In just 150 days since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has upended not just Washington but the entire global order. Not only is he reshaping the way America looks at home, he’s become a one-man wrecking ball on the world stage, souring relations with long-time allies and currying favour with old foes like Russia. But many of the moves he’s made were predictable, coming straight from Project 2025, the 900-page roadmap for reshaping the US, crafted largely by the ultra-Right Heritage Foundation.

And if Trump’s policy blitz feels coordinated, it is. He’s governing by the book — Project 2025, which declares everything in the US is broken: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponised against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”

Guess who pops up on one page after another as Enemy No 1? No prizes for figuring it’s ex-president Joe Biden. But the rot, the document says, stretches back long before Biden.

So what, exactly, does this new-old America imagined by Project 2025 look like? Think 1950s suburbia, when women stayed at home, cooking, cleaning and raising the kids. It acknowledges, begrudgingly, some women may still choose to work, but expects them to be the beating heart of the old-fashioned family. “The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics: the well-being of the American family.”

It reels off statistics. One, repeated like a warning siren, is 40 per cent of children are born to unmarried mothers. For Project 2025, this is no mere data point, it’s proof of civilisational decay. There’s “no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father,” it says, claiming paternal absence to be the root cause of America’s ills.

Moral collapse

No conservative manifesto would be complete without a chapter on “moral collapse” and Project 2025 doesn’t hold back. The Right sees pornography not just as a vice but as the ultimate evil and demands it be “outlawed,” its creators and distributors “imprisoned,” and educators and public librarians who purvey it “classed as registered sex offenders.”

Then there’s abortion. In Right-wingers’ eyes, one huge battle is already won: the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade, which created a constitutional right to abortion. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs Vs. Jackson decision returned that power to individual states. Project 2025 wants to go further: “The next conservative Administration should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.”

It goes without saying Project 2025 envisages an overwhelmingly white and Christian world. And it proposes tough steps, like those already being taken by the Trump administration, against illegal immigrants. It insists more money go towards “aggressively” building the border wall and strengthening Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. Trump has already pushed for massive ICE budget hikes.

Among the proposals: vastly expanding ICE, conducting workplace raids, and “raising the daily available number of (detention) beds to 100,000.” It wants funding for “at least 20,000 Enforcement and Removal ICE officers.”

Already, some of this is playing out — Los Angeles has seen widespread ICE raids, and Trump’s proposed enforcement budget hikes align closely with Project 2025’s calls.

In addition, the Right-wing has a huge grouse against the civil service, which it sees as a liberal fifth column: leftist, possibly Marxist, and obsessed with promoting transgender rights and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or DEI. It’s a broadside levelled not just by the Heritage Foundation but by the equally Right-wing American Enterprise Institute, which claims government workers receive more generous compensation, including emoluments, than their private-sector peers.

So where does India fit into this hard-Right world-view? As a key ally. The document makes space for foreign policy, identifying India as a “keystone” member of the Quad. But it doesn’t bend on immigration, urging that the H1-B visa programme be tightened so only highly “meritorious” workers qualify.

Pakistan, by contrast, gets short shrift. The US, it says, “must be clear-eyed and realistic about… the military-political rule in Pakistan… There can be no expectation of normal relations with either” Afghanistan’s Taliban government or Pakistan.

In short, Project 2025 is not just a wish list, it’s a battle plan. And Trump is charging ahead in lockstep, morphing ideology into policy and reshaping America one executive order at a time. The world it envisions is already taking shape and it looks nothing like the one most Americans, or the rest of the world, are used to.

Published on June 18, 2025