The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
The Heritage Foundation is one of the oldest conservative think tanks in Washington. They have influenced Republicans and Republican politics for many years.
Last year the Heritage Foundation published a thousand-page revolutionary tome called Project 2025. It suggested detailed proposals for upending hundreds of Constitutionally- and legally-established principles of democracy that had been written into cultural and legal codes for almost two and a half centuries. Project 2025 was a much longer conservative manifesto for radically conservative authoritarian government than the Communist Manifesto was for radically liberal authoritarian government.
In his first one hundred days in office, Donald Trump has attempted to institute hundreds of notions contained within the Heritage Foundation’s ultra-rightist position paper. Trump made FDR look like a novice at executive orders, which FDR was.
President Trump insisted in 2024 that he had never read Project 2025, nor would he. He didn’t need to do so. Hundreds of Heritage Foundation employees and other ultra-conservative operatives had been waiting in the wings for a President to come along who was as intelligent, narcissistic, and persuasive a dupe as Donald J. Trump. Trump is the perfect puppet for the oligarchic-authoritarian movement. No one could possibly be more effective than he.
Up until the turn of this century, for most of his adult life, Donald Trump was a self-acknowledged and publicly-proclaimed Democrat. That was not because he was either liberal or conservative, but because in New York State, and especially New York City, the Democratic Party was the only game in town. Therefore Trump, forever an opportunist, naturally was a Democrat. By the election of 2000, however, Trump correctly read the political tea leaves to conclude that the USA was trending toward an increasingly conservative Republican Party. George W, Bush was the clear sign of that trend change.
Liberals constantly make the mistake of thinking that Donald Trump is an ignorant ultra-conservative. He is not. He is a prescient fifth-columnist, wisely opportunist, neo-convert authoritarian Republican who is a willing dupe of the multitude of Heritage-Foundation-types who for decades have been waiting for one such as he to appear on their monarchical horizon. He is, in other sords, the longed-for answer to autocratic conservatives’ prayers.
God did not twice put Donald Trump the Oval Office, although Trump seems to believe that is true. Millions of American voters anointed him President. For better or worse (it is decidedly for the worse), Mr. Trump is now the US President who is transforming the United States and the entire world into an economic and political mess. We Americans have no one to blame for this tragedy but our collective selves. The Republicans voted Trump into office, and the Democrats, because of a far-too-belated choice by Joe Biden, could not stop the disastrous groundswell.
Because too many Democrats in Congress lack the courage to rise up against Trump and lose their bids for re-election in their 2026 party primaries, a happily-restored future rests solely in the hands of the third branch of American government, the judicial system. The Supreme Court is the only hope we have for cutting off Donald Trump and authoritarian government at the knees.
God does not intervene in human actions. Only humans can do that. But by God’s spirit working within resistant human hearts and minds, autocracy can be thwarted in the USA and in the world.
Democratically-minded peoples of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains! - May 5, 2025
John Miller is the retired pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.
More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.