Barbarians at the Gates of Rome

You’ve got to hand it to the American right – when they go in for a project, they really go in. Project 2025 isn’t just a shopping list of things they don’t like (though it does read a bit like the grumblings of a retired colonel dictating letters to the Daily Telegraph). No, it’s a full-blown plan to tear up the wiring of the US government and install something a bit more... compliant.

According to the Heritage Foundation – the ones pulling the strings – it’s a “strategy” to restore executive power, tame the federal bureaucracy, and roll back all the woke nonsense. In reality, it’s a blueprint for an ideological purge. A sort of "Make America Theocratic Again" playbook.

Here’s the gist. They want to sack tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with loyalists. Climate regulations? Gone. DEI programmes? Axed. Abortion rights? Bulldozed. LGBTQ+ protections? Not on their watch. Basically, if it happened after 1968, they want it reversed.

And they dress this up as restoring democracy. That’s the bit that’s almost funny – if it weren’t so chilling. Because nothing says "democracy" like firing people for insufficient ideological purity and handing total control to one man at the top. It’s less “government reform” and more “banana republic chic”.

One of the more telling aspects is their hostility towards universities. Because make no mistake – an attack on universities is an attack on truth itself. Universities, at their best, are predicated on the idea of seeking truth – through evidence, challenge, debate, and rigorous thinking. To undermine them is to say, quite baldly, that truth no longer matters – only loyalty. And when that happens, we’re no longer dealing with politics. We’re dealing with a cult.

It’s a strategy, yes – but not for governing well. It’s a strategy for seizing and holding power, for silencing opposition, and for reshaping the state into a blunt instrument. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect from Orban or Erdogan. But in the Land of the Free? Trump’s early second-term actions – methodically dismantling federal oversight, gutting civil rights protections, and withdrawing from global commitments – echo the Vandals’ sack of Rome: swift, ideologically driven destruction dressed up as restoration. Just as the Vandals stripped Rome of its institutions and treasures under the pretence of liberation, Trump's alignment with Project 2025 cloaks its radical restructuring of American governance in the rhetoric of patriotism and efficiency. But beneath the surface lies a deliberate unpicking of democratic norms, much like the Vandals’ legacy – not builders, but breakers, whose name became synonymous with wanton ruin.