating profit, reached a peak. The safeguards of a transparent republic, that is to say 1) journalism that is free to relate the truth, 2) education and research that is dedicated to ethical concerns and the accurate description of reality, 3) government that is concerned with the rule of law and protecting the rights of individuals against the rich and powerful, and other public institutions from libraries and museums, universities and research centers, all these institutions were slowly transformed into profit-making organizations and those who did not support the rule of Wall Street were forced out.

Of course, there were still some decent people in government, in think tanks, on the staffs of politicians, but they were good in their free time—their main work had become to generate profit in one way or another.

When the 2024 election came, there was still a façade of a democratic process, and some time-honored traditions like voting were continued like some ancient ritual from the distant past, but in which the actual institutions of government, journalism, publishing, research and teaching, institutions that are made up of men and women who work hard as civil servants, diplomats, professors, researchers, lawyers and doctors, there had been such a profound transformation that it seemed entirely local to Musk and Trump to make the system of generating profit for multinational corporations more “efficient” through a “Department of Government Efficiency” which was not a part of government at all but a private consulting firm.

There was no opposition to this new tyranny of the rich because most of the government organizations for the regulation of business and the prevention of corruption had been completely eaten away by maggots, their functions outsourced to for-profit companies. There was a little opposition in the media from a few prominent Democrats, but they could not state how illegal the process was because they were dependent on funding for their elections from the same companies backing Trump. Politics had become a puppet show.

So, it was no surprise when in January of 2025, when Donald Trump was sworn in as president, promising to carry out a complete takeover of the government in clear violation of the constitution and of multiple federal laws, that there was hardly a whimper from the Democrats or from other public intellectuals. The vast majority of famous people suggested this was just a bit of bad policy, rather than the literal coup d’etat that it obviously was. There were efforts to use the federal court system to slowly resist Trump’s destruction of the federal government, but most Democrats already knew that these efforts were futile and would be overturned by higher courts, including the Supreme Court, which were populated by Trump appointees, and Trump sympathizers. There was no attempt to organize a resistance that was up to the assault being waged by Trump on the entire system.

All of the voices of opposition that are actually heard in the media are part of that rotten system. The façade of a functional United States that upholds the rule of law and stands for human rights, a public relations program that has effectively misled most for the last 30 years, had finally fallen.

The rule of law for Trump and his associates is whatever you can get away with. The rule of law in the United States had been largely undermined by the Patriot Act of 2001 which permitted the government to spy on citizens at will, and to create concentration camps like Guantanamo Bay where people could be locked up and tortured for years without any accountability. Regulations on banks such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that separated commercial banking from investment banking was ended and a new form of equity, consulting, intelligence, and IT firms like Blackrock and Black Stone emerged that used their immense financial and political power to work outside of the legal system entirely.

So also, the Supreme Court, packed with pro-business judges, ruled in 2010 in the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that it was fine for multinational corporations and millionaires to spend unlimited amounts of money promoting politicians granted that they did it through “political action committees” (organizations that function like a campaign office but do not actually report to the candidate).

The nature of government was slowly changed and that change offered an opening the door for revolutionary transformation under Trump. Policy after the Bush administration was formulated lobbyists, consulting firms, and lawyers who worked for corporations. The civil servants who had previously handled much of the formulation and implementation of law with some objectivity and commitment to long-term planning were removed as part of cost saving efforts.

The functions of government were outsourced to private companies to such a degree that government could no longer function independently, or conduct any investigations of corruption in banks and corporations. The remaining bureaucrats increasingly oversaw budgets and doled out money to companies—no longer having their own staff.

In recent years, the military and police have their functions outsourced to private security concerns, a trend that has become extreme under the Trump administration.

Although journalism is not a part of government, in fact the control of information immediately impacts the function of government since public opinion, including that of politicians and bureaucrats, is determined by newspapers and television.

The push of multinational corporations has been to consolidate the ownership of newspapers and television stations in the United States and reduce the range of opinions expressed and the possibility for alternative policies. At present, the vast majority of news is controlled by just six multinational corporations: New Corp, Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, Viacom, and Sony. They generate profits for shareholders and giving the truth to the people is not a priority. Many local newspapers and radio stations have been purposely bankrupted, driven out of business, as part of this plan to dumb down the American people.

Finally, the assault on universities and research institutes that support a functional government has had a devastating impact. Universities have policy made by investment banks and wealthy donors, increasingly billionaires, who control their endowments, and depend on grants for research that have many strings attached. Few indeed are the professors who are striving to discover the truth. Success as a professor, or researcher is determined by the number of grants one receives, and those grants are a product of conducting research that corporations like.

Now charges of antisemitism for criticizing Israel, or American policy towards Israel, have been used to end free debate on policy at universities and in the mainstream media.

We cannot detach the destruction of a functional government from a deeper decay at a cultural and spiritual level that resulted in intellectuals feeling little, or no, ethical commitment to the common good, and made it possible for them to go along with corrupt and destructive policies that intellectuals would not have tolerated in previous ages. When I talk about intellectuals, I am referring to those with specialized knowledge, and with the time and occasion, as a result of the nature of their work, to read and to think about what they read. That means lawyers, professors, government officials, engineers, computer programmers, journalists, and doctors. They have understanding of policy and the ability to express themselves effectively. In a normal political system, they would form an effective core of an opposition to the tyranny of money; yet in America over the last twenty years they found easier to drown themselves in denial, to spend their time talking about little problems, or boasting about their family vacations in Italy, and to avoid the big questions. They came to think that it was common sense, even a virtuous act, to remain silent about the most serious issues, to even mention how the United States government had ceased to work for the people, was no longer administered by intellectuals whose role it was to stand with the people against the powerful.

There was no real opposition left anywhere in Washington DC when Donald Trump and his coterie of billionaires arrived in January, 2025. They came with a sledge hammer to demolish government and a detailed plan that had been prepared at the Heritage Foundation by the team at the Project 2025 that told exactly what had to be done to destroy a functional government and leave only military and police force that served the rich and powerful. There was no plan like that in place to oppose this assault. In reality, all the policy leaders who could have organized a real response had been driven out of Washington decades before when cultivating close relations with the rich became an absolute condition for any role in policy.

The Three Demolition Teams

There were three teams who were set loose to destroy the federal government, take control of the entire money system, and impose an inflexible and irresistible ideological straightjacket on American society under the banner of “America First.” Although the general goals of the three teams of demolition artists were similar, they worked separately and on occasion they served different masters.

The first team was the Project 2025 team, under the leadership of Heritage Foundation’s political genius Russell Vought, who was installed as manager of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) after writing the Project 2025 manual for destroying representative government and eliminating intellectuals from the government and replacing them with political appointees loyal to the president.

The second team is the immigration threat team under the leadership of Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor. Miller is the most politically effective and ruthless of Trump’s team of administrators (as opposed to independently wealthy individuals) and has led the drive to stir up vague and overwhelming fear of dangerous invasions of immigrants on the one hand, while working with white-nationalist and Christian nationalist political groups, and also coordinating the rapid integration of the military, Homeland Security and the FBI, ICE and other immigration authorities, and state police and prison authorities into a teams that is personally loyal to President Trump (or whoever will be the future president) and able to employ deadly force, or arrest and imprisonment by unaccountable private security firms of anyone who gets in the war of the executive branch.

The third team is the DOGE team led by Elon Musk that promoted the takeover of the federal government by IT firms using a call for the rapid implementation of AI as a sledgehammer to destroy most of the existing government. The figurehead of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) was Elon Musk, the most narcissistic and attention-grabbing person who represented a larger group of IT billionaires and private equity firms. DOGE was purposely created as an ambiguous entity that further blurs the boundaries between government and corporations. Federal workers are forced to accept the dictates of young hackers and other unqualified apprentices of Musk as a means of discouraging then and getting them to rapidly retire and leave government service permanently. DOGE obtained overwhelming authority because of the ideological collapse of the shared values that brought together diverse groups in Washington previously. DOGE’s role was to destroy all cohesion among government officials so that they cannot form an effective resistance and to take over the computer systems, cloud servers, payment systems, and the creation of and use of money in the United States, both the dollar itself through the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department and a variety of crypto and digital currencies that are being pushed by the Trump administration.

Musk left after he had done the greatest damage to the federal government and the media tried to make it seem as if the entire stunt was over, and had been entirely about Musk, rather than about getting rid of the federal government.

Ultimately, DOGE set the stage for the replacement of all government with unaccountable AI in rapid succession. Although Musk was the face of the DOGE team, appearing on television with a chainsaw in a comic manner, it was Peter Thiel, and especially his company Palantir, that have the greatest impact off stage, working to destroy all aspects of government not related to security and to consolidate all security, from local police, to immigration and the Department of Defense, under one command, and link that one command to his company Palantir.

The Trump administration threatened criminal prosecution against state officials, NGOs, or private citizens who take lawful steps to protect or advise those targeted by his orders. Trump is carrying out a purge of all in federal agencies who are judged insufficiently loyal to Trump, and a push to replace career government officials with either political appointees, or outsource their functions to private companies, and even better, to AI applications.

Musk’s main tool was OPM (Office of Personnel Management) which is run by Amanda Scales a former employee of Musk Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

Musk had a small group of young men who work for him who were given illegal access to central government computers: Edward Coristine, Akash Bobba, Gavin Kliger, Ethan Shaotran, Luke Farritor, and Marco Elez. Musk used the same approach he followed in the takeover Twitter whereby a fake claim to be defending freedom of expression was used to create confusion as employees were fired at the will of the new CEO and an absolute dictatorship was established. The result, in the case of Twitter (rebranded as X) is a propaganda machine that promotes Elon Musk and Donald Trump, granted it still gives a little space for opposing voices.

The philosophy behind this radical remaking of government can be traced back to the right-wing thinker Curtis Yarvin who advocates for the end of constitutional democracy and the administration of the entire world by multinational corporations, starting with IT. Yarvin’s book Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century proposes that nation states be replaced by “sovereign joint-stock republics” that use cryptographic governance (AI administration and crypto currencies” as a way to run the world with greater efficiency like Disneyland, with clean streets and no crime because the entire world is run by invincible robot and drone armies that enforce world peace.

The Project 2025 Team

In the first week of the administration, like the first seven days of the universe as described in Genesis, Donald Trump “created heaven and earth” using executive orders.

But the destruction of the Federal Government, and with it much of the state governments and civil society, took much longer than seven days. The executive orders had been prepared months in advance, far before Trump’s election. In fact, the conservatives had assumed all along that in the unlikely case that the Democrats somehow managed to retain the presidency, that they would challenge the election at every level and manage to take the executive anyway. There really was no plan in the Trump-occupied Republican Party to permit a Democratic victory.

Although the actual executive orders for the Trump administration were drafted in secret so that they could be released in rapid fire form in the first week, and first month, their basic content and import was no secret. The Heritage Foundation had launched a massive project to prepare for the takeover of the executive branch and the complete transformation of the government in 2022 under the leadership of Russell Vought, one of the most devious and intelligent members of the Trump team.

The leader of the Project 2025 operation Russell Vought is a Christian Nationalist who expressed extreme hostility to all minorities, and to women, and has worked systematically in the Heritage Foundation to create a 900 page plan for the complete restructuring of the federal government and to create lists of some 10,000 or more Trump loyalists who can be quickly installed in the federal government to replace career bureaucrats and thereby very rapidly create an institution that serves the super-rich while upholding a militant Christian ideology. His appointment as director of the Office of Management and Budget allows him to destroy the government from within, aiming to eliminate capable bureaucrats, discourage or frighten those who remain, and replace the rest with Trump loyalists or AI.

Project 2025 is engineered to draft a blueprint for the federal government, and it is the equivalent of a constitutional convention, but it is not given that name so as to understate its significant. The mainstream media, whether the New York Times, or CNN, as intentionally suggested that the massive restructuring of the federal government through the elimination of all expertise and destruction of the Department of Education, of social services, of safety and anti-corruption agencies, and the elimination of scientists and of funding for scientific research is just politics as usual. This understatement, and the decision to label these changes as “conservative,” is profoundly misleading. “Project 2025” is a manual for running the federal government like a Fortune 500 corporation, for the profit of corporations and no concern for the rights of citizens. The decision to eliminate the Constitution from the webpage of the White House for the first time was part of this move which is revolutionary, not conservative.

Project 2025 ignores much of the constitution to present a “unitary executive theory” for the federal government wherein the executive branch is under the complete control of the U.S. president and Congress has a minimal role, and the judiciary is under the control of the president.

Following the strategy for overcoming resistance from ethical intellectuals in the government, as well as rival factions of political players, that was developed by vice president Richard Cheney in 2001 (when a similar war within government was waged) large sections of the government are to be privatized, given over to corporations. Jobs for federal civil service workers who are protected from the political whims of the president are being brutally eliminated. In many cases the forced dismissals of government officials are illegal and unconstitutional, but the Trump administration has taken full control of the mechanisms of financial power and the threat of force, leaving the opposition to turn to judges to block individual policies for the moment—with little prospect for an improvement in policy.

Under normal circumstances, such an action would be impossible. Tens of thousands of highly educated government officials would use the law, regulations, and powerful ethical arguments to fight back. The problem is that when Trump says that he is battling an oversized, unaccountable, corrupt federal government he is speaking truth. The federal government, although it serves a vital function, has become incredibly corrupt, especially in security in military affairs, but in health, and even in education as well—serving corporations and banks rather than citizens, and ignoring constitutional mandates.

Project 2025 is not about reducing the power of government, which is what many who consider themselves conservatives desire, although it is misinterpreted in that manner frequently. Rather it is about shifting the nature of power for the government away from education, research, the health and welfare of citizens, and elaborate systems that assure a balance of power within the government itself, and between the government and civil society, and towards massive buildup of the military, of the police and immigration authorities, and other government institutions with the power to compel (even as those institutions are increasingly run by private industry, but still retain the authority of the United States government).

The entire “deep state” narrative that was promoted among citizens by the forces who were presenting to citizens Trump as a savior figure was used to justify the “reforms” of Project 2025, but the project and its funder Heritage Foundation are products of the deep corruption of the deep state in every respect. If there was a difference between the deep state of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, it was the result of which multinational corporations supported each party. Republicans received more support from coal and gas interests, military contractors, real estate speculators, derivative traders, and directly from billionaires. Democrats got more money from entertainment and media, investment banks, IT and communications companies (although that shifted in the course of the campaign), and Fortune 500 firms who wished to cultivate a tolerant and inclusive image.

A radical shift in ideology is central to Project 2025 and the revolution being carried out by Vought. The political ideology of the United States started with the radical experiment of a democratic constitutional republic that recognized no king or nobility and in which citizens were expected to participate in government through the election of officials. Religion was explicitly excluded from governance and clear distinction made between church and state so as to avoid the chaos of the religious wars in Europe of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The civil war of 1860-1865 ended the cruel institution of slavery and suggested that all literally all people, not just the highly educated and landed, should have equal rights. The rise of an industrial society and the establishment of a complex civil service system from the 1870s established a more inclusive society following Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” The New Deal of the 1930s introduced ideas of social justice and social welfare wherein the government would be responsible for helping citizens—in part inspired by the Soviet Union’s experiments in the 1920s and the European states that adopted socialist policies in the 1930s. The Cold War of the 1950s in which the Soviet Union openly challenged the contradictions in American policy concerning race and the unfair treatment of working people and thus forced a response from the United States that created more inclusive policies on public education and healthcare and that used the authority of the federal government to promote equality, transparency and international law—granted such effort were imperfect.

There were massive contradictions in American policy, and much hypocrisy. And yet the ideal of the rule of law, of scientific inquiry, of social justice, of creating a society in which any man or woman could stand up against the rich and powerful using the truth and an appeal to justice, and the Constitution, was essential to the American system.

Trump’s critiques of welfare, education, and centralized government policy is not without foundations, but Trump is not trying to fix anything here, but to break it even further.

Big government in the United States has encouraged passivity and lack of self-sufficiency among the citizens and government has become slow and inefficient—largely because it no longer is an appealing career choice and there is little spirit of public service now.

That transformation of the federal government, however, was not a product of bureaucrats, but was a product of the anti-civil service and anti-intellectual agendas promoted by corporations and their lobbyists who wished to undermine the ability of local communities to support themselves.

The flurry of executive orders given out by Trump as the actualization of the strategy outlined in Project 2025 is an ideological Operation Barbarossa that is intended to destroy by shock and awe to destroy the civil service, the constitutional system, to marginalize intellectuals, as well as the universities, research institutes, NGOs and newspapers that employ them. The intended result is that there will not be any alternative information available to Americans. The funding of government is shifted almost exclusively to the military, police, immigration and prisons, and away from all services that might support citizens who could resist.

The Trump administration is not simply undoing the counterproductive and hypocritical “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies that were taken to the extreme by the Biden administration (as part of another strategy to create division that was organized by the rich and powerful by pushing agendas for the promotion of transexual ideology designed to confuse working people and split them up). Such a move would be welcome. Rather the Trump administration is trying to undo all efforts to combat sexism and racism in the government, going back to the violent racist policies undertaken by Woodrow Wilson.

Whether it was Secretary of Defense Hegseth ordering photographs of Japanese Americans taken off of the webpage of the Department of Defense, or the end of all records of the battle of African Americans for justice over the last two hundred years from virtually all places in government, he was explicitly engaged in counterrevolution.

The separation of church and state has been critical to American ideology from the founding in 1776. The founders of the United States interpreted the Greek and Roman traditions of political philosophy for the current day and created a political realm in which religion was not used as the justification for policy, but rather a general concept of the rights of men based on natural law. They wanted to avoid the bloody religious wars between Catholics and protestants that devastated Europe in the 17^th century and that unique move to separate church and state made America a beacon of hope for many around the world over the last two hundred years.

But Project 2025 makes the enforcement of Christian values, defined in the narrowest sense, critical to the restoration of a functional government. They wish to establish a state religion which is not simply Christianity, but a narrowly defined ideology.

The ideological core for the Christian nationalism that Trump supporters wish to employ to replace both the constitutional republic established by Constitution of 1787, and expanded by liberalism and internationalism of the New Deal, is the religious ideology best known as New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). This powerful rigid religious teaching is designed for rapid indoctrination and the formation of the American equivalent of Mujahideen. NAR was critical to organizing large numbers of Trump followers in 2016.

New Apostolic Reformation establishes a mandate based on an apocalyptic millenarianism interpretation of Christianity that demands militant activism in the political realm by its members. The decay of society in the years before the return of Jesus Christ demands political activism and justifies any actions taken against those perceived as evil.

The combination of magical thinking, the promotion of political leaders as messianic saviors, and the formation of social groups that serve leaders with military obedience defines how NAR operates. It draws on diverse roots in Pentecostalism and evangelicalism, serving as an effective organizational tool for motivating and leading people. The followers of NAR and similar Christian ideologies that are encouraged by top leaders in the Trump administration, see their role as preparing for a ruthless form of spiritual warfare in which all political opponents are assumed to be in league with the devil, and in which complete domination of society by Christian teachings, as dispensed by NAR, is essential for the salvation of the United States, in league with Israel.

The deceased American theologian C. Peter Wagner wrote the core documents that define the New Apostolic Reformation movement creating a powerful set of texts for political organization which are virtually unknown to most intellectuals who just see “stupid people” wearing MAGA red hats. Wagner started organizing nationally to establish a disciplined political movement that views American politics as the proper field of action, and sees only the decadence and evil of the “end times” before the imminent return of Jesus in all institutions of the United States. No compromise with opponents is possible in this ideological world. In that respect, this ideology is fundamentally different from the conservative politics of Reagan and Bush.

The NAR’s played a major role in the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president, embracing him in spite of his complete lack of piety or religious devotion in his life of gambling, drinking, and debauchery. That was possible because NAR promotes a messianic Christian nationalist ideology that relies on messianic figures who have superman qualities, and who therefore cannot be judged by the standards of ordinary mortals. This aspect of NAR’s Christian ideology had tremendous value for the billionaires behind Trump who wish to use Christianity to motivate working class Americans to follow the messiahs that they create, but who do not want any of the egalitarian, anti-establishment, and anti-imperialist thinking that can be found in teachings of Jesus to influence the political movement they are preparing.

A major strategy employed to demonstrate to the public the new political power of these militant Christian groups that support Trump (and that is not limited to NAR) is the radical prohibition of abortion in states across the United States. Abortion is being prohibited even in cases of rape and danger to the life of the mother, and the imposition of severe limitations on the availability of contraception are part of the policies. Women who cross the border to other states for abortions are charged with criminal actions and even women who suffer miscarriages are being charged by police. The restrictions imposed on abortion are so severe, so ridiculous that they are out of touch with received opinion in America. Most Americans who oppose abortion for religious reasons find these extreme policies that endanger the lives of women to be offensive.

And yet the Trump administration and the Republican Party go forward with these extreme anti-abortion policies anyway. The drive to end abortion, and to restrict women’s rights to seek medical care and make decisions about their own bodies, is not an effort to appeal to the belief systems of conservative

Christians opposed to abortion, but rather a strategy to establish a new political culture, supported by a religious ideology, in which the values of citizens are imposed from above, and not derived through a rational discourse. Moreover, the bodies and the medical treatment of citizens is determined by laws passed in unconstitutional manner by a tiny minority.

The naïve assumption among many American intellectuals is that a tiny religious faction cannot take over the entire United States with all its complexity and diversity. But we are looking at an example of the crows coming home to roost. The very same strategies used by the United States to promote religious extremism through artificial means in Afghanistan so as to undermine the Soviet Union are now being employed domestically to create a religious group of extremists that covers over the political seizure of power by financial interests.

If anything, the Trump administration is benchmarking Argentina and Israel these days. The seizure of foreign students and other people with visas to study in the United States for supposed anti-Israeli statements (often without ever being formally charged), and the creation of precedents for those arrested in the United States with US citizenship to be sent to Guantanamo Bay or to prisons in El Salvador has no political precedent at all.

Rather it seems that the Trump administration is creating precedents to seize anyone opposing government policy and deport them to other countries without any accountability. In the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student studying at Tufts University, she was arrested by private military contractors who showed no identification and made no formal charges, and then illegally kidnapped and transported to Louisiana.

That action served to promote the vision behind Project 2025. Its authors assumed that they as revolutionary Republicans under Trump’s leadership would take control of the entire government and that they could exclude all groups that they identified as “leftist” or “foreign,” including conservative groups that do not agree with their methods. Attacks on foreigners with the legal right to live in the United States was essential to this strategy.

Although the stealth takeover of government institutions by forces working with IT firms, billionaires, Christian nationalists, and Israeli operatives has been going on for some time, it picked up speed after Trump’s election in 2016, and went into high gear in January, 2025 with Trump’s comeback. The general roadmap provided by Project 2025 are being used to create an all-powerful executive branch, reporting to banks and billionaires, that dominates the legislative and judicial branch which is also largely under Republican control.

The Immigration Threat Team

The domestic and international security, military, immigration, and intelligence functions of the federal government are being rapidly merged as one, using private contractors who design software, communications systems and supply databases as the catalyst; the strategy intends to pull together elements from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Defense (DoD), and various parts of the intelligence community as a single entity that reports to multinational private equity, with Palantir and Cerberus being major intermediaries. The takeover of the government, and smaller or less combative contractors is achieved through a “shock and awe” approach in which government and corporate employees are frightened and discouraged into inaction by massive firings and threats. When deeply corrupt individuals are placed in administrative positions in the government, many federal employees will simply leave altogether in disgust and make possible the complete takeover of the Federal government.

The new unaccountable entity that is being created to replace the parts of government related to security and the use of force (the other parts of government are being rapidly eliminated) will be able to engage in warfare at home and abroad without discrimination, and can use the authority of the government to label its opponents as terrorists or terrorist-sympathizers.

This team that focuses on immigrants overlaps to some degree with the members of Project 2025 which developed the original blueprint for the restructuring of the federal government. Several central figures in Project 2025 were appointed by Trump to key positions, including John Ratcliffe for the CIA, Tom Homan for ICE, and Brendan Carr for the FCC. But the team focused on the threat of dangerous criminal aliens has a different goal and an appeal beyond the Christian nationalism of Project 2025.

The primary goal of this operation is to create a frightened population, especially among whites who fear that current demographic shifts that could render them an ethnic minority and that the current take over by non-whites must be stopped at any cost.

The strategy is to declare that criminal gangs are militaries that are preparing to invade the United States, even though most of them are of very small scale and are not an immediate threat, and also to say that the immigration of desperate people to the United States is an “invasion” and that it must be responded to in a military manner. This team is not that interested in policy, or in the Congress, but rather in creating a military government using the excuse of illegal immigration, a military government that is unaccountable, can seize immigrants or citizens without any warrant or even explanation, and can that send them to concentration camps in the United States, or abroad.

Trump ordered the military’s US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to develop operational battle plans to suppress what referred to as an “invasion” of immigrants early in his administration, thereby granting the military authority with no geographic limitations within US borders.

He also directed the military and intelligence that they could use invocation of the Insurrection Act, a federal law that allows the deployment of the military in the United States to suppress civil disorder or rebellion, and the Alien Enemies Act, a federal law that allows for the seizure of foreigners within the United States, as a way to declare all foreigners as “aliens” and all “aliens” part of an “invasion”—which means a military response is appropriate. The seizure of foreigners with legitimate visas, and even American citizens, for deportation to unaccountable concentration camps in El Salvador, and also Guantanamo Bay, has shown that the intention was to create a complete dictatorship.

The Trump administration also directly deputized local police and the FBI to enforce immigration laws and deployed their forces against citizens. In Texas, these empowered groups roam around like private armies doing whatever they wish. In addition, part of the border has been made into the property of the military so that anyone crossing the border can be seized by the military without any due process.

On April 28, Trump issued an executive order “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens” that orders the merger of the military and local police, removed all legal accountability for police officers who steal or murder, and sets the stage for the creation of a private army under the personal command of Donald Trump.

Trump had deportees chained to their chairs on repatriation flights to countries like Colombia and Brazil for no purpose other than brutalization of “enemy combatants” such as was done in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of those people seized and deported had committed no crime, and many possessed the visas required to work in the United States. There were several examples of citizens who were illegally seized.

Moreover, the primary private army established by the Trump administration, ICE, arrested a state judge Hannah Dugan in Wisconsin who refused to hand over an immigrant to the private contractors posing as representatives of the government who tried to seize him. ICE then arrested the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Ras Baraka when he tried to question their activities at their facility. In both cases, private firms working on contract for the Trump administration were empowered to arrest actual government employees who were following the constitution.

The result of these actions is that the Department of Defense (combined with other agencies) is empowered now to seize anyone in the United States and send them to the torture chambers of El Salvador, or of Guantanamo Bay if the White House gives the word. Trump has made it clear that he will extend this power to include American citizens.

The combination of security, military, immigration, and intelligence, as well as the massive increase of funding for defense, was combined with a drive to dismantle all aspects of the government that serve to support the wellbeing of ordinary citizens such as the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Environmental Protection Agency, Health and Human Services, and other parts of the government that serve the citizens, or that monitor and prosecute corporations and banks for malfeasance. The government is being fashioned into a weapon to defend the rich with no accountability to citizens; no one can challenge the rule of the billionaires.

Stephen Miller the great divider

The central figure in the drive to make foreigners the alien threat within is Stephen Miller, whose title – deputy chief of staff for policy – is misleading. His influence with the president and across the government is greater than any other official.

Miller survived numerous purges in the first Trump administration and rose to the position of maximum influence because he was able to quickly grasp the political direction Trump was heading and offer him carefully crafted statements, while setting down the rules in an authoritarian manner for members of the administration. He did so without appearing to be more important than Trump himself and that loyalty has been rewarded.

Miller established himself as Trump’s main speechwriter—extremely effective at creating powerful messages that grabbed attention. His role has become the backroom brain at the White House.

He embraced a reactionary politics of blind patriotism from high school that contrasted with the blasé classmates in a wealthy neighborhood. He attacked the introduction of cultures that he viewed as “minority” and longed for a more traditional America. He was fascinated with American gun culture, eventually becoming a fan of National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre. Although Miller came from a highly educated wealthy Jewish family in California that embraced liberal values, but he was excited by a white supremist gun culture. He would become a critical figure because he had the cultural sophistication, and the writing skills of a upper-middle class liberal, but embraced an entirely different ideology. He could serve as a bridge between Jewish political elements and conservative white groups who were deeply antisemitic. The combination of Jewish groups with white nationalists who had been deeply antisemitic, as well as the cooperation between private equity and Christian fundamentalist churches, are the two strange power structures that allow the Trump administration to function.

The ideology behind the anti-immigrant group was developed by Samuel Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist journal American Renaissance president the New Century Foundation which advocates a massive ethnic cleansing of the United States. Although Taylor is not involved in the concrete formulation of policy like Miller, his book White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21^st Century profoundly influenced the policies of the Trump administration, especially the move to give white Americans a stronger form of citizenship and to push for new policies that allow an empowered state to strip those judged not to be American of citizenship.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also is part of this anti-immigrant, white supremist group. In fact, because Hegseth has no experience in administration or policy, and became famous as a Fox News personality, he has delegated all administrative functions to Steven Feinberg, a finance master of the universe focused on making money from war, and spends his time as a TV personality inspiring white nationalists and Christian Zionists within the military to join an army within the military that is intent on taking complete control. Hegseth’s anti-foreigner rhetoric is focused on Chinese, and Asians in general, as part of a push within the military to designate China at an existential military and civilizational threat; at the same time, he works closely with Miller to integrate police, immigration, military and intelligence as a single private army using the ideology of white nationalism and Christian fundamentalism.

Hegseth, like Vice President JD Vance, is very visible in the popular media as a personality who has been carefully marketed as an ordinary American dedicated to American values. He was created through massive investments by extremely wealthy individuals.

Hegseth upholds a “warrior ethos” of members of the military, and the police, which means specifically that soldiers should be ruthless, completely unaccountable, and that America must embrace a culture of violence that embraces military glory.

Hegseth’s book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men who keep us Free” defends soldiers who engaged in war crimes and torture program, holding up an image of the ruthless soldier as the best of American culture. He has become famous for defending the military and police who engage in war crimes.

His book “American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free” describes a Christian white nationalist vision for America that is engaged in a battle of good and evil, like the Christian crusades, against the evil civilizations of Islam and China. The book is not about strategy or a geopolitical analysis, but rather an effort to redirect anger at the rich and powerful who are exploiting working Americans towards an alien power far away that is planning to invade and take over the United States.

As soon as Hegseth became secretary of State, he engaged in a ruthless purging of all military officers in positions of authority who were not personally loyal to Donald Trump, and the termination of DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) programs. Although some welcomed his ending of DEI because this policy had been politically abused to promote people loyal to the Democratic Party who were not qualified, ultimately it became clear that all non-whites are to be marginalized and a racist, segregationist culture is to be reestablished in the United States military.

The most symbolic action of Hegseth was his dismissal of Air Force general Charles Q. Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top position in the military. Hegseth gave no reason for the dismissal and conducted it in a manner that was blatantly unconstitutional. Brown is African American and the message was clear for all: the Trump administration is not trying to stop using race and gender as a political tool, but rather dedicated to creating an explicitly racist culture in the government. Brown was replaced with General Dan Caine, a man unqualified for the position who needed special permission from congress. Caine is famous for his work in special forces, black operations, and specifically special access programs (SAP) in which military assets are used without constitutional authorization to attack citizens.

It was integration of the military by President Harry Truman that started the serious end of segregation in American society. Hegseth and his backers are attempting the reverse. The effort to create a white dominated society, starting with the military, is paralleled by the demotion of women in the government, and increasing campaigns to remove women from positions of authority and limit their social role. The war on abortion is a major part of this effort. The cruel and dangerous policies towards women, including making abortion illegal even for victims of rape, or women whose lives are endangered by a pregnancy, is not driven by the Christian groups who opposed abortion for reasons of belief. No, this campaign is meant as a means to undermine the social status of women in order to create a more submissive and oppressive society.