Heritage Foundation sans frontières
By 
Absolutely crucial to Donald Trump’s re-election were 1)people like John McCain and various executive branch members constraining him from executing his worst impulses during his first term and 2)his systematic dishonesty about his agenda for his second term, particularly his playing dumb (with extensive media collaboration) about Project 2025. But high on their own “historic landslide” supply, Trump 2.0 is the pure id of the reactionary movement that has been building for this since McCarthy and Goldwater:
Federal funding for SNAP, the nutritional aid program still often referred to as food stamps, ends tonight. This will have catastrophic impacts on 42 million Americans, the great majority of them children, elderly or disabled.
Millions more Americans are about to discover that health insurance has become vastly more expensive, in many cases unaffordable.
Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer.
But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections. For example, draconian work requirements for Medicaid — which would effectively throw millions off the program, largely by imposing paperwork burdens low-wage workers can’t overcome — weren’t scheduled to take effect until the end of 2026.
Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.
Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.
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We’ll just have to see how all this plays politically. But it’s clear that Republicans messed up badly on the implementation of Project 2025. Immense cruelty was always part of the plan, but policy wasn’t supposed to get this cruel, this soon.
So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.)
None of this is to say that authoritarian consolidation isn’t happening. It most certainly is. But the medium-term prospects would be even more dire if Republicans were using their seized power to provide things that people want rather than to do a bunch of things with no mass constituency at all.