If you haven’t heard of or read about Project 2025, you’d better get real familiar with it real soon because it will be Trump’s playbook from Day One or – if we dodge that orange bullet – the 2028 GOP candidate’s. And you will find out–if you’re lucky and haven’t already–just how little it takes to get Orange Man angry, and what happens to you when Orange Man smash…especially if you’re homeless, LGBTQ+, an addict, or all of the above.

The key to Project 2025 is three words: unitary executive privilege. Basically, it’s an argument that the U.S. Constitution gives the President complete and total power over the other two branches of government: the legislative and the judicial. In other words, whatever decisions these two august bodies make can be overruled by the President (the executive), and that was the true intention of the founders. Which, it could be argued, would have been the case…if the majority of the founding males had been suffering from tertiary syphilis at the time they were crafting this founding document.

So let’s assume the worst: Trump gets in and his minions start going about reconstructing the republic. Where would they start? According to their own plan, which is in the Project 2025 handbook, they would begin with what they consider the dark heart of the state: civil servants. The bureaucracy.

Here’s where things start to get complicated. Most civil servants are NOT appointed by the President. They are in the positions they are in because of their expertise, and expertise does not carry a party bias. You don’t care if the scientists at NASA or the rangers in the US Forest Service vote red or blue–you care if they know how to make the rockets go up and come down safely, and you want rangers who understand how to and–most importantly–how NOT to interact with wildlife in our national parks.

Nevertheless, the creators of Project 2025–mainly Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, one of the best-known conservative think tanks–have decided to make ALL civil servants political appointees via Schedule F, which means loyalty oaths will be applied to ALL civil servants–no matter how irrelevant party affiliation is to their job. The architect of this part of the plan, Russell Vought, has calculated that non-political government employees comprise 68 percent of the bureaucracy of the federal government. This means thousands of civil servants will be compelled to either sign a loyalty oath to Trump or be replaced by mouth-breathers whose sole credential is being a big donor to Dear Orange Leader.

Let’s just say that the potential losses to the government brain trust would be…catastrophic. When the qualification for a position becomes party loyalty and not decades of expertise, the result will be incalculable losses of life, liberty, and property. And that’s just the tip of Project 2025’s iceberg. Wait ‘til you hear the other goodies!

If Trump is re-elected, one of the first things he plans to do is suspend habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is Latin for “you should have the body”–in other words, the judge or court should have any person who is being detained brought forward so that the legality of their detention can be assessed.  Without habeas corpus, a person can be detained for any length of time without being seen by a judge. You can see why Trump would love having such power. “Detain my enemies for as long as I want without them seeing a judge? Where do I sign?” And it would be a perfect tool for detaining the unhoused–indefinitely.

And then there are other horrors for the MAGAots to get their jollies over, like Trump’s stated intention to round up the unhoused, declare them “stateless,” and put them in camps in godforsaken wilderness areas–hey, maybe he’ll reuse the camps out here in the West that housed displaced Japanese-Americans during World War II! I mean, they’re just sitting there unused! You wouldn’t even have to refurbish them! Just imagine the savings!

Now, Titler won’t actually be able to start locking up or rounding up people on Day One. But it won’t take long for his people to begin replacing policy wonks with loyalists and left-learning judges with Trump-loving ones. So if you want to prevent this dystopian nightmare from becoming a hideous reality, you’d better start arming yourself with anger and knowledge. And read up on Project 2025. It’s like Mein Kampf, if Hitler had had any capacity for linear thought. But it has one virtue: at 920 pages, it is slightly shorter than Atlas Shrugged.