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AMERICA BROKE SOMETHING WHEN IT GAVE TRUMP A SECOND CHANCE  
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Jamelle Bouie
June 3, 2026
The New York Times
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_ It is not clear that Democrats have any sense of what they want the
American Republic to be, versus a sense of the kinds of policies they
hope to institute. _

, Meghan Marin/Connected Archives

 

The Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership: The
Conservative Promise” — popularly known as Project 2025 — was
much more than a wish list of conservative policy preferences. It was
much more, even, than a blueprint for a second Trump administration.

Project 2025 was, above all, a statement of values and a theory of
governance. Its authors did not simply want to move national
policymaking to the right. They wanted to use the authority of the
executive branch to impose a new regime on the United States.

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,”
declared
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Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, in the summer of
2024. This revolution, he added, “will remain bloodless if the left
allows it.” Russell Vought, who leads the Office of Management and
Budget and was, like Roberts, a key architect of Project 2025, also
spoke publicly
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about the need for a “radical constitutionalism” and a
tribune-like president who would dismantle the New Deal state, sell
the scrap and return the nation to the status quo ante of the 19th
century.

Much of the disruption and destruction of the past year and change is
downstream of the revolutionary orientation of Roberts, Vought and the
other alumni of Project 2025 who have taken up places in and around
the Trump administration. To observe the aggrandizement of power in
the executive, the decimation of the federal bureaucracy, the
destruction of much of the nation’s medical, scientific and public
health infrastructure and the broad attack on racial and gender
equality is to see the many faces of a furious effort to restructure
the existing nation to match the one envisioned by these far-right
ideologues.

If this is all true, and it is, then any plausible response to Project
2025 must include a larger vision for the future of the American
Republic. A Project 2029 cannot be a collection of Democratic Party
agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception of the
nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future
Democratic-led government might wield power. Above all, Democrats must
have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the
wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have
wrought — not for restoration of what was.

As it happens, several Democratic groups are drafting the equivalent
of a Project 2029
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And so far, unfortunately, it is not the reconstruction agenda the
country needs. It is, instead, just another Democratic Party policy
document: a grab bag of ideas stitched together with the usual slogans
and gestures toward economic populism.

It is not that these policies are bad. Most of them, from what has
been revealed, are good: worthwhile plans to break up utility
monopolies, support child-rearing, regulate social media and
artificial intelligence, and curtail corporate abuse.

But none of this reflects or represents a far-reaching or
comprehensive idea of what the nation might be. There is no coherent
worldview at work, nor does there seem to be any inkling or awareness
of the obstacles — structural, political and institutional — that
will confront, and likely stymie, all but the most threadbare and
ineffectual Democratic agendas for governing.

What difference will specific policy items make if there are profound
obstacles to simply governing at all? A Project 2029 that has nothing
to say about either the Senate filibuster, or an ideologically
captured Supreme Court, or extreme partisan gerrymandering — among
other concerns — is not a Project 2029 worth the time or effort.

The same is true for a Project 2029 that fails to speak to questions
of constitutional authority. Democrats need a theory of constitutional
power: a sense of what the Constitution _is_ and how it both
authorizes and legitimizes the kind of government they hope to build.
For Trump-aligned conservatives, the Constitution is an unlimited
grant of executive authority in which sovereignty lies with a
president who is more Bonapartist tribune than Madisonian chief
magistrate. Their American Republic is not one led by and for
self-governing individuals but one directed from above by an executive
who claims to stand as the living embodiment of the national spirit.
The entire country, in the words of the White House, must meet “the
president’s priorities.”

By contrast, it is not clear that Democrats have any sense of what
they want the American Republic to be, versus a sense of the kinds of
policies they hope to institute. This is important because their
constitutional vision, or lack thereof, will shape how they attempt to
rebuild American democracy.

During Reconstruction, after the Civil War, Republicans worked to
refound the nation as a democratic and egalitarian republic that
embodied the values of the Declaration of Independence. “By the
Constitution it is stipulated that ‘the United States shall guaranty
to every state a republican form of government,’” said Senator
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in his eulogy for Abraham Lincoln
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“but the meaning of this guaranty must be found in the birthday
Declaration of the Republic, which is the controlling preamble of the
Constitution. Beyond all question, the United States, when called to
enforce the guaranty, must insist on the equality of all before the
law, and the consent of the governed.” Such, he continued, “is the
true idea of republican government according to American
institutions.”

It was this view that led Republicans, radical and otherwise, to write
their aspirations toward freedom and political equality into the
Constitution through the 14th and 15th Amendments. It also shaped how
they responded to President Andrew Johnson and hostile Supreme Court
justices, who tried to trim and curtail their vision. They did not
just override Johnson’s vetoes; they also impeached him. And they
did not just criticize the court; they took steps to tie its hands,
limit its power and strip its jurisdiction. The extent to which
Republicans in this era operated as an imperial Congress was the
closest this country has ever come to congressional supremacy, the
result of their expansive conception of American democracy.

As they look ahead to 2029 and beyond, Democrats need that kind of
vision. They need, in particular, a commitment to a constitutional
order centered on the power and prerogatives of Congress. And they
need to begin to work through the details of what this will mean in
policy and in law. It is this work that will shape how Democrats
approach the major concerns of the post-Trump moment: the state of the
federal bureaucracy, the scope of executive power and the problem of
judicial supremacy over the political system. It is ambitious, yes.
But so was Project 2025.

“Broken eggs cannot be mended,” Lincoln observed in a reply to
August Belmont, a leading Democratic Party organizer and financier in
New York, who had forwarded to the president the comments of an angry
Louisiana slaveholder who wanted restoration of the Union “as it
was.” Not much later, Lincoln repurposed the quip in different form.
“Broken eggs can never be mended,” he wrote in reference to the
fate of slavery as the war carried on, “and the longer the breaking
proceeds the more will be broken.”

Fort Sumter broke the Union and with it, slavery. Whatever the nation
was or would be in the aftermath of the war, neither the nation nor
its Constitution would protect, support or sanction human bondage.

You can think of this Trump administration as a similar state of
affairs. The American people broke something when they gave Trump a
second chance in office. And there is no going back to the Union as it
was. If Democrats hope to lead the nation to any kind of recovery,
much less renewal, they must understand and internalize this fact of
the matter.

_Broken eggs cannot be mended_. To try to do so, to try to return to
some notion of normality, is to court failure. Worse, it is to play a
repeat of the last Democratic administration, when in pursuit of the
familiar, the Democratic Party all but passed the baton back to
reactionaries working toward something revolutionary.

_JAMELLE BOUIE became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019.
Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate
magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va. _

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* Project 2025
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* Heritage Foundation
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* far right
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* Reconstruction
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* democracy
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* egalitarian society
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* political equality
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* renewal
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