The year 2025 was marked by the Trump shock: an unprecedented wave of extreme brutality, unapologetic nationalism, and unrestrained extractivism that shook the world as never before since 1945.
To better understand what made it all possible, and how to confront it in the future, we must turn to its roots. Namely, to Project 2025, the 920-page report published by the Heritage Foundation, Washington’s most influential conservative think tank, in 2023. From one state department to another (security, immigration, education, energy, trade, etc.), the report outlines the strategy to follow after taking office, targeted for January 2025. It even specifies the content and timetable for executive orders, the presidential decrees signed publicly and in rapid succession by Donald Trump since his inauguration.
The report drew on the work of hundreds of conservative experts – as they call themselves – brought together by the foundation, which is lavishly funded by corporations and billionaires. What stands out most when reading the report today is the degree of technical, political and ideological preparation behind the Trump administration. Over the past year, Trump has followed the plans laid out by Project 2025 almost to the letter. The new National Security Strategy published by the White House on December 5 reads almost like a copy-and-paste of the project.
Revealingly, Project 2025 identifies several political and ideological enemies. First, there are the globalist liberals, staunch advocates of absolute free trade and unfettered globalization, who are portrayed as useful idiots. Easy to defeat and despise, these liberal elites care little for deindustrialization, job losses and the destruction of local communities and family ties. In contrast, the proud conservatives behind Project 2025 claim to protect these communities. They do so first by asserting US power in the world, relying heavily on tariffs and all-out extractivism: outright asset seizures (Ukraine, Panama, Greenland), imposing military tribute on Europe, and doubling down on fossil fuels. Next, they champion hard work, family values, and respect for natural and cultural hierarchies. The scourge of « fatherlessness » (growing up without a father, a situation that particularly affects ethnic minorities) is repeatedly condemned and blamed on liberal narratives that deny traditional gender roles and undermine the traditional family.
But Project 2025 is mainly concerned with an enemy it deems much more dangerous: internationalist socialists and their plans for a global superstate. The fear may seem laughable, as Trumpists sometimes tend to conflate mild-mannered European social democrats with fearsome Marxist revolutionaries. Yet it must be taken seriously. First, because supporters of democratic socialism such as Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani have become very popular among young Americans over the past decade.
Even more importantly, the authors of Project 2025 seem genuinely alarmed by international debates on taxation, climate reparations or reforms of the global financial system that have gained traction since the 2008 crisis and the Paris Agreement of 2015. They loathe Brazil’s proposal to create a global tax on billionaires just as much as they resent the significant issuance of international currency (Special Drawing Rights by the International Monetary Fund) that occurred after the crises of 2008 and 2020. All the more so because the US will soon lose its veto power over such decisions as its share of global GDP declines.
A particularly telling section concerns trade, which takes the very unusual form in Project 2025 of two chapters setting out opposing positions. The main chapter advocates an avalanche of tariffs closely resembling what Trump implemented in 2025. Like the US president, the author seems to be under no illusions about the extent of industrial job creation this could bring. In general, the report displays little empathy for the poorest and relies on an instrumental, paternalistic and hierarchical approach to the working-class vote. The main objective of tariffs seems to be to generate revenue for the federal government and to continue dismantling the progressive tax system – a project shared by liberals and conservatives since the 1980s, though conservatives have always maintained a lead in this area.
Project 2025’s second chapter on trade opposes such a strategy. The dissenting conservative author fears that by so openly repudiating the principles of free trade, the door may eventually be opened to global socialist planning. In future, opponents of the market will use this precedent to regulate trade based on social and climate criteria: the ultimate nightmare for conservatives. In the end, Trumpists opted for protectionism for both electoral and financial reasons, but the fear of a socialist drift is clearly acknowledged.
In reality, the true enemy of the nationalist and extractivist right embodied by Trumpists is the global social-democratic left. That left can win, provided it learns to organize and move beyond the liberal ruts of the past. Trumpist brutality is a sign of weakness. The US is losing its grip on the world. Across the Atlantic, some believe they can escape this decline by brandishing weapons and instructing Europeans to preserve their racial purity to maintain the Western alliance. All they will do is further tarnish their country’s image and convince the rest of the world that the future will increasingly be written without them.
This column was first published by Le Monde
Thomas Piketty is professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and author of Capital and Ideology and Capital in the Twenty-First Century (both Belknap Press).
