Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann documented in a recent column.

Chris and Jeet Heer talk about Trump’s mobilization of Christian nationalist ideologues in the service of a making the state subservient to big business. We also take up the remarkable supine Democratic Party response, and also possible sources of resistance in the courts, the federal government and, most crucially, from outraged public opinion mobilized into protest.