Project 2025: MAGA, Christian Nationalists, and Tech Bros

The Allure of Fascism (Vol. II), Part 12

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

—Kevin Roberts.¹

After Trump lost the 2020 election, the establishment was confident that his political career was finished. Soon after the January 6^th riots, the Wall Street Journal concluded that “this week has probably finished him as a serious political figure. He has cost Republicans the House, the White House, and now the Senate. Worse, he has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.”² In February 2021, The Hill reported that “Senate Republicans, including those who do not plan to vote to convict former President Trump, say this week’s impeachment trial has effectively ended any chance of him becoming the GOP presidential nominee in 2024.”³ Speaking to Politico, a close ally confidently claimed: “He won’t be around in 2024. He’s not going to run… I don’t think he’s ever going to say ‘I won’t run.’ He just won’t run.”⁴

They were wrong.

On November 15^th, 2022, Trump announced his intention to run for the presidency again. At Mar-a-Lago, he said: “In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.” “We have to save our country,” he continued. “[T]ogether we will make America powerful again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again.” In his speech, Trump also stated that MAGA 2.0 would not be his movement alone. “This will not be my campaign,” he continued. “This will be our campaign. This is a task for a great movement.”⁵

The “great movement” that propelled MAGA 2.0 to victory in November 2024 would gradually coalesce in the years after Trump announced his re-election bid. It would include a variety of far-right, undemocratic individuals, movements and organisations that, perceiving the common ends of their political projects, would unite behind the banner of Trump’s populist MAGA movement.⁶ Arguably the most important of them—the undemocratic Christian theocrats and the Silicon Valley “Dark Enlightenment” corporate libertarians—are people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and right-wing organisations like Jim DeMint’s Conservative Partnership Institute⁷ and the Heritage Foundation, the latter of which produced the now-infamous ‘Project 2025’ document.

Trump and the MAGA movement have been closely tied to the Heritage Foundation and its former president, Jim DeMint, since his first campaign for the presidency in 2016. Then, the Foundation assisted in the administrative transition in early 2017 after Trump became president, filling “hundreds of jobs throughout virtually every federal agency,” recommending some of “his most prominent Cabinet officials,” and selecting nominees for Supreme Court justice for Trump. DeMint’s CPI also played a prominent role in the “Stop the Steal” movement: the week after Trump lost the election in 2020, they held meetings to discuss how to ensure Trump was sworn in anyway, and helped to organise the January 6^th rally in Washington; Trump would later reward them in 2021 with a $1 million donation. They would also play a critical role in organising the various right-wing not-for-profits that contributed to Project 2025, including those founded by Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, and in financing the legal defence for those indicted after the January 6^th riots.⁸

Donald Trump announces 2024 White House run — Trump announces his third presidential campaign in November 2022.

Though Trump’s links to Silicon Valley became critically important in his 2024 campaign, with Elon Musk in particular providing $288 million in campaign financing, the most of any political donor that year,⁹ the links between these Silicon Valley billionaires and the Heritage Foundation itself are less explicit. Via the Thiel Foundation, Thiel has given money to DonorsTrust, an opaque organisation that funnels money to conservative movements, which has in turn given millions to Project 2025 advisory groups including Stephen Miller’s America First Legal.¹⁰ The Heritage Foundation also contracted with Larry Ellison’s company Oracle to build their personnel database of people who could fill roles throughout the government during Trump’s second term.¹¹ But the mutual interests of all these groups are clearly expressed by their shared support for one figure: JD Vance.

Vance originally rose to national prominence in 2016 as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir that explored his difficult upbringing in a white, working-class family with Appalachian roots. When he studied at Yale in the early 2010s, Vance connected with Peter Thiel, who would mentor and employ Vance over the coming years before funding his successful run for the US Senate in 2022. Through Thiel, Vance would meet Curtis Yarvin, the Thiel-funded “philosopher” whose work developed the intellectual edifice behind Silicon Valley’s emerging brand of undemocratic tech-authoritarianism.¹² Thiel himself is a longstanding right-wing libertarian, whose evangelical Christian faith is “central to his worldview.”¹³ As early as 2009, he said he stands against the “ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” and stated that he no longer believes that “freedom and democracy are compatible.”¹⁴ Thiel has also been a crucial supporter of AI and surveillance technology: he was an early investor in DeepMind, the AI lab bought by Google, and a founder of Palantir, the “data ontology” company working with Trump’s second administration to enact its deportation agenda.¹⁵

The same goes for far-right politics: Thiel, for instance, is a major funder of the US National Conservatism movement.¹⁶ In 2025 and 2026, he has delivered lectures on the Antichrist, who he says has returned through people halting the progress of scientific development like Greta Thunberg, and expressed his hopes that technology “will allow humanity to solve the problem of death and achieve the long-held promise of Christianity of eternal life and transcendence.”¹⁷

JD Vance and the rise of the 'New Right' | On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti — Trump and Vance in 2024.

Meanwhile, Yarvin is a figure long associated with “neo-reactionary” thought and the Silicon Valley “Rationalists,” a largely online intellectual community from which many AI researchers and entrepreneurs emerged, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman.¹⁸ Referred to as the “house political philosopher” for Thiel’s political network, Yarvin advocates for the destruction of democracy and the creation of an essentially monarchical corporate state, governed by a dictator CEO figure or “American Caesar.” Thiel, says Yarvin, is “fully enlightened”; Yarvin has also openly praised slavery. Yarvin’s radicalism has earned him significant influence in the MAGA movement. JD Vance has openly praised his ideas and called him a “friend,” and in 2025, Yarvin was “guest of honour” at Trump’s inauguration ball.¹⁹

Donald Trump's 'shadow president' in Silicon Valley - POLITICO — Peter Thiel and Trump together.

After he published his book, Vance would also develop connections with people associated with the Heritage Foundation. In 2017, he authored the introduction to a collection of essays that advanced a “conservative agenda” that had “the early markings of what would become Project 2025”: its authors advocated for “a two-parent household of a mother and father, more church involvement, restricting access to abortion, women getting pregnant at a younger age, getting rid of government benefits like affordable housing or welfare and more.”²⁰ Vance would also form a relationship with Stephen Miller before his 2022 Senate campaign.²¹ The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, and Vance would go on to co-author an op-ed in 2023 calling for military aid for Israel after October 7^th.²² Before Trump’s electoral win, Vance would also author a foreword to Dawn’s Early Light, a book by the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts. There, he described the Heritage Foundation as “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”²³ Returning the praise for his “good friend,” Roberts said that Vance “is absolutely going to be one of the leaders—if not the leader—of our movement.”²⁴ In 2026, Vance would also publish his second book, Communion, about his conversion to Catholicism; Kevin Roberts also has close ties to Opus Dei, a Catholic organisation that had strong ties to Franco’s right-wing dictatorship in Spain.²⁵

Once Project 2025 became controversial late in Trump and Vance’s campaign, MAGA leaders would consistently disavow their association with and knowledge of the programme. Trump said he knew “nothing about it,” while Vance claimed that “Project 2025 is not affiliated with the Trump campaign.”²⁶ Despite Trump and Vance’s consistent disavowals of Project 2025 throughout their campaign, the links between the MAGA movement and the Heritage Foundation are clear. In January 2024, Kevin Roberts “said that he viewed the foundation’s role as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’”²⁷ Trump himself also praised the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” plans in April 2022 at a Heritage Foundation event. A 2024 New York Times analysis found that 182 of 307 Project 2025 authors had ties to Trump and his administration. As of mid-2026, too, the Trump administration had also implemented over 50% of Project 2025’s recommendations.²⁸

Many of these recommendations—from the mass firing of federal employees, to the defunding of key federal agencies, to the radical cuts to USAID that are already estimated to have caused hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths worldwide—were conducted via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”²⁹ This is not a coincidence: like Vance, Musk is intimately linked to key individuals involved with Project 2025. According to the New York Times, Stephen Miller “quietly cultivated a relationship” with Elon Musk after Trump’s first presidential term.³⁰ As DeSmog reported, America First Legal, a not-for-profit organisation and Project 2025 advisory body, founded by Miller and with Russell Vought as its treasurer, created an anti-woke advocacy organisation in 2022 called Citizens for Sanity: Musk was the “central funder” of its campaigns, contributing $43 million to its anti-trans and anti-migrant advertisements.³¹ According to a New Yorker report, Miller and Vought were also the “key nodes” of Project 2025, alongside a “third group launched by the Conservative Partnership Institute,” another key right-wing not-for-profit spearheaded by Jim DeMint, former president of the Heritage Foundation, leading light of the Tea Party movement, and key ally of Trump in his first presidential term.³² After Trump’s win in 2024, Vought would become one of Musk’s key advisers at DOGE. Vought, a self-proclaimed “Christian nationalist” and “chief architect of Project 2025,” assumed responsibility for the Office of Management and Budget, which immediately partnered with DOGE. DOGE thus became the vehicle for much of Project 2025’s implementation: “DOGE’s actions under Musk were indistinguishable from what Project 2025’s ‘Mandate’ called for,” DeSmog concluded. Following Musk’s departure, Vought “inherited” the DOGE agenda, where he continued his mission to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and concentrate power in the hands of the executive.³³

An 'Apple Store' government and other takeaways from Musk's interview on Fox News - POLITICO — Elon Musk in his DOGE t-shirt.

DOGE’s activities enacted key elements of Project 2025. It also arguably followed a blueprint for radical governmental change sketched out by Curtis Yarvin.³⁴ Yarvin argued that Trump should act like the “chairman of the board” in a large corporation, and select a “CEO” to “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts,” take over “state and local governments,” and shut down and replace most “existing important institutions, public and private.” “The new regime must seize all points of power,” Yarvin continued, “without respect for paper protections.”³⁵ Yarvin’s plan was called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—and its similarities with DOGE’s activities under Elon Musk are obvious.

After Trump left office in January 2021, a far-right ecosystem began to coalesce and flourish around the MAGA movement. A blend of committed activists and huge amounts of money ensured that the MAGA movement gained even more institutional and cultural power in its years out of office than it had while Trump was president. Its support for his second presidential run would ultimately be indispensable for his success in 2024. The key players involved in this ecosystem now occupy some of the most influential positions within Trump’s second administration. Though their interests diverge in many respects, they are aligned on several critical points. They believe in vesting extraordinary, dictatorial power in the executive. They believe in dismantling federal bureaucracy and staffing it with loyalists, even if it is illegal and undemocratic to do so. They mostly share a nativist, America-first agenda, which often features intense anti-migrant and racist sentiments. They agree that the state should be weaponised against its opponents, and that they are entitled to undermine democratic electoral processes. They are opposed to any and all strands of leftist politics. In short, they are an alliance of what Slavoj Žižek calls “libertarian fascists”: people whose commitment to the ideals of libertarian individualism has led them to collectively endorse fascistic political methods, forms, and policies.³⁶