TOM EATON: Wanted by a future Uncle Sam: ardent believers in Trump and Jesus

“Project 2025” sounds like nonsense, the sort of thing you find sloshing around in the more paranoid corners of the lefty internet, but I regret to tell you it’s all astonishingly true: there is a fairly solid chance that the US is about to introduce a form of cadre deployment that will make the ANC look like a team of Swedish forensic auditors. 

To be fair, a lot of people have seen it coming from a long way off. They’ll tell you that Project 2025 — the evangelical right’s plan to purge Washington’s professional civil service and replace it with true believers should Donald Trump win in November — is merely the conclusion of a process begun in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan courted the religious right to get elected. 

It’s also true that every new administration in the US practises a form of cadre deployment, parachuting in loyalists and yes-men into all the top positions.

What makes Project 2025 so startling though, is that this is the first time a candidate’s team has publicly planned to purge the professional bureaucracy below those top positions — 50,000 government employees in all, according to the plan’s backers — and replace them with workers selected not for their competence or professionalism but for how ardently they believe in Trump and Jesus. 

The many think-tanks and foundations that form part of Project 2025 seem to represent a fairly broad church, but it is a church nonetheless, with policies heavily focused on strengthening Christian nationalism in the US, as well as rewriting US history to insist that what the founding fathers were really after was a Christian theocracy with Jesus as president and an assault rifle as his vice-president.

Certainly, someone like Russell Vought, head of the Centre for Renewing America and a key figure in planning Trump’s second term, didn’t reveal himself to be a huge fan of separating church and state when he suggested that criteria for allowing immigrants into the US should include whether they “accept Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history”. 

Perhaps this is why Trump has recently taken time away from lying about the election in 2020 to lying about something far closer to home for his religious allies: the imaginary persecution of Christians in the US.

At a rally earlier this month Trump insisted that “under Crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this nation has ever seen before”, adding that “Catholics, in particular, are being targeted and evangelicals are surely on the watch list as well”.

It was nonsense, of course, but to Christians who feel their world is crumbling around them, and for the sharp-toothed hustlers who exploit them, the election in November — and the increasingly likely prospect of a Trump win — is a moment of rapture and Project 2025 is a horn blown outside the walls of Jericho. 

According to Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation (which, you will be stunned to learn, doesn’t support sending aid to Ukraine and doesn’t think Joe Biden won in 2020), Project 2025 is a “clarion call to come to Washington”. 

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” he told PBS last year. “People need to lay down their tools and step aside from their professional life and say ‘this is my lifetime moment to serve’.”

No doubt these words would have sounded inspirational to many people, but as I read them I found myself fascinated by their (perhaps unwitting) honesty. Because there it was in black and white, not even between the lines but right out in the open: lay down the tools of your trade — the things you know how to use — and step away from the things you know how to do, to take over one of the largest bureaucracies on the planet and run it using nothing but the power of your dislike for liberals.

But Vought was even clearer, telling AP: “The president’s day one will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state.” To reiterate, he meant that as a good thing. Vought smashing the administrative state — the thing at the centre of the vast federal system that runs schools and hospitals and collects taxes and fixes roads — was something to aspire to.

It’s possible that both Dans and Vought believe they want to replace the US’ central bureaucracy with something that will serve Americans better. Unlikely, but possible. But I can’t help thinking about SA and cadre deployment, and the fact we’ve learnt at such great cost — that the civil service is the state, or at least the state’s ability to do any of the things that define it as a state. Break that and the state is broken. And people in broken states will vote for almost anything.

SA’s bureaucracy will never be sexy. Indeed, calling for a professional, well-trained civil service, ring-fenced from political interference, sounds almost callous next to demanding things such as access to water and adequate housing. But as our politicians promise us salvation perhaps a bit of political atheism is in order. After all, we don’t want everlasting life. We just want our current life not to be spent in a queue at home affairs.

Yes, you can promise the earth, but without a professional, uncaptured civil service, well, Jesus take the wheel. 

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.