Project 2025 expresses the MAGA movement’s alleged hatred of what they like to call the Deep State, and it lays out detailed plans for dismantling it. However, in classic 1984 double think, it also outlines its plans for installing its own Deep MAGAstate, the evil twin of the one they want to destroy.
The “deep state” they want to replace is the administrative infrastructure that’s been built over the decades to implement policy decisions and the laws that have been passed by Congress.
Except at the topmost tiers, the current administrative infrastructure is made up of civil servant technocrats who have been hired for their experience and expertise and they do their jobs regardless of their own political views or the political wills of any administration. They have to obey the law.
National Weather Service meteorologists chart the paths of hurricanes according to the science of meteorology. Food and Drug Administration researchers review and approve new drugs based on medical science. National Wildlife Service biologists decide whether a bird is endangered based on how many there are left and what their chances are without some help.
In the Deep MAGAstate, the Orange Fraud Felon Assaulting Liar draws on a map with his black Sharpee to warn Alabamans that, look out, that hurricane is gonna lift your bass boat into your neighbor’s yard; that’s what his brown-nose meteorologist told him, after he appointed him and threatened his job if he didn’t hand over that Sharpee.
In the Deep MAGAstate, some wingnut judge in Texas who knows nothing about medical science says mifepristone will bring the Apocalypse, so the FDA doesn’t know jack. From now on, judges with conservative Christian beliefs instead of specialized medical training will decide what drugs are safe and effective.
Republicans are so worried that they can’t win elections anymore because ultra-conservative white people are being replaced by Jewish bald eagles and brown plague-vectors that you have to rig as many elections as you can with your Deep MAGAstate trigger fingers. I say trigger fingers rather than sticky fingers because, if the Deep MAGAstate operatives they’ve jammed into those county election offices don’t do what they’re told, then the Deep MAGAstate will have to send in their armed paramilitary brownshirts to hang the Vice President, one of the last remaining bald eagles in the Gasping Oathbreaking Party. Though I think he might have been faking the eagle part; he looks more like a turkey to me, even if he did do one right thing.
You don’t have to take my word for it. It’s already happened; it’s happening right now.
Once the civil service has been eliminated, the Orange Hurricane Sharpee Master’s flunkies will fire everybody they can find who ever used the words “climate change” or “global warming” and order the phrases deleted from all government documents, just like DeSantis did in Florida. In their place, they will hire some white Christian nationalist who can’t wait for the apocalypse, just like Ronald Reagan did when he hired Interior Secretary James Watt, who leased out federal lands at an apocalyptic rate and justified it by saying that it was all going to burn up day after tomorrow in the endtimes, anyway. Can’t you just see Jesus coming back to rule on a vast cloud of smoke from the mega-fires in the West? And that’s heaven’s trumpets you hear blaring and thankfully drowning out the sound of your children coughing up their lungs.
In the Deep MAGAstate, relief money won’t go to help with California fires, but will go to Wyoming. The only thing that kept His Hatefulness from doing just that to California when he was in the OFFAL Office was that aids showed him maps that proved the fires were burning up the homes of people who had voted for him. But forget about the town that Liz Cheney lives in, red-red Wyoming or not. Can’t you just hear the jubilant chanting of “Let it burn!” in the Situation Room?
The Deep MAGAstate will ban the sale of blue dahlias, claiming that they hurt the eyes of any true American.
The Deep MAGAstate will look the other way when, emulating the much-missed Bull Connor, local sheriffs shoot innocent young unarmed black men, wishing they could use a rope and a tree instead. But the next day, they will raid you daughter’s house looking for birth control pills. If they find them, they will haul her off to an already overcrowded prison, wishing they could use forced sterilization instead because she’s not fit to be a mother—there will be bleak irony everywhere you look. If they don’t find any birth control pills or diaphragms, they’ll trash the house in a rage and take the change they found in your granddaughter’s smashed piggy bank.
Nobody will hold anybody to account because the Deep MAGAstate has packed local jurisdictions, the justice department, the courts, and Congress with cronies. You can be sure they’re agents of the Deep MAGAstate if their knees are bleeding through worn holes in their camo pants and their lips are permanently puckered, with an orange ring around the mouth—or is that brown? It’s hard to tell.