Project 2025 is more than just Trump

ANDIn recent weeks, Donald Trump has disavowed his authorship of Project 2025, a sprawling playbook aimed at transforming the federal government into a bastion of conservative power. While Project 2025 closely follows his vision, Trump has a point.

Far from being an anomaly or the brainchild of a single administration, Project 2025 is the latest manifestation of a decades-long legal campaign to expand executive power. Trump is more vessel than visionary — the current standard-bearer of a movement that began long before him and will likely continue long after him.

The seeds of this ideological movement were sown during the presidency of Richard Nixon, when conservative thinkers and activists began to create a legal framework that concentrated power in the executive branch at the expense of Congress, the courts, and the people. Their vision emerged from what historian Arthur Schlesinger has called the “imperial presidency.” Beginning with Harry Truman, five successive presidential administrations expanded executive power. This escalation peaked under Nixon, who, as Schlesinger noted, “became the first to profess the monarchical doctrine that the sovereign can do no wrong.”

Nixon exercised his power as monarch covertly – the most famous example being the Watergate scandal – and brazenly, claiming that Article II of the Constitution gave him the authority to seize funds already appropriated by Congress and to conduct widespread wiretapping without a warrant.

Nixon’s claims about executive power were met with resistance; Congress and the Supreme Court blocked seizures and wiretapping, respectively. But his claims also conditioned a generation of Republicans to accept unlimited executive power. Among those who came of age at the height of the imperial presidency were future Vice President Dick Cheney and future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. Both sought to institutionalize Nixon’s vision of virtually unlimited presidential power as young White House staffers.

Read more: What is Project 2025?

As special assistant to the president and executive assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney worked to oust liberals from the federal government and paralyze disliked agencies. His goals were simple: consolidate Nixon’s power, cement his ideology, and demolish obstacles to his agenda.

Rehnquist, meanwhile, had become a legal mercenary for the imperial presidency. Although he fancied himself the administration’s “resident constitutional theorist,” to quote journalist John Jenkins, his role was more cynical: crafting constitutional justifications for Nixon’s agenda. When the Nixon administration needed a lawyer to defend the constitutionality of mass arrests and surveillance of antiwar protesters or to pressure a liberal Supreme Court justice, it turned to Rehnquist.

He also traveled the country to lambast perceived enemies of the Nixon administration. His rhetoric was harsh and apocalyptic, calling students protesting the war “new barbarians” who threatened “the basic values ​​of our system of government.” Rehnquist suggested curtailing their rights to protest and vote, and later warned ominously that “law and order will be maintained at all costs in the sphere of individual liberty and rights”—a thinly veiled threat of violence against peaceful protesters.

Nixon’s fall initially seemed to signal the end of the imperial presidency. His secret crimes shocked even staunch conservatives and accelerated congressional efforts to curb presidential power and corruption, including the War Powers Act. The Justice Department and intelligence agencies also issued new limits on presidential power. His resignation and subsequent reckoning undermined a core tenet of Nixon’s philosophy: that the president is above the law.

This apparent collapse of the unchecked presidency left a mark on former Nixon staffers. As journalist Charlie Savage recounted, Nixon’s resignation and Watergate reforms “made a deep impression on Cheney.” Cheney would later lament that the post-Nixon limitations on presidential power represented “the lowest point of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy.”

Rather than accept this new constitutional consensus, however, Nixon’s former aides redoubled their efforts to create an unbridled executive power. Hurt by their boss’s fall, they gradually reclaimed and expanded executive power over the decades.

As President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, Cheney fought post-Watergate reforms that he saw as undermining the Constitution’s “institutional arrangements” and unduly limiting the president’s power. He found intellectual support in a senior Justice Department official named Antonin Scalia. And as a congressman from Wyoming, Cheney fought to sabotage congressional oversight of President Ronald Reagan, including during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Rehnquist, appointed by Nixon in 1971 to the Supreme Court, also became a central figure in the effort to reclaim expansive executive power. His thinking and advocacy shaped a generation of conservative jurists, including future Chief Justice John Roberts. While clerking for Rehnquist in 1981, Roberts witnessed the Justice argue for a broad interpretation of executive power in the case Dames & Moore v Regan.

After completing his internship, Roberts joined the Reagan Administration, and it was in the Reagan Justice Department, under Attorney General Edwin Meese, that the desire for a stronger presidency took on new life.

As attorney general, Meese also focused on appointing conservative judges with experience in Republican administrations. So in 1986, Reagan promoted Rehnquist to the Supreme Court and added Scalia, whose experience shaped his belief in expansive presidential power, to the court. Other young conservative lawyers in the Reagan administration—including future justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—absorbed Meese’s ideas about expansive executive power before later Republican presidents made them federal judges.

It was not until George W. Bush, with Cheney as vice president, that the imperial presidency was fully restored. Through aggressive military force, indefinite detentions, and invasive surveillance, the vision of an unfettered presidency—first articulated in the Nixon era and refined under Reagan—gained new strength.

Read more: The Surprising Legacy of Watergate in Politics Today

The Bush administration saw this unabashed use of presidential power as a decisive break with the constraints imposed after the fall of Nixon. John Yoo, a chief architect of the Bush administration’s executive excesses, argued that Watergate “led to a period of congressional supremacy that contributed to the failed presidencies of Ford and Carter.” Yoo further argued that Reagan’s “rejuvenation” of the executive branch reversed the malaise of the pre-Bush era.

Those ideas now shape the thinking of the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court. Its conservative supermajority counts Roberts, Thomas and Alito as members, along with Brett Kavanaugh — who clerked for Bush and has called Rehnquist his “first judicial hero” — and Neil Gorsuch, who also clerked for Bush.

Their decades-long push for greater executive power culminated in a July ruling — joined in part by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the other Republican Supreme Court nominee — that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” a ruling that institutionalized imperial-style presidential power.

Roberts’ opinion pointedly omitted any consideration of Nixon’s criminality, but its underlying legal basis reflected Nixon’s infamous claim that “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” That legal framework would have been unimaginable in 1974 to all but a handful of conservative ideologues embittered by Nixon’s resignation. But it is now enshrined in constitutional law.

The continued growth of expansive notions of executive power has begun to undermine the democratic principles that Nixon’s resignation was supposed to uphold. Project 2025 is the latest dark legacy of this ideological lineage—one that transcends any individual. It is the product of a patient, persistent movement that has outlasted presidencies and weathered political storms.

The next chapter in this disturbing decline of democracy will unfold this fall. Candidate Trump, embroiled in legal trouble, seeks refuge in an imperial presidency. “Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he says. The 2025 Project gives these grievances a roadmap; the Supreme Court he reshaped is in its entirety. The choice is up to the voters.

Duncan Hosie is a lawyer and the Steven Polan Fellow in Constitutional Law and History at the Brennan Center at New York University School of Law.

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