Over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump made two Truth Social posts that offer our best insights yet into what a second Trump administration will look like.
In one, Trump announced his intent to appoint Thomas Homan to the expansive role of “border czar” — a position that, naturally, would report exclusively to the president. In another, Trump conditioned his endorsement of the next Senate majority leader on Republicans allowing him vast leeway to bypass Congress in filling senior government positions.
Both ideas would represent expansions of presidential power, and both come directly from the Project 2025 playbook that Trump unconvincingly disavowed during the campaign. In less than a week, Trump has succeeded in realigning the Republican Party with the extreme Project 2025 vision of an authoritarian executive. Now the future president would like official approval to go on a loyalist hiring spree.
Homan’s new gig is a great example of just how cozy Trump has always been with the sweeping goals of Project 2025. The position now includes, among other responsibilities, overseeing “all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin.” Homan has promised the return of controversial workplace raids under a second Trump administration. He also remains a committed defender of family separation policies, which created a humanitarian crisis when Trump first implemented the proposal in 2018.
Homan sits to the right of even most Republicans when it comes to advancing anti-immigration policies. Earlier this year, he drew criticism after declaring that “families can be deported together” to avoid family separations, even while acknowledging that some of those families include American citizens.
That remark barely raised media eyebrows when Homan first said it. Now that extreme idea is on track to becoming official government policy.
It isn’t a coincidence that some of Homan’s most infamously severe immigration ideas sound a lot like what’s written down in Project 2025. In fact, Homan was a major contributor to Project 2025, and his influence is clearly visible in the playbook’s immigration section. And now, just four months after noisily distancing himself from Project 2025, Trump is using one of his first and most far-reaching appointments to let the extremists know his condemnation meant nothing.
Fortunately for Trump, Homan doesn’t need to be confirmed by the Senate. But the president-elect is already locking in a way around the constitutional inconvenience of Senate confirmation, by demanding Republicans help him subvert the process entirely, allowing effectively unlimited use of recess appointments.
That spares Trump the trouble of needing to expose his extremist nominees to public scrutiny or on-the-record testimony. It’s also exactly what I warned he would do. I didn’t expect him to prove me right so fast, but Republicans are wasting no time preparing the runway for America’s grim slide into illiberalism.
“Project 2025 officially recommends liberally invoking the Vacancies Act to fill Senate-confirmed roles with loyalist acting officials from the first day of Trump’s presidency,” I wrote. “The result will be an administration where loyalty to Trump is the first and only concern.”
Now Trump is pursuing that approach, too. A cowed Republican Senate will more than likely give Trump his way on recess appointments, accelerating the upper chamber’s slide into irrelevance as the presidency grows even stronger. That’s bad news for the democratic process, because the transparency provided by public confirmation hearings matters. When Americans delegate their power to government officials, they deserve to know who those officials are and what they believe.
The alternative is a system that veers ever-further from representative government, as a growing army of unconfirmed officials puts loyalty to the president ahead of loyalty to the Constitution. Senate Republicans are falling all over themselves to make clear they have no interest in serving as a check on Trump or his officials. Without the transparency of confirmation hearings, the American people can’t play their accountability role, either.
The election is over. What matters now is how the Trump administration governs. The early signs indicate a president more interested in advancing Republicans’ most extreme ideas than in strengthening our weakened democratic system.
With the Senate also on the verge of sacrificing its constitutional responsibilities and Democrats knocked down after last Tuesday’s drubbing, it isn’t even clear who could offer effective resistance to Trump’s looming abuses.
Trump and Republicans are hard at work building a government by, for and of Project 2025 alumni. So much for the people.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
