Love him or hate him, President Trump commands an inordinate share of our attention. He is easily the most galvanizing politician of my lifetime. But while Trump entertains the MAGA faithful and generates outrage among his opponents, Russell Vought, Scott Bessent, Stephen Miller and others, with a big assist from the Supreme Court, implement the directives of Project 2025 and systematically dismantle our democracy. While we obsess over blowing up suspected drug-carrying boats and the Epstein files, approximately 50% of Project 2025 has already been implemented.

Project 2025 is the crowning achievement of an effort originated by the Koch brothers and a few other ultra wealthy conservative libertarians in the 1970s. The Koch brothers, ultra-wealthy industrialists, wanted very low taxes, a rollback of environmental, safety and workplace regulations, a minimal social safety net and an extremely limited federal government, all of which would serve their interests. Over the last 50 years, the Kochs and others have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create an infrastructure of think tanks and organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. This movement has captured one of our major political parties.

Project 2025 is over 900 pages, but the essence of it is lower taxes, particularly for the wealthy; environmental, workplace and public safety deregulation; a much more limited social safety net and greatly expanded power for the president.

The U.S. history of deregulation is not good. Deregulation of the financial industry began in the 1970s and promptly gave us the Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s, the dot.com bubble in 2000, the Enron and World.com scandals and most recently, the subprime mortgage crisis that nearly blew up the world economy and led to the Great Recession. My guess is that the next financial crisis is not far off, fueled by cryptocurrency and huge investments in artificial intelligence. Slashing environmental, health and safety policies will have similar adverse results.

I don’t know if the Kochs envisioned their movement culminating in an authoritarian takeover of the government, and on the surface, it doesn’t make sense that a libertarian small government movement would support an authoritarian system with the president wielding almost unlimited power. The Project 2025 policies are so unpopular that voters will reject them if given the chance. Look at what is already happening with aggressive immigration enforcement and Affordable Care subsidies; most Americans are not supportive of these policies. Do we, as a nation, really want more pollution, lower taxes on the wealthy and big corporations, health care for those that can afford it, less oversight over Wall Street, etc?

This is why Republicans are doing everything in their power to prevent free and fair elections. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Voting Rights Act is null and void, and red states are taking advantage of it. States are purging voter rolls, implementing new ID requirements, reducing the number of polling places and drop boxes in minority precincts, limiting absentee ballots and mail-in voting, all on the false narrative that voter fraud is a problem. States are also redistricting congressional districts with unprecedented aggression. And although states are tasked with running elections, the federal government has weighed in and demanded to inspect voter rolls, and threatened to disallow the use of voting machines and mail-in voting.

President Trump could disappear tomorrow, and this project would continue without skipping a beat. The movement started by the Koch brothers has been chipping away at American democracy for 50 years, and the people driving it will not stop now; this is the moment they have been working and waiting for, and they intend to implement their agenda and remain in power indefinitely. Trump has only provided them the power to achieve their goals; he is not the architect. Don’t be misled and think this is all about Trump; he is the entertainer and distractor in chief while his minions do the dirty work of dismantling democracy for the benefit of the wealthy.

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John Monroe is a resident of Saranac Lake.