Project 2025: What Europeans should know
Offhand pronouncements about giving fertile people more voting power may seem abstract. But the 900-page manifesto spelling out plans for Trump's second term is very detailed.
There has been much attention paid over the past week to the ideas of JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate chosen at the Republican National Convention three weeks ago, when it comes to women and families. This attention only increased once a woman became the Democrat’s presumptive nominee for president, with Vance’s previous comments coming under the spotlight. One clip in particular, where he suggests that people without children shouldn’t be eligible for high political office (referring to them as “childless cat ladies”) has done the rounds. Enacting new restrictions on what women can do, and coercing them into having children, has come up again and again in Vance’s writing and TV appearances expounding his “pro-natalist” ideology over the years. Not only has he said that he wants a national abortion ban with no exemption for rape and incest, he’s also opposed no-fault divorce and said that women should stay in their marriages, even if their husbands are violent, for the sake of the children. He’s also said that people with children should have more voting power in elections than the childless.
These types of Handmaids-Tale-Adjacent remarks can seem so outlandish that Europeans, always wanting to shut their eyes to dark developments in America, seem to have an instinct right now to dismiss this as empty rhetoric. “He could never actually implement that into law” I’ve been told by someone here in Brussels this week. “And anyway, he would only be Vice President”. But while Vance’s rhetoric is vague, the Project 2025 manifesto that both he and Trump are deeply connected with is not. It spells out in excruciating detail how Trump could radically change the United States starting on day one - a day on which Trump has promised to be a dictator. Though the Trump campaign is now desperately trying to distance themselves from this document, their efforts look increasingly absurd. Not only are its authors former members of Trump’s own administration, Vance himself wrote the introduction to the manifesto’s book version.