Progressive groups are preparing a concerted fightback against Donald Trump and Project 2025, the vast far-right policy plan, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, which promises slashing reform to all areas of government when the president-elect returns to power next month.
Skye Perryman, chief executive of Democracy Forward, a national legal organization, will help lead that fightback via Democracy 2025, a new coalition of “litigation, advocacy and policy groups” designed “to deploy swift legal defenses” – an effort informed by, but meant to be stronger than, the scramble Trump prompted in 2017, the year Democracy Forward formed.
Perryman said: “After Trump took office, people in communities in the United States started experiencing a range of harms based on policies the administration was implementing. You had very visible ones, like the Muslim ban, which caused lawyers in airports to drop their suitcases and rush to the aid of people being kept out of the country, and organizations like the ACLU and others that sued on those policies, to other, less high-profile things, such as the Title 10 gag rule” that slashed family planning access for poorer women.
“But there were many things that the administration was doing that were a bit under the radar, but were nevertheless negatively impacting millions of Americans and in many instances were unlawful. So Democracy Forward was founded in response to that reality, the threats to people in the United States, but also [threats] to our rule of law and [to highlight] the overall way that the government was functioning in a different nature, of extreme and unlawful activity.”
Democracy Forward took the first Trump administration to court more than 100 times, over “things like the collection of information about individual voters through the Pence-Kobach voter [fraud] commission, the abrupt discontinuation of federal funding to cities and counties supporting bipartisan healthcare programs, such as the teen pregnancy prevention program … and things like rolling back nutritional standards for schoolchildren”.
Perryman was senior counsel for Democracy Forward, then general counsel, chief legal officer and head of public affairs for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She rejoined Democracy Forward in 2021, with Joe Biden in the White House, but with threats to fundamental rights in full flow in Republican states.
“After January 6,” she said, of the deadly attack on Congress by Trump supporters, “it was clear threats to democracy were not actually abating as President Trump was leaving office. So we began to scale our work … in state and local communities and at the federal level, addressing judicial extremism and the far-right legal movements that were responsible for things like Dobbs,” the June 2022 US supreme court ruling that removed the federal right to abortion.
In 2024, first Biden then Kamala Harris ran on such threats to fundamental rights. Concurrently, Perryman noted, Trump and his own running mate, JD Vance, realized the unpopularity of Project 2025 and its plans regarding LGBTQ+ rights, climate action and other issues, telling “the American people that they were not associated with it”.
But “they didn’t disavow association with many of the groups in that ecosystem that developed Project 2025, and some of these extreme behaviors, [and] we now see that they’ve wasted no time in this transition period in announcing their plans to appoint a number of those architects and implement those plans. And so we’re actively monitoring various threats and what recourse the American people would have, should the administration ignore the law.”
Hence Democracy 2025, which is backed by figures and groups including Noah Bookbinder and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; Norm Eisen, once Barack Obama’s ethics czar; the National Women’s Law Center; and the National Immigration Law Center.
Preparing for battle not just in courtrooms but in the public square, against a threat “far more extreme” than policy plans produced by the Heritage Foundation over the past 40 years, Perryman sees signs for hope.
“What we know about the American people, and we’ve seen this since Dobbs … is that the vast majority do not support extremism. Places like Missouri, which is a red state, places like Florida, the majority of the voting public in those states voted to protect abortion rights on the ballot. In states like Louisiana, we saw climate initiatives.
“In poll after poll, among conservatives, among independents and among liberals, we saw that Project 2025 is really a lightning rod, and it was deeply unpopular, which is why [Trump] and his allies sought to distance themselves from it in the election.”
Republicans will soon control the White House and Congress. To Perryman, that does not mean all is lost.
“The main point is that the American people have a lot of levers of their own power that they can use and build in this time. One of those is legal action. There are certain things that a president cannot do, an administration cannot do, rights that people have, as well as laws around how our government functions, that the courts will have to be a check on. We want to make sure people can access and utilize the courts.”
Biden has managed to appoint more judges than Trump did first time round. The supreme court may be tilted firmly right, but the law takes time. The midterm elections are just two years away and in the House, at least, Republicans have only a tiny majority.
“People still have a voice with their elected officials,” Perryman said. “While the president-elect’s party holds the balance in the US Congress, it’s not a massive balance and many of the things that we’re seeing the presidential transition team at least propose or say they’re going to do are deeply harmful to all Americans, regardless of political ideology, and to many of the communities that have supported the president-elect.
“In the last Trump administration, Trump was very determined to overturn the Affordable Care Act, and believed he had the votes in Congress to do so, and actually as a result of public outrage and people making their voices heard to their members of Congress, as a result of those members having to understand what people they were responsible to, the attempts failed.”
This time round, Perryman said, “we’ve already seen the Matt Gaetz nomination fail” for US attorney general. “And so I think part of the work here is making sure that the American people do not lose their own power.”
Democracy 2025 is not just designed for offensive manoeuvres. Given reports of legal attacks on progressive non-profits being prepared by those close to Trump, it will also be a means of defense.
“We know there’s a playbook,” Perryman said. “Part of the work of defending the American people and defending democracy in this time is being willing to continue to use the tools that we have, all the tools our democracy provides, the lawful tools to represent people in communities, and then to understand that there may be certain consequences or attempts to quell that work through intimidation, through threats, a retributive agenda, but not to allow that to stop the important work that needs to be done in this moment.”
