Examining a particular president has become my favourite pastime over recent months, and with recent events, I thought it was high time I contributed my third addendum to my series. The first I wrote back when the 45th President was temporarily blocked from the Colorado and Maine electoral ballots, and the second in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. So, I suppose, here we go again.Â
When I said back in October that all signs pointed to his concepts of a plan being “Project 2025,” I had hoped that I was being naïvely pessimistic. Feeling like I was hedging my bets, I never gave myself the excuse to actually think through the consequences possibly at question – instead, I opted for the safer route of categorizing such paranoid, rash-scratching ramblings as a symptom of being a Brit in America. But here we are, so perhaps my seeming mania was self-imposed.
As of August 2025, the re-elected President has officially enacted almost half of Project 2025’s aims. Out of 317 proposals, 116 are completed, and 63 are currently in progress. That’s a twenty percent hike since March. The six objectives concerning USAID? All completed, and the agency would have been disbanded had it not been for a last-minute court ruling. Gone is UNHRC, gone is WHO, and soon enough, gone too will be NATO and the UN. It’s clear that he wants to win, and so far, he’s almost wholly doing so – because winners never admit and always deny defeat.Â
What I hear you clawing at your cages asking is, “Why did your editor let you publish this article without correcting the title? How stupid can you be!” But – shockingly, you’re all very shocked at this – that was on purpose. Yes, we are seeing Project 2025 happen in front of our very eyes, but I continue to hear no one asking what happens next. Simply put, Project 2028 is my label for the 47th President’s five-year plan.Â
“Trump 2028” is a very real possibility, according to Steve Bannon. Although the President cannot rewrite amendments through Executive Orders, I think he believes he can. That’s half the job. With such strong swathes of supporters, amendments could, and might well, be amended, should the checks and balances the Judiciary tries to provide continue to be ignored. Jan. 6th was one of the scariest days in modern American history, and if he continues to successfully motivate the public, such an event can and will happen again. Representatives and lawmakers, their livelihoods and their families will be threatened, and soon enough, that two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-quarters of the states doesn’t seem entirely too out of the question – especially when the alternatives are a woman of color or an openly gay man. Enough of the voting/electorate bodies hate those futures more than they hate the current president. And even if he is successfully evicted from the Oval Office, he has his nepotist oligarchy of a family ready and rearing to step in; a future that is becoming ever more likely as bruises continue to blossom on Trump’s hands, and he continues to sway to a beat only he can hear while walking his red carpet.
What the New York-born President is trying to become (and arguably succeeding at becoming) is a king. Back in 2018, Time Magazine officially depicted him as a crowned monarch in a mirror, thanks to the illustration by Tim O’Brien. Seven years ago, such a likening of the famous self-tanner to a tyrant was his self-imposed fantasy – and a constitutional textualist’s worst nightmare. But just last month, the crown moved from the mirror to the man. In a post made to Truth Social (a place that wouldn’t know truth if it slapped it across the face), he called out, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” alongside a fake Time Magazine cover of him in a crown. And such self-envisioning isn’t just limited to AI-created art. The President is constantly acquiring power and exceeding constitutional limits. As of today, the incumbent President has signed 196 EOs, compared to “just” 221 in his first presidential term. It’s clear from further posts to his network, including one stating, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law”, that he no longer envisions himself the king – he is the king.
The irony, of course, is that his self-styled monarchy thrives precisely because of the democratic tools meant to prevent it. State legislatures continue bending rules to accommodate him, judges look over their shoulders before ruling against him, and the so-called “loyal opposition” shrinks from confrontation in fear of losing their next primary. Authoritarianism, it turns out, doesn’t always arrive in jackboots but in golf shoes, signed hats, and with chants of “lock her up” recycled against whichever opponent dares to stand next – but jackboots are always quick to follow. For all the talk of safeguarding democracy, America seems unable to defend it when the attacker is also its elected steward, and MAGA’s enemy seems to be the very freedom they supposedly orgasm over.
I’m afraid, this time, I have no warning I can give you in a last-ditch effort to change your minds. What’s done is done, and what’s done is Don. A King can lie, obscure, avoid and ignore; a democratically elected official cannot. A king dictates; an official decides. I ask you, what has the 47th President been doing all this time? America has made a king out of a kid, a kingdom out of a kindom. So, as a British national, why elect the very thing you fought against?Â
I’ll leave you with something that sums up my thoughts and feelings about my year abroad; click here.Â
p.s. you might have read parts of this article before. It was originally published in March, but I swiftly removed it for, well, obvious reasons. One of which rhymes with a J-1 Pisa Polder and the other with Peing an Pinternational Pudent. Now I’m back in the land of the free, and thinking I’ll give the US a miss for the next (roughly) 1237 days, 17 hours, 58 minutes and 29 seconds, I no longer care to be worried.Â