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Project 2025 Is Here.
With Trump’s return to the presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe.
More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy, which is proving to be the source for Trump’s anti-democratic policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign. Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.
Project 2025’s stated goal is to create an “ideal” America that would see women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color, and others deprived of their hard-won constitutional rights and the erosion of environmental and education protections. It also advocates for a frightening centralization of power in the executive branch, something Trump is keen to achieve. Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.
GPAHE monitors how Project 2025 is becoming a reality and reports on the ties between the project and the administration, and its impact on the American people and democracy. We track Project 2025 activities at the federal, state, and local levels, and their plans for an authoritarian and Christian Nationalist America.
This week, we look at how a pregnant Tennessee woman was denied medical care for being unmarried in an early skirmish of Project 2025’s war on women. We’ll also examine the Supreme Court’s use of the shadow docket to push through Trump’s Project 2025 policies, and how Christian nationalist Ryan Walters, superintendent of schools in Oklahoma and anti-porn crusader, was reportedly caught with naked women on his office television during a Board of Education meeting.
The Handmaid’s Tale Becomes Reality: Project 2025’s War on Women Has Already Begun
A 35-year-old pregnant woman was denied prenatal care in Tennessee for being unmarried. Her healthcare provider told her to “seek care elsewhere due to differing values” — not because of medical complications or insurance issues, but because she wasn’t married.
This case represents the first victim of Tennessee’s Medical Ethics Defense Act. The law, which took effect in April 2025, grants physicians unprecedented power to deny healthcare based on religious, moral, or ethical beliefs. Within three months, the legislation had moved from abstract policy to personal trauma.
“Instantly, I felt my stomach drop, and I knew this wasn’t right,” the woman told a packed Jonesborough town hall. She has been with her partner for 15 years, already has a 13-year-old child, and maintains a home that serves as the neighborhood kids’ “hangout house.” None of this mattered under the new legal framework.
The Medical Ethics Defense Act directly implements Project 2025’s vision for traditional family structures and gives healthcare providers unprecedented power over those seeking treatment. Rural patients, like this Tennessee mother, with nowhere else to go receive no protections. Referrals to other providers aren’t required of the caregivers denying treatment. Legal recourse for denied care simply doesn’t exist.
Rep. Bryan Terry (R-Murfreesboro), who sponsored the bill, promised it would help Tennessee recruit physicians. Instead, the state has been hemorrhaging OB-GYNs since its total abortion ban in August 2022. Critics predicted exactly this outcome — vulnerable patients judged in real time, with catastrophic consequences for anyone failing arbitrary religious tests.
Project 2025’s blueprint explicitly promotes Christian nationalist concepts of Biblical family arrangements. “The American family is in crisis,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts wrote in Project 2025’s foreword. “Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts.”
As did GPAHE, Carrie Baker, a Smith College professor, warned of Project 2025’s systematic punishment of unmarried women in July 2024. “There’s a lot in Project 2025 about reviving the traditional patriarchal family,” she explained. “It stigmatizes single parenthood and makes cuts to social support for single parents. To incentivize marriage, it punishes people that don’t get married, taking Title X funding, which is supposed to go towards family planning and contraception, and redirects it towards ‘marriage education’ and the importance of marriage.”
The Tennessee mother-to-be’s experience demonstrates how abstract policy becomes personal trauma. She described her response to being turned away with heartbreaking composure: “I didn’t want to react in a place of anger, because I felt like that was just going to support any judgment that the provider already had against me. I said ‘thank you for your time’ and left.”
She now drives across state lines to Virginia for prenatal care — her punishment for failing to conform to religious standards that Project 2025 seeks to impose nationwide. Her geographic mobility and financial resources represent privileges many rural patients lack.
Lynn Paltrow of Pregnancy Justice, an organization that advocates for women’s reproductive rights, explains the broader context. “After Dobbs, there is no longer a need for pretense,” she observes. “States can outlaw abortion. So, all of the social outcomes lawmakers sought to accomplish through the distraction and politicization of abortion, they can now do directly, like penalizing unmarried women. The need for pretense is gone.”
When the Tennessee woman contacted her elected representatives seeking help, their responses exposed the politics behind the policy. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn remained silent. Republican Senator Bill Hagerty’s staff reportedly delivered a disturbing message for a public servant: “he’s not obligated to listen to his constituents.”
Tennessee State Representative Gloria Johnson (D) offered a stark assessment when she learned about the situation. “It’s absolutely not ‘pro-life’ — and not very Christian either,” she said. “And who else are they not going to treat? What about someone who’s addicted to drugs or alcohol, or who’s struggling with mental health? If you can just refuse treatment to anyone whose lifestyle you disagree with — that’s not medical ethics. That’s fascism.”
Johnson’s warning identifies the slippery slope inherent in the legislation and in Project 2025’s other harsh policies. Now that healthcare providers can deny care based on moral judgments, the potential for discrimination becomes limitless, extending to anyone who fails conservative religious standards — LGBTQ+ individuals, people with addiction, and those struggling with mental health issues.
The Tennessee woman’s story is that of an early casualty in Project 2025’s broader assault on women’s autonomy and healthcare access. Her experience reveals how Christian nationalist policies become concrete harm, tangible at the local level when pregnant women are denied care, forced to travel hundreds of miles, and punished for personal choices that offend conservative sensibilities.
With Project 2025 a reality, Tennessee’s Medical Ethics Defense Act serves as a model being replicated across conservative states. Oklahoma has followed with similar legislation. Texas has introduced comparable measures. Florida also has a law on moral gatekeeping in healthcare.
Rural communities bear the heaviest burden under this system. In areas with limited healthcare options, patients denied care by one provider may have nowhere else to turn. The Tennessee woman’s ability to drive to Virginia represents a privilege many others lack — geographic mobility, financial resources, time away from work and family.
Project 2025’s vision of theocratic governance has moved from proposed policy to lived reality for women like the one who sat in that Tennessee doctor’s office, hearing words that shattered her understanding of healthcare as a human right. Her experience marks the beginning of Project 2025’s systematic reconstruction of American society — one denied patient at a time.
How the Supreme Court’s Emergency Docket Became Trump’s Project 2025 Express Lane
The Supreme Court’s transformation began long before Trump returned to the White House. Leonard Leo, the far-right Catholic integralist and Federalist Society co-chair who has close ties to far-right Catholic movement Opus Dei, spent decades methodically stacking federal courts with conservative judges.
Leo advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, and helped confirm the Court’s three other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. His influence extends far beyond judicial appointments. His dark money network has poured millions into Project 2025 advisory groups. Nearly half of Project 2025’s collaborating organizations have received funding from Leo’s network of fundraising groups. In 2022 alone, Leo directed $216 million to far-right organizations through his network of nonprofits. It’s no wonder that ProPublica has dubbed him “The Court Whisperer.”
When Trump ordered mass layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal employees across two dozen agencies and federal judges moved to block them, the Supreme Court intervened with an unsigned, two-paragraph order. No hearings. No explanations. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stood alone in dissent, writing that her colleagues had decided to “release the president’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.”
In the first six months of his second term, Trump has brought 19 emergency applications to the Supreme Court— “an unprecedented number compared to every prior presidency,” according to Georgetown Law professor Stephen Vladeck. Each decision cleared the path for another Project 2025 priority to take effect.
During the 16 years under Bush and Obama, the government made emergency requests to the Supreme Court just eight times total, succeeding only four times.
As David Graham, author of the recent book The Project, puts it, Project 2025 envisions “an America where abortion is strictly illegal, sex is closely policed, public schools don’t exist, and justice is harsh, all in accordance with fundamentalist Christian principles.” The Supreme Court’s shadow docket decisions have enabled multiple policies from this agenda.
When Trump moved to eliminate the Department of Education — a central Project 2025 demand — lower courts blocked the dismantling. Education Secretary Linda McMahon planned to strip federal oversight of public schools, eliminate programs serving disadvantaged students, and transfer educational authority to the states. Disregarding the harms that will come from the more conservative states. The Supreme Court overturned the lower court order without providing legal reasoning.
The contrast with previous administrations is stark. When Biden attempted student loan forgiveness, the Court produced a voluminous analysis in Biden v. Nebraska explaining why the Department of Education lacked authority, ultimately blocking the program. For Trump’s agency eliminations, the justices provided no written explanation.
Other Project 2025 priorities received similar treatment. Project 2025 calls for removing transgender people from military service — the Court allowed the Pentagon to proceed with the ban. Project 2025 advocates expanded deportations to “third countries” regardless of migrants’ safety — the justices cleared the path for deportations to war-torn nations where people face torture or death. Project 2025 policies sought to give Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” access to Americans’ private Social Security data — the Court overruled lower courts that had demanded transparency protections.
Justice Jackson, who does not owe her seat on the Supreme Court to Leonard Leo, wrote 24 opinions during the term that ended last month, making her the second-most productive writer behind only Justice Clarence Thomas. Many of her opinions targeted her colleagues’ handling of Trump cases.
“With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace,” she wrote. “But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”
Jackson accused the Roberts majority of favoring wealthy interests in standard cases and being unduly influenced by Trump in shadow docket decisions, citing the “court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this president’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture,” and creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.”
The conservative majority pushed back directly. “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in an opinion signed by all five other Republican appointees.
Jackson continued her criticism outside the courthouse. Speaking to lawyers in New Orleans, she called the conservative bloc’s decisions “an existential threat to the rule of law.” At another event in Indianapolis, she said “the state of our democracy” kept her awake at night.
The shadow docket was designed for genuine emergencies like death penalty appeals. Under Trump, it has become something different. Cases on the shadow docket receive no extensive briefings or hearings. Decisions come with little explanation, sometimes without indicating which justices voted for or against. The justices produced just 56 opinions this term in cases that had been briefed and argued — the lowest number since the 1930s. Meanwhile, they issued decision after decision on Trump’s emergency requests.
Jackson warned about where this leads. “The majority’s ruling … is … profoundly dangerous, since it gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.” Her colleagues continued issuing unsigned orders in the shadows.
The Moral Crusader’s Fall: Ryan Walters and the Hypocrisy of Christian Nationalist Politics
Ryan Walters sat behind his desk during an official State Board of Education meeting on July 24 when multiple nude women appeared on a television screen behind him. Board member Becky Carson stared in disbelief at what she would later describe as “retro” adult content playing on the television in Walters’ office.
This was the same Christian nationalist Ryan Walters who appointed Kevin Roberts — president of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 co-author — to overhaul Oklahoma’s public school curriculum. The same Ryan Walters who leads prayers for Trump on YouTube.
“I was like, ‘What am I seeing?'” Carson recalled. Her mind raced — maybe the woman had “a body suit on.” Reality crashed down: “That is not a body suit. And I hate to even use these terms, but I said, ‘Those are her nipples.’ And then I was looking closer, and I got a full-body view, and I was like, ‘That is pubic hair.'”
Walters has spent years railing against schools for “pushing pornography” because they shelved celebrated books like The Kite Runner. This is the same superintendent who declared about one school district that “Edmond Public Schools not only allows kids to access porn in schools, they are doubling down to keep pornography on the bookshelves.”
Carson confronted him. “What is on your TV? What am I watching?” she demanded. Walters looked up with surprise and then came desperate fumbling with the controls as he tried to switch off the screen. What followed? Nothing. No apology. No explanation.
Walters has constructed his political identity as Oklahoma’s moral guardian — mandating Bible instruction in public schools and threatening teachers who refuse with license revocation. With Project 2025 supporter PragerU, he’s developed ideology tests to screen teachers from “progressive” states, questioning their beliefs on “the fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.”
This wasn’t his first pornographic incident. In March 2023, Walters emailed pornographic images to state legislators, claiming he was providing evidence of inappropriate school materials but offering zero context about which schools supposedly contained the content.
Republican lawmakers expressed alarm over the incident at the meeting. House Speaker Kyle Hilbert demanded Walters “unlock and turn over all relevant devices” for investigation. Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton called the situation “bizarre and troubling,” with board member accounts of the meeting painting “a strange, unsettling scene that demands clarity and transparency.”
Walters deployed predictable deflection. His spokesperson called the story “a junk tabloid lie.” Walters dismissed everything as “blatantly dishonest,” framing criticism as attacks on “the values of the Oklahomans who elected me to challenge the status quo.”
The timing was devastating — the pornography scandal broke the same day Oklahoma’s schools were ranked as some of the worst in the nation. Democratic Party Chair John Waldron captured the irony: “It’s not a surprising coincidence that news of Oklahoma’s schools falling to 50th in the nation arrived within hours of reports of the State Superintendent airing porn in his office.”
Fellow board member Ryan Deatherage noted Walters’ complete lack of remorse: “I was surprised that when he came back to the table, he was not apologetic. I didn’t ever hear an apology for that being on, and he didn’t seem to be fazed that it was on.”
