I am a communist. Take that to mean what you will and assume whatever implicit bias to what I’m about to write that suits you.

During trumps presidency, the administration attempted to do a bunch of stuff through executive orders and administrative state action. Some of that was successful, some of it was a failure. Before Covid, the line of thinking seemed to be that the failures were from either oppositional administrators or sclerotic institutions and couldn’t be reasonably overcome. if anyone remembers the rhetoric back then there was a lot of stuff we associate with fascism and naziism because it represented creating a structure of parallel power to government so that when government was unwilling or unable to take action that structure could step in and perform.

No need to discipline the weirmacht into perpetrating krystallnacht when the ss will do it.

Once Covid happened, either through a shock to the system or through hidden competence, the administrative state was shown to be capable of huge feats of logistics, information dissemination (importantly sometimes misinformation dissemination), media control and direct interaction in citizens lives.

Now that the dust has settled for better or worse, the people who were willing to stoke groups like the proud boys and events like unite the right have turned their attention to the clearly capable administrative state.

No need to manage a fickle paramilitary organization if you can actually just mobilize the weirmacht, you know?

Project 2025 is just that, a plan to use the administrative state to accomplish republican policy goals successfully. While the rhetoric and policy in it is often waved around to motivate people, the important part is that post Covid it represents a plan to use the state power that defined Covid to get those policies enacted.