Project 2025’s oligarchic power and executive absolutism

Lorenzo Davids is the Executive Director of Urban Issues Consulting. How does all this relate to the rest of the world? Project 2025 is diametrically opposed to any notion of democracy.

It is a blueprint for the unlimited power of the president. The kidnapping of the president of Venezuela demonstrated that power. Dans states that Project 2025 believe that “the Constitution vests the executive power squarely and solely in the president of the United States.” Voters elect the president.

That president rules with full executive authority. Dans believes that since the days of Woodrow Wilson, “encroachments on the executive power were anti-democratic and unconstitutional.” He sees democracy as an exercise where “every four years the people vote for a president to put forward new policy, and if his policies are being impeded by an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy, that is a problem that needs reformation.” Project 2025 wants a president with unlimited executive powers – a king. With the rise of populist leaders globally, one begins to see how other far-right, centre-right, and centre-left political parties are buying into this way of thinking as a survival strategy.

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With growing immigration challenges across the world, disruptions to systems that once worked, and the optics of very different societies emerging, influenced by the previous two, European, Asian and African political orders are beginning to gravitate to their own versions of Project 2025. This is not a temporary disruption. This is a full systemic rupture of the geopolitical landscape.

The multilateral world we know is no longer considered necessary by Project 2025. What we are living through is a poly-crisis of democratic regression, centralised power, geopolitical fragmentation, environmental stress, and a global debt crisis, all happening simultaneously. The systems we created in 1945 to stabilise and manage a multilateral world are being abandoned at the speed of light.

Powerful states with old and new wealth are increasingly ignoring intelligent politicians and turning to the wealthy elite – the people with money – to lead the way. Not only to lead it, but to have their way. Dynastic oligarchs are being asked to serve as the bankers, intelligence, and political face of the new world they are creating, with unrestricted powers to determine the future of nations.

Gaza is one such case. With the establishment of the Board of Peace, Donald Trump has made the first move to abandon the United Nations and set up an alternative global power base that willing nations can join for free, but after three years, must pay US$1 billion to become a permanent member. Jared Kushner is restructuring much of the Middle East, not as a representative of multilateral government institutions, but on behalf of Project 2025 and his father-in-law. He is a salesman of dynastic oligarchic power, not democratic policy or institutional order.

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