In the summer of 2015, Steve Bannon watched Donald Trump descend the Trump Tower escalator. He exclaimed: “That’s Hitler!” He meant it, of course, as a compliment.

Bannon would go on to become campaign CEO and a White House staffer, and Trump went on to win his first presidency. He didn’t get to do full Hitler. He did spend four years smashing norms, insulting women, finding “fine people on both sides” of a Nazi march, committing treason (or at least trying to), operating an open-air kleptocracy, mishandling and lying about a pandemic, inciting a coup, surviving two impeachments, and then grabbing dozens of classified documents on his way out the door.

Now, a majority of the American electorate—over 70 million voters—has handed supreme power back to this supremely unqualified, disrespectful, convicted fraudster and sexual abuser who likely avoided prison time for conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. And now, his power to fulfill Bannon’s prophecy is even greater than it was during his first term, thanks to a timorous Republican Party and a Supreme Court that has granted him nearly monarchical immunity.

We are headed into uncharted territory as a people and a nation. Trump and his allies have promised to initiate their radical right-wing agenda the minute after he takes his hand off the Bible on Inauguration Day. We are about to experience an unprecedented assault on the Constitution and our civil liberties related to speech and assembly, and an abandonment of norms related to the military, the Justice Department, and government contracting that will make the first term look, well, normal.

The worst-case scenarios are disturbing, to put it mildly. Will Americans watch behind closed curtains as men in military garb, maybe without identification, hustle their neighbors away? Will we hear of—but never see—the concentration camps, deep in the barren Western deserts, surrounded by razor wire?

The worst-case scenarios are disturbing, to put it mildly. Whose side will the military take, Trump’s or the people’s? Will America come to resemble Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, the “enemy within” rounded up and held without charges? Will women be stopped at state borders and hormone tested for pregnancies? Will Americans watch behind closed curtains as men in military garb, maybe without identification, hustle their neighbors away? Will we hear of—but never see—the concentration camps, deep in the barren Western deserts, surrounded by razor wire?

For this article, I spoke with former government officials; experts in American law, politics, and national security; and civil society NGOs and activists to get consensus on what to expect, and when and how, and what a resistance movement might look like. The consensus was bleak, but many saw a silver lining—a new coalition of Americans from many points on the political spectrum fighting back against autocracy, newly engaged and energized to create a stronger, more vigorous democracy.

Many people believe Trump 2.0 will begin with some orders delivered and carried out at lightning speed. Shock and awe. California Representative Jared Huffman, co-founder of the House Democrats’ Stop Project 2025 Task Force, expects action within minutes of Trump taking the oath of office. “This is not a drill,” Huffman said. “We haven’t been talking about Project 2025 just for campaign fodder. It is truly a wrecking ball aimed at our democracy and our individual rights. I think speed is part of their agenda.”

There are lots of guesses about the order of business on day one, but most agree that Trump will sign orders that include all or some combination of the following:

• Reinstitute Schedule F, a job reclassification Trump lackeys put in place at the tail end of his administration to strip federal employees of job protections, and which President Joe Biden rescinded. Maybe for on-brand cruel entertainment, he will announce he’s firing a large number of such employees as well.
• Pardon all federally charged and convicted January 6 rioters, effectively putting a paramilitary organization on the streets, answerable to Trump.
• Undo Biden’s climate change protections, and instantly reopen federal lands for resource extraction.

In the following hours, days, or weeks, the administration will likely activate some form of Trump’s MAGA-pleasing deportation threat. The logistics of rounding up the millions of “newcomers” who are “poisoning the blood” of America and moving them are still unclear. A sudden nationwide roundup—a mass kidnapping—would immediately normalize extreme use of police powers and a domesticated military unlike any in the history of the country. “There is no doubt that they believe that is the most popular part of their agenda,” said Huffman. “They’re going to just rip that Band-Aid off right away. It’ll be an early test of whether all of us understand that this is the first of many steps to take away our democracy. Maybe a lot of people will look the other way. And so, you know, when they come around for the national abortion ban, or for rolling back civil rights, voting rights, you know, gutting other institutions, they’re well on their way.”

Whether by shock and awe or by frog-boiling, there is no doubt Trump will enact the major Project 2025 priorities.

And the first of those is Schedule F.

The first Trump administration was built around a long-standing Republican goal: to shrink “big gummint,” as George W. Bush sometimes slurred it. In the first term, this goal was sold to the public as revolutionary, in the words of Steve Bannon: deconstruction of the administrative state.

Project 2025 carries vestiges of that ideology. It calls for dismantling the Department of Education. But in other ways, Trump 2.0 will do the exact opposite of smashing the administrative state. It will expand and weaponize it. Under current law, the president gets more than 4,000 political appointees, and their employment ends when the president leaves office. Schedule F allows the president tens of thousands of political appointments, a mass right-wing burrowing into the “deep state.”

National Federation of Federal Employees executive director Steve Lenkart said hundreds of civil servants already know they are going to be fired and put the potential number at 100,000. “It is going to turn into something we have never seen before,” Lenkart said. “It’s hard for people to imagine something getting so bad. I think there’s a little bit of denial for that reason.”

Anti-Trump conservative Bill Kristol is among the Washington insiders not in denial. He participated in a tabletop exercise earlier this year with dozens of lawyers, judges, and elected officials, gaming out what an unleashed, autocratic president could do. Kristol was on the “red,” MAGA/Trump team. They enacted Trump’s desired Schedule F changes right away. “People who were there playing Congress, and Democratic groups, unions, said, well, we’re not going to let you do that,” he recalled. “We’re going to fight you in the courts. Meanwhile, you’re busy intimidating huge numbers of civil servants, firing some, and you don’t have to fire that many. You don’t have to fire all of them. You just have to intimidate all of them, right?”

The plan is already in place: Right-wing operatives associated with the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 have reportedly assembled a list of thousands of MAGAs who filled out a purity test questionnaire. (Agree or disagree? “The police in America are systemically racist?” “Life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death.”) Those people will be brought in to replace career civil servants and presumably will be willing to follow orders........

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