The New Yorker:

The urge to police the past is hardly an invention of the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere.

By David Remnick

In the very first paragraph of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s operating manual for a second Trump Administration, battle lines over history are drawn: “America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.” Three weeks after Donald Trump’s election, Mike Gonzalez, a contributor to Project 2025, and Armen Tooloee, the former chief of staff to the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, elaborated on the new Administration’s martial maneuvers, writing in the Wall Street Journal that, in order “to put a spike through the heart of woke,” the White House was duty bound to “retake control of museums, starting with the Smithsonian Institution.”

During the campaign, Trump professed ignorance of Project 2025. “I’ve never read it, and I never will,” he said. This was hard to parse. While it really was difficult to imagine Trump hunched over his desk, underlining passages in the report’s nine hundred-plus pages, he obviously had what is known in Washington as a “situational awareness” of its prescriptions to maximize executive power, slash government agencies, punish perceived enemies, intimidate dissenters, and rule as an autocrat. Trump is enacting Project 2025 nearly to the letter, deploying executive orders, lawsuits, and rhetorical bombast in an effort to force judges, law firms, cultural institutions, university presidents, and press barons into postures of pitiable obedience. He has even taken time to bring to heel that center of Brechtian cultural rebellion, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

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