Project 25 — Promoting Violence Against Dissenters to Accumulate and Wield Power that Isn’t His*
Calling it by its name — FASCISM — now qualifies as promoting “domestic terror.”
His September 22 and 25, 2025 Executive Orders are wrapped in false American flags and drenched in faux patriotism. They attack and purport to criminalize “domestic terrorism” he claims is caused by the “enemy within.” He characterizes the likes of “Antifa” as “sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence (Executive Order, September 25, 2025).
Remember what he learned from his fixer, hero, and mentor Roy Cohn: always accuse your enemy of the same terrible acts you are committing — or worse. His Executive Orders do exactly what he accuses of those who dissent from his Project 25 annihilation of the constitutional republic — rogue, “organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”
Roy Cohn “has been described by people who knew him as ‘a snake,’ ‘a scoundrel’ and ‘a new strain of son of a bitch.’ . . . Trump, as has been well-established, learned so much from the truculent, unrepentant Cohn about how to get what he wants, and he pines for Cohn and his notorious capabilities still.”[i]
Trump reportedly has asked himself, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
“What Cohn could, and did, get away with was the very engine of his existence. The infamous chief counsel for the red-baiting, Joseph McCarthy-chaired Senate subcommittee in the 1950s, Cohn was indicted four times from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s — for stock-swindling and obstructing justice and perjury and bribery and conspiracy and extortion and blackmail and filing false reports. And three times he was acquitted — the fourth ended in a mistrial — giving him a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability. Cohn . . . took his sanction-skirting capers and twisted them into a sort of suit of armor.
“Cohn did not, in the end, elude the consequences of his actions. He could not, it turned out, get away with everything forever. He was a braggart of a tax cheat, and the Internal Revenue Service closed in; he was an incorrigibly unethical attorney, and he finally was disbarred; and only six weeks after that professional disgrace, six months shy of 60 years old, Cohn was dead . . . .”[ii]
Lessons Trump learned from this incorrigibly unethical, cheating fixer included:
1. Never apologize or admit wrongdoing, ever.
2. Always counter-attack, and always with greater force than you received, accuse your opponent of the very same offense or worse.
3. Use the legal system as a weapon, not a recourse for justice.
4. Manipulate the media ruthlessly.
5. Use fear as both a shield and a sword.
6. Build a fortress of loyalty around yourself.
The Six Dark Lessons Roy Cohn Taught Trump (That He Still Uses Today) (Berrett-Koehler Staff, Berrett-Koehler, July 31, 2025).
Trump has succeeded in all of Cohn’s lessons. Most importantly — and necessarily — he has surrounded himself with people who exude Cohn’s dark traits and are loyal to him above all else — the Constitution be damned. Project 25 would otherwise be a pipe dream. Foremost in current news are devout loyalists Stephen Miller and Russel Vought. Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, has been likened to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. According to some, Miller plagiarized a 1932 address titled “The Storm is Coming” in his speech at the Kirk memorial. “Observers online pointed it out in real time: this wasn’t just Nazi-adjacent, it was Nazi karaoke night.” Office of Management and Budget Director Vought, on the other hand, “has been dreaming about this moment — preparing this moment — since puberty,” according to Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). Lee, who himself turned Cohn-style Trump loyalist and congressional oath betrayer years ago, was referring to what Vought will do to “Democratic voters as punishment for their senators not capitulating to Trump’s funding bill,” during the latest of Trump’s government shutdowns.[iii]
At the end of September Trump issued two executive orders, one purporting[iv] to designate “Antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,”[v] and the other declaring war on the “enemy within” as the cause of political violence.[vi] On Tuesday, advancing his Project 25 campaign to consolidate power in himself, he spoke to 800 military leaders his Secretary of War had summoned from around the world to the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia. His intent was to groom the generals to use American (“Democrat”) cities as “training grounds” against the “enemies within,” and he expects they will devote Cohn-level loyalty to him over their sworn oaths to the Constitution.
Will they?
I have read many articles and reports[vii] lauding the honor and integrity of the U.S. military’s most senior leaders, that their loyalty is and will steadfastly remain to the Constitution of the United States above all else, that they will follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice by refusing to obey an unlawful order from the civilian commander in chief. See Can the Military Refuse a Trump Order? (Preet Bharara, CAFE, February 21, 2025). Aside from determining whether an order is lawful, the problem is this: any military commander who refuses to follow Trump’s unlawful orders will be fired or demoted and replaced with loyalists who “have either amplified his wishes or bowed to them.” That purge from the military — of those who tried to prevent him from using the military domestically to advance his political agenda — began at the end of Trump’s first term and picked up early in his second. See ‘Dangerous Cities,’ the Military, Trump and the Founding Fathers (Helene Cooper, The New York Times, October 1, 2025).
The recent Executive Orders and speeches Trump and his Secretary of War gave to the generals were unabashed incitements to political violence against Americans. “Their words should leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that the civilian leadership intends to use the threat and actuality of violence to infringe on Americans’ constitutional rights” to suppress lawful dissent. See also US cities should be military training grounds, Trump tells generals (Bernd Debusmann Jr. and James FitzGerald, BBC, October 1, 2025).
The two Executive Orders and speeches to military leaders converge to threaten and use government power, including military force, to suppress protected speech and association and quash dissent, activities clearly protected by the First Amendment, in his continuing authoritarian campaign to accumulate and consolidate power.
Given the current political climate, I offer an oft-quoted excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. The quote, unfortunately, is as relevant now as when he wrote it, given the administration’s advancing white Christian nationalist agenda, human and civil rights attacks on non-white populations — citizens and non-citizens alike — Congress’s wholesale capitulation of Article 1 power to Trump, and the Supreme Court’s creation of presidential immunity that bestows king-like power that binds him to no laws:
“We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal.” ― Martin Luther King, Jr.,
*Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, the talented fiction writer and novelist, is my brother. He deserves considerable credit for offering substantive and technical suggestions to my blog. His second novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. It is a literary masterpiece.
[i] The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned From Roy Cohn (Michael Kruse, Politico Magazine, September 19, 2019).
[ii] Id.
[iii] Senator Lee’s combining Vought’s puberty with dreaming about eliminating healthcare, jobs, and a safety net for millions of Americans suggests a profound and deeply disturbing pathology in both men.
[iv] The law permits the Secretary of State to designate “foreign terrorist groups,” but there is no legal equivalent for designating an organization a “domestic terrorist group.” Domestic terrorism is defined in federal law, but of itself is not a federal crime. Typically, federal prosecutors charge suspected domestic terrorists with crimes that flow from their membership in such groups such as murder, weapons violations, hate crimes, and the kinds of crimes the Jan. 6 domestic terrorists committed. Plus, Antifa is not an organized group: it has no leaders, assets, or infrastructure. See, e.g., Trump wants to designate antifa as ‘a major terrorist organization.’ Can he do that? (Maria Briceño, PBS (originally appeared in PolitiFact), September 19, 2025).
[v] September 22, 2025 Executive Order — Antifa: Antifa — “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals. This campaign involves coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists. Antifa recruits, trains, and radicalizes young Americans to engage in this violence and suppression of political activity, then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members. Individuals associated with and acting on behalf of Antifa further coordinate with other organizations and entities for the purpose of spreading, fomenting, and advancing political violence and suppressing lawful political speech” — is now designated a “domestic terrorist organization.”
President Trump Plans To Investigate and “Disrupt” Opposition Speech (Walter Olson, CATO Institute, September 26, 2025).
[vi] September 26, 2025 Executive Order — Political Violence: Political violence — “is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. . . . These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” — now requires a “new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terrorist conspiracies.”
The Trump Administration’s Attack on First Amendment Rights Is Enabled by Fourth Amendment Shortcomings (Matthew Cavedon, CATO Institute, September 29, 2025).
[vii] See, e.g., US cities should be military training grounds, Trump tells generals (Bernd Debusmann Jr., and James FitGerald, BBC, October 2, 2025); Trump tells a roomful of silent generals to join a ‘war from within’ (Emily Davies and Matt Viser, The Washington Post, September 30, 2025); Trump sounded ‘exhausted, incoherent and stupid’ in his speech to military top brass, says retired general )Mike Bedigan, The Independent, October 1, 2025); The Silence of the Generals, Qualms From Quantico, William Kristol, The Bulwark, October 1, 2025).