The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!

Taraji B. Henson, 2024 BET Awards

As host for the 2024 BET awards, Golden Globe Award winner Taraji B. Henson called out Project 2025, which is a dystopian and frightening GOP plan for Trump’s first 180 days in office should he secure a second term. While introducing artists, the host made an impassioned plea to viewers to get out and vote in November: “I’m telling y’all, you better show up and show out with them ballots,” she said, “It’s not just about the presidential election you guys. It’s time for us to play chess not checkers. It’s about making decisions that will affect us as human beings: our careers, our next generations to come.”

What got my attention was when Henson added: “I’m talking to all the mad people that don’t wanna vote. You gon’ be mad about a lot of things if you don’t vote.”

Henson is right, Project 2025 is not a game, and this is not a normal election cycle. This year we don’t have the luxury of nit-picking about a candidate’s debate performance, or age: The very fabric of our government is at stake here, and there’s a bunch of white, rich, patriarchal, white Christian nationalists who want to strip us of our liberty and freedoms and install Trump as “king.

Just ask the conservative Supreme Court justices who ruled that presidents have “absolute immunity” from prosecution for official acts and that a president is presumed immune for a cornucopia of acts. The ball is rolling for a Trump coronation.

So what is Project 2025? 

Forty years in the making, Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is an extensive 920-page tome of policies proposed by the Heritage Foundation. In a nut-shell, it’s a right-wing plan to create an authoritarian presidency, stripping power away from the other branches of government and empowering the president (Trump) to enforce an ultraconservative agenda throughout the U.S.

Democracy Forward has a clear and concise breakdown of Project 2025, and here are some of the highlights:

• Push more of the 33 million people enrolled in Medicare towards Medicare Advantage (which costs enrollees) and more expensive private options
• Deny students in 25 states access to student loans if their state provides in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants (if you’re not rich, forget about a college degree, and oh, immigrants are lazy and poisoning America).
• Halt efforts to lower prescription drug prices (gotta keep those pharma stocks up, too bad if you have to pay $400 for a bottle of insulin).
• Cut overtime protections for over 4.3 million workers (gotta keep wages down so CEOs can buy more yachts).
• Implement a national abortion ban and restrict access to contraception (better get used to the rhythm method).
• Roll back civil rights protections for everyone who isn’t straight and white. Project 2025 calls for cuts to inclusion-related (DEI) programs, and denying LGBTQ+ individuals access to health care, education, and even employment.
• Undo initiatives to combat climate change and eliminate years of federal regulations that protect people from the harms of pollution (screw the Paris Climate Accord and the EPA).

My message to all you Democrats and talking heads who are toying with the idea of Joe Biden stepping down because he didn’t “wow” us with his performance in Atlanta, or that he’s old: Are you kidding me? Are you insane?

It boggles my mind that Americans ignore all that the Biden administration has done for us in just four short years. Sure, Joe’s a bit older, but a presidency is just more than one person, it’s an administration, and his administration is committed to preserving democracy and our civil liberties.

If not Biden, it’s Trump: A liar, a convicted felon, a would-be dictator, and the figurehead of a deranged and dangerous plan to dismantle our Democracy.

As Henson said, “You gon’ be mad about a lot of things if you don’t vote.”