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Donald Trump says he knows nothing about Project 2025. Yet the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators call it "the Presidential Transition Project." In "Project 2025: Revealed!"--season 3 of "Democracy's Chief Executive: The Podcast--Peter Shane and Dale Russakoff explore Project 2025's ambitious right-wing agenda and recruiting effort, designed to empower a hoped-for, but unnamed “next conservative president.” Experts on education, reproductive rights, immigration, the environment, DEI, labor, and much else answer Peter and Dale's questions about the Project's overall ideology and specific
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Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection(ICAP) and Visiting Professor of Law at theGeorgetown University Law Center, discusses with Peter Project 2025’s dangerous vision of a deeply politicized Justice Department acting in lockstep with a president bent on punishing his adversaries. She also explains why such a president is now likely freed of criminal liability for corruption in supervising the Justice Department (or the IRS or the CIA or . . .), given the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision in Trump v. United States.
Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at American Progress, explains to Peter the likely burdens on middle-income and lower-income families if Congress were to enact the near-term and longer-term/fundamental tax reform programs recommended by Project 2025. (As a bonus, he even explains tariffs!)
NYU law professor and labor and employment law expert Cynthia Estlund explores the conflicting impulses evident in Project 2025’s chapteron labor policy—the one chapter that cites the Book of Genesis. For example, it wants to shift the focus away from DEI except for accommodating religious employers and employees; to introduce more flexibility into labor-management relations, except when it comes to worker decisions to unionize; and to cut back on temporary visas for legal non-citizen seasonal workers in agriculture and other sectors, unless that would actually be a bad idea. (The report offers both possibilities!)
Leading DEI consultants Angela Vallot and Mitchell Karp discuss with Peter and Dale what they believe is at the root of Project 2025’s hostility to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, how cutting DEI programs can hurt government performance, and the difference between actual DEI practice and the caricature conjured up by the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators.
Georgetown law professor Lisa Heinzerling, herself a former EPA official and accomplished environmental litigator, explains to Peter and Dale Project 2025’s proposals for disempowering the EPA and creating a “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” attitude towards climate change and environmental protection.
Peter discusses with noted presidential scholar Andrew Rudalevige what policies a new president could institute or reverse with the proverbial stroke of a pen, and why he expects a second TrumpAdministration would be more successfully aggressive than the first.
Yale law professor and prominent immigration scholar Cristina Rodríguez explains to Peter and Dale the President’s central role in implementing immigration policy and why the Project 2025 agenda is both substantively misguided and unrealistic in its goals.
Paul Verkuil, formerly head of the Administrative Conference of the United States, discusses with Peter what is at risk both practically and constitutionally if a president tries to make loyalty to his or her agenda the paramount qualification for government service.
Noted legal historian of American educationDiane Ravitch discusses howProject 2025’s vision for the future of federal education policy would hurt low-income communities and undermine genuine education as the goal of K-12 schooling.
Attorney and long-time women’s rights advocate Lynn Paltrow discusses with Peter and Dale how the overruling ofRoe v. Wade has already worked to the detriment of women and what the Project 2025agenda portends for women’s privacy and health care.
Public law scholar Peter Shane and journalist and public affairs writer Dale Russakoff lay the ground work for a series of deep dives into Project 2025 by explaining its four “pillars,” its animating vision, and the key individuals and organizations behind it
On this special "Connect the Dots" episode, co-hosts Peter Shane and Dale Russakoff discuss how Season 2 episodes on "Disqualifying an Insurrectionist President," "The Electoral Count Act and the Rule of Law," and "The Electoral College" affected their reactions to the Supreme Court argument on the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to exclude Donald Trump from a primary ballot.
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In a bonus episode, Peter and Dale explore with two constitutional scholars whether the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 Disqualification Clause bars Donald J. Trump from again serving as president. Gerard Magliocca, whose 2020 academic research helped to spark interest in the question, and Garrett Epps, author of Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America, discuss whether the Disqualification Clause covers presidents, whether Donald Trump’s documented actions amount to “insurrection,” and whether Congress needs to enact enabling legislation before the Disqualification Clause becomes operative. They survey the Supreme Court’s options in reviewing the Colorado Supreme Court decision barring Trump from a presidential primary ballot in that state–and the legal and political implications of the different possibilities.
This last regular episode of the season asks whether American democracy is well-served by the institution of the presidency in its current form. Is there an irreconcilable tension between the president as the nation’s foremost mobilizer of party politics and the president as a faithful, steady, law-bound manager of government? Are there aspects of our system for choosing presidents that expand the prospects for effective democracy, or does the system actually increase the risk of democratic failure? Do popular frustrations with our constitutional separation of powers help lay the groundwork for authoritarianism?
Peter and Dale explore these fundamental issues with Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, one of the nation’s foremost presidential scholars, and Bertrall Ross, the Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law and director of the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy at the University of Virginia.
This special super-sized episode explores, first, the process of certifying a new president-elect on the sixth day of January as that process is supposed to unfold and, second, the implications of prosecuting a former president for allegedly conspiring to disrupt that process. In the first part, Peter gets a briefing on the Electoral Count Act and its reform from Protect Democracy counsel, Genevieve Nadeau. He and Dale then explore decision making around the Trump indictment with former U.S. Attorney General and current Belmont University law school dean Alberto Gonzalez and former career prosecutor and Justice Department official Mary McCord, now Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at the Georgetown University Law Center.
What is it like to be the chief lawyer for a major party’s presidential candidate in a national campaign? NYU law professor Bob Bauer, general counsel to Obama for America, the president’s campaign organization, in 2008 and 2012, and Ben Ginsberg, national counsel to the 2000 and 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaigns, as well as Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, explore with Peter and Dale the roles and challenges of presidential campaign lawyering. They also discuss their roles in co-chairing the Obama Presidential Commission on Election Administration, as well as their co-founding of the Election Official Legal Defense Network.
The U.S. has an unfortunate history of officials in power often trying to make it more difficult for voters to vote. Recent years have also witnessed a sharp escalation in intimidation and threats targeting the poll workers and administrative officials responsible for assuring a complete and accurate ballot count. Peter and Dale talk to two voting rights experts–former Justice Department official and current law professor Gilda R. Daniels and Brennan Center vice president for democracy Wendy R. Weiser about their greatest worries going into the 2024 elections–and where they see progress.
There is no other major democracy that chooses presidential candidates the way Americans do–a system in which primary voters play such a large role and the formal role of party leadership is so limited. Political scientist and presidential campaign veteran Elaine Kamarck and election law scholar Rick Pildes explore with Peter and Dale the advantages and disadvantages of the major parties’ primary system, how it has evolved in unexpected directions since the 1970s, and why the system would now be difficult to change.
Actual presidential elections occur only every four years, but political polls operate every year, week-in and week-out, supposedly to give Americans a real-time sense of who is up and who is down in the political horse race. How do the political candidates themselves use polling as a strategic tool? Can Americans trust polls that are not based on random sampling? Why do polls taken at more or less the same time sometimes seem to point in opposite directions? Peter and Dale examine the evolution and current practice of opinion research with leading Republican pollster Whit Ayres and leading Democratic pollster Geoff Garin.
U.S. presidential elections turn on the mechanics of what is now called the “electoral college,” an institution that does not work at all as the Framers expected and which all too frequently threatens to undo the will of the voters. Peter and Dale talk with historian Alex Keyssar and leading election law scholar Ned Foley about electoral college mechanics, its evolution, how its creation and operation reflect our history of race and regionalism, the prospects for abolishing it, and the perhaps brighter prospects for reforms that will reduce the risk of election misfires.
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