Alan Zendell, July 5, 2024

If you haven’t heard of Project 2025, it’s in your interest to learn about it. The brainchild of the ultra-Conservative Heritage Foundation, it lays out a blueprint for a Trump administration whose objective is to transform America into a “Christian Democracy” using Viktor Orban’s re-making of Hungary as a model. It’s a thousand-page document that lays out how Conservatives will govern America. Donald Trump claimed, yesterday, that he knows nothing about Project 2025. Raise your hand if you believe that.

Project 2025 builds on the usual Conservative tropes: family values, individual rights, defending our sovereignty, and destroying the administrative state. It sounds benign enough until you read between the lines. Family values means marriage only between a man and a woman and the repeal of any recognition of LBGTQ rights, removing all references to non-binary genders from educational materials, statutes, and regulations. Individual rights is probably the most disingenuous subtitle in Project 2025 because it focuses mostly on the rights of fetuses, (outlawing abortion,) and the right to own and use any kind of weapon you want to.

Sovereignty is a code word for our southern border and includes every slander ever uttered by Donald Trump about immigrants and refugees. Finally, destroying the administrative state means firing a large percentage of the two million people who work for the federal government, who are covered by the Hatch Act which requires their actions to be nonpartisan. Project 2025 would replace those who remain entirely with loyalists, which sounds a lot like the origins of the Gestapo to me.

I omitted religious values above because I want to focus on them here. I happened to be in Budapest the day in 2015, four months after Donald Trump’s escalator ride, when thousands of Syrian refugees arrived and were held captive at the Budapest railway station. That day, Orban addressed his nation to justify his action, declaring that Muslims were not welcome in Hungary, which he intended to transform into a white, Christian nation. The local press referred to him as “the Hungarian Donald Trump.”

We’ve seen the beginning of that trend already in the United States as MAGA-dominated legislatures have begun passing laws that were likely drafted by the Heritage Foundation. Florida has a new law that requires all references to gay or transgender issues removed from all regulations and official documents. Louisiana now requires the Ten Commandments to be posted and taught in all elementary schools. A few years ago, I would have said we have to wait until the Supreme Court weighs in on whether that’s constitutional, but the Court we inherited from Trump is likely to rubber stamp it. And twenty red states have essentially outlawed abortion.

It’s understandable that with all the turmoil and divisiveness Trump has created, if you don’t live in either of those states, you might not want to get involved, but those actions represent an ominous trend that we must take seriously, and something I saw yesterday sent a chill up my spine that’s still there today.

My wife loves fireworks, so we spent Independence Day evening channel surfing to see which network had the best presentation. PBS did its usually creditable job producing A Capital Fourth, a live, patriotic musical show from the Capital Mall in Washington, not exactly my thing, but well-done and appropriate. CNN bounced from city to city showing viewers how the Fourth was celebrated around the country – rich in pop culture but not so much on fireworks. So we fell back on the old standard: NBC’s production of the Macy’s firework show over the Hudson River in New York.

As always, the fireworks were accompanied by a musical review, this one atop a New York skyscraper. The fireworks were spectacular, lighting the sky between New York and New Jersey – for about five minutes. Apparently, NBC thought that millions of viewers who tuned in looking for fireworks would rather listen to a concert. The band was outstanding and many of the performers, like Alex Newell, were brilliant, but after a few musical numbers, they started performing Christian hymns.

Performed well, Amazing Grace is an impressive piece of music, but it was absolutely inappropriate as a celebration of Independence Day. Even more so were the hymns that followed it. It was outrageous and offensive. Not a hint of the traditional patriotic songs emanating from Washington on PBS, with John Philip Sousa nowhere to be found.

I don’t know whether Macy’s or NBC was responsible, but my question to both of them is: “What the hell were you thinking?” I learned a long time ago that most of the time when we suspect someone of having an ulterior motive, it turns out they were just stupid or incompetent. But I can’t help but wonder – was NBC or Macy’s anticipating a Trump victory and deciding to present the appearance of being on board with Project 2025?

If that’s true, we’re doomed.