Inside The Trump Plan For 2025 The New Yorker

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 24, 2025, 11:08 PM

inside the trump plan for 2025 the new yorker

One evening in April of 2022, a hundred people milled around a patio at Mar-a-Lago, sipping champagne and waiting for Donald Trump to arrive. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, stood in front of an archway fringed with palm trees and warmed up the crowd with jokes about the deep state. The purpose of the gathering was to raise money for the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy shop whose most recent annual report emphasized a “commitment to end woke and weaponized government.” Its... He is trim and bald, with glasses and a professorial beard. His group is a kind of ivory tower for far-right Republicans, issuing white papers with titles such as “The Great Replacement in Theory and Practice.” In 2021, he wrote an op-ed for Newsweek that... The Center for Renewing America is one of roughly two dozen right-wing groups that have emerged in Washington since Trump left office.

What unites them is a wealthy network based on Capitol Hill called the Conservative Partnership Institute, which many in Washington regard as the next Trump Administration in waiting. C.P.I.’s list of personnel and affiliates includes some of Trump’s most fervent backers: Meadows is a senior partner; Stephen Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration, runs an associated group called America First Legal, which... of the MAGA movement; Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department lawyer facing disbarment for trying to overturn the 2020 election, is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America. All of them are expected to have high-ranking roles in the government if Trump is elected again. “C.P.I. has gathered the most talented people in the conservative movement by far,” someone close to the organization told me.

“They have thought deeply about what’s needed to create the infrastructure and the resources for a more anti-establishment conservative movement.” C.P.I. was founded in 2017 by Jim DeMint, a former adman from South Carolina who spent eight years in the Senate before resigning to lead the Heritage Foundation. During that time, he was one of Washington’s most notorious partisan combatants. As a senator, he attacked his Republican colleagues for being insufficiently conservative, tanking their bills and raising money to unseat them in primaries. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, called him “an innovator in Republican-on-Republican violence.” With C.P.I., DeMint wanted to create a base of operations for insurgents like himself.

“If you’re not getting criticized in Washington,” he once said, “you’re probably part of the problem.” Other conservative groups have defined Republican Presidencies: the Heritage Foundation staffed the Administration of Ronald Reagan, the American Enterprise Institute that of George W. Bush. But C.P.I. is categorically different from its peers. It’s not a think tank—it’s an incubator and an activist hub that funds other organizations, coördinates with conservative members of the House and Senate, and works as a counterweight to G.O.P.

leadership. The effort to contest the 2020 election results and the protests of January 6, 2021, were both plotted at C.P.I.’s headquarters, at 300 Independence Avenue. “Until seven years ago, it didn’t exist, and no entity like it existed,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, told me. “It’s grown by leaps and bounds.” C.P.I. and its constellation of groups, most of which are nonprofits, raised nearly two hundred million dollars in 2022.

The organization has bought up some fifty million dollars’ worth of real estate in and around Washington, including multiple properties on the Hill. A mansion on twenty-two hundred acres in eastern Maryland hosts trainings for congressional staff and conservative activists. Four political-action committees have rented space in C.P.I.’s offices, and many more belonging to members of Congress pay to use C.P.I.’s facilities, such as studios for podcast recordings and TV hits. The House Freedom Caucus, a group of three dozen hard-line anti-institutionalist Republican lawmakers, and the Steering Committee, a similar group in the Senate, headed by Lee, hold weekly meetings at C.P.I.’s headquarters. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, called the organization a “gathering site” that offered “regular contact” with the power brokers of the conservative movement. He told me, “You walk into the building and you can talk to Mark Meadows or Jim DeMint if they’re there, or Russ Vought.”

It’s easy to forget how bleak January, 2021, felt for conservatives in Washington. Donald Trump had lost the election. The January 6th Capitol riot was seen as an irredeemable scandal. The pandemic was raging, and the country was still reeling from the George Floyd protests. “Republicans had been run out of town,” one Trump Administration official told me. “I thought, I’ll go to Texas, where I might still be able to get a job with a scarlet ‘T’ on me.

It’s like, this city, and the federal government—it’s over.” Those who stayed in D.C. hunkered down in think tanks, preparing for a long winter in the opposition. Some were convinced that Trump’s first term had been a missed opportunity. The Administration had been slow to hire, and many staffers were unfamiliar with the intricacies of bureaucratic combat. As Trump loyalists planned their return to power, they studied up.

Jim Blew, an Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education during Trump’s first term, recalled fielding dozens of calls about arcane processes like negotiated rule-making. “We all realized it really helps to understand these things,” Blew said. During this period, Republicans also watched American culture shift dramatically. Companies and universities pledged to do more to support racial minorities, expanding their D.E.I. bureaucracies. Lia Thomas, a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, became the first transgender athlete to win a women’s N.C.A.A.

Division I national championship. The October 7th attacks in Israel led to campus protests nationwide. Conservatives were particularly outraged by Joe Biden’s higher-ed agenda. Biden officials attempted to use the HEROES Act—a law passed after 9/11 allowing the government to waive student-loan requirements in a national emergency—to cancel billions in student debt, long after the pandemic’s peak. Bob Eitel, a senior counsellor at the Department of Education during the first Trump Administration, helped mobilize lawyers who ultimately challenged the debt-forgiveness efforts in court and won. The Biden Administration also pushed for colleges to allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.

The proposal stalled, but Republicans saw it as a glaring federal overreach. Eitel said the Biden years made him feel that there was a “stark, almost unbridgeable difference” in the two parties’ understanding of reality. In all this upheaval, there was a common theme: campuses were the battleground. Conservatives have long viewed universities as radical enclaves. In 2021, when J. D.

Vance gave a speech called “Universities Are the Enemy,” he was echoing Richard Nixon. What has changed is that higher ed itself is arguably weaker than ever. Both parties have denounced its soaring costs, crushing debt, and degrees that don’t yield jobs. The culture wars gave Republicans political permission to target not just progressive bias in higher ed but the basic structures of the sector. This was, according to Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to push through some real conservative reforms.” In Washington backrooms, a playbook took shape, centered on two insights.

First, nearly all universities depend on federal money. There’s student aid, and there’s research money—at some top schools, federal funding has made up a quarter or more of their revenue in recent years. Even Harvard, with the country’s largest endowment, cannot afford to walk away from the government, which awarded it nearly seven hundred million dollars for research in 2024. Second, some conservatives believed that research funds could be frozen or cancelled almost instantly, giving a future Administration a powerful tool to pressure universities. In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Donald J. Trump, thirty, leonine, and three-piece-suited, was chauffeured around Manhattan by an armed laid-off city cop in a silver Cadillac with “DJT” plates, while talking on his hot-shot car phone and making deals.

“He could sell sand to the Arabs and refrigerators to the Eskimos,” an architect told the Times. That architect was drawing up plans for a convention center that Trump hoped to build in midtown. Trump called it the “Miracle on 34th Street,” promising a cultural showpiece, with fountains, pools, a giant movie theatre, half a million square feet of exhibition space, and rooftop solar panels. The Culture Industry: A Centenary IssueSubscribers get full access. Read the issue » On the Fourth of July of that red-white-and-blue year, the Tall Ships—a flotilla of more than two hundred vessels from more than a dozen countries—sailed into New York Harbor.

Three days later, Trump was in Washington, D.C., presenting to the city’s redevelopment board his plan to build another gargantuan convention center, this one near the U.S. Capitol. Encountering stiff resistance, according to the Evening Star, a visibly “miffed” Trump left the meeting “in a huff.” The paper did not report whether, before leaving D.C., Trump stopped by the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology to tour its thirty-five-thousand-square-foot bicentennial exhibition, “A Nation of Nations.” Five years in the making,... It is also unknown whether Trump, huffy and miffed, walked along the National Mall to see the Smithsonian’s Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife, the product of years of field work conducted on a scale... One field worker, for instance, found a Cajun crawfish peeler in Louisiana, and recommended giving her a booth: “She can peel very fast.” The festival featured what organizers described as a “cultural sea” of...

Cold bedevils Presidential Inaugurations, Washington, D.C., tending to be chilly the third week in January. The New Yorker’s correspondent in 1965 (Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural) donned “red-white-and-blue thermal underwear”; the magazine’s dispatch from 1977 (Jimmy Carter’s) noted “shining white ice everywhere.” Anticipating frigidity, the organizers of the 2025 iteration (Donald... In: the First Family, seated behind the President, and punctuated visually by the six-foot-seven-inch, eighteen-year-old Barron Trump. In, too, were the billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sundar Pichai, seated in the next row, and co-ideologues from abroad: Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Argentina’s Javier Milei. Out—consigned to the Capitol Visitor Center—was Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, who at this point in 2023 enjoyed influence in the Republican Party broadly equivalent to Trump’s, and whose sidelining was a reminder of... Eight years is even longer.

In the Rotunda, Trump said that, since his first election, “I have been tested and challenged more than any President in our two-hundred-and-fifty-year history. And I’ve learned a lot along the way.” Perhaps more important was what his movement had learned: the virtue of preparation. Detailed policy and hiring programs had been negotiated and assembled. “For American citizens,” Trump said, “January 20, 2025, is Liberation Day.” It was, if not that, Executive Order Day. Papers flowed.

Inside The Trump Plan For 2025 The New Yorker

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