Alan Zendell, March 28, 2025

Whenever the Weather Channel covers a massive hurricane, I’m fascinated by the different ways they present It. Their bread and butter is sending people in waterproof bodysuits out into the storm. Viewers love chaotic scenes of meteorologists with microphones being blown around by 100 mph-plus wind gusts and ducking flying debris. Viewers also love high-tech color-coded maps accompanied by phrases like “bomb cyclones,” “occluded fronts,” and “temperature inversions.” For me, however, the most impressive shots are satellite photos that show a mass of roiling energy that resembles a giant behemoth in a horror film encompassing half of North America.

It’s all about perspective. We can get lost in the fog of war, drown in never-ending analyses and predictions, or we can be awestruck by the massive power of nature. All three aspects are valuable, but we often let ourselves be overwhelmed by details or hang on the words of experts eager to explain what’s happening instead of taking a step back and looking at the whole picture for ourselves.

The storm I’m thinking about today is the torrent of Executive Orders and DOGE-inspired mayhem of chopping up government agencies – before anyone shouts “exaggeration,” remember that their self-selected symbol is a chain saw. We see the chaos and confusion that are the intended results of the Trump administration’s strategy every day, although more and more people seem to be tuning out. This weekend, millions of us are directing our attention to March Madness or the opening of the baseball season to preserve the illusion that life goes on as usual. Imagine the damage Trump and Elon Musk may have done by Monday while none of us was looking.

My favorite historian, Heather Cox Richardson, whose career focused on the Republican Party and its founding principles, took that step back for us today. Richardson understands that focusing only on specifics like the horrific security breach around our attack on Yemen or the dismantling of the Department of Education is like watching a battle scene in a war movie. Lots of noise, destruction, and personal tragedy but no context. She also understands that the fabric that holds all this madness together is Project 2025, whose principal author, Russell Vought, is now Donald Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought’s position arguably makes him the most powerful person in government, because it controls how funding authorized by Congress is disseminated or held hostage.

It’s obvious that Project 2025 is Trump’s blueprint for the future of America, although he repeatedly lied about having no knowledge of it. He still doesn’t acknowledge it, despite the fact that almost every action he has taken in the nine weeks he’s been president comes directly from that thousand-page manifesto, and much of his support team were involved in writing it. Richardson makes that clear in simple terms, just as the satellite view of a massive storm gives us a better understanding of its power and extent, but her words took on greater significance when I read Hilary Clinton’s Op-Ed in today’s New York Times.

Clinton, appropriately, focused not only on the cynical nature of the Trump administration’s actions, but how stupid they are in terms of the objectives Trump campaigned on. Clinton pointed out what many others have: that Trump’s actions in cutting government services are hurting his voting base more than the rest of us; that his trade war is likely to seriously damage our economy; and that firing talented generals and ignoring security rules greatly weaken our military. Clinton concluded that those actions are dumb. Richardson had a different view.

She pointed out that if, in fact, Trump’s intention is to cut waste from government, strengthen our military, and improve the lives of his devoted base, most of the things he’s done, including the majority of his Executive Actions, make no sense. But what if his real intention is to destroy the power of the federal government because in his delusional universe, it’s controlled by the mythical Deep State?

She makes a strong case for this, and it’s an easy one to make. The perspective her satellite view shows us is that the apparatus of our government is not being improved or made more efficient – it’s being dismantled with no plan for which governmental services will continue or how the ones that don’t will be replaced. Or, more importantly, how the millions of people (non of whom are Trump’s billionaire donors) who are seriously hurt because of Trump’s actions will survive.

Her most convincing argument centers around Curtiss Yarvin, a reactionary intellectual who was heavily involved in Project 2025. She quotes extensively from Yarvin’s speeches and writings from 2021, which lay out how to replace a democratic government with an autocracy. In the context of today, Yarvin’s words read like a crystal ball predicting Trump’s agenda. I urge everyone to read Richadson’s Letters From an American newsletter on Substack to see for yourself. It’s free, no account necessary.