Project 2025 Is About Much More Than Trump

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has disavowed authorship of Project 2025, a sweeping playbook to remake the federal government into a stronghold of conservative power. While Project 2025 aligns closely with his vision, Trump has a point.

Far from being an anomaly or the brainchild of a single administration, Project 2025 is the latest manifestation of a decades-long legal campaign to expand executive power. Trump is more vessel than visionary—the current standard-bearer of a movement that began long before him and will likely persist long after.

The seeds of this ideological movement were sown during Richard Nixon’s presidency, when conservative thinkers and operatives began crafting a legal framework concentrating power in the executive branch at the expense of Congress, courts, and citizens. Their vision emerged from what historian Arthur Schlesinger dubbed the “imperial presidency.” Starting with Harry Truman, five consecutive presidential administrations expanded executive authority. This escalation peaked under Nixon, who Schlesinger observed “became the first to profess the monarchical doctrine that the sovereign can do no wrong.”

Nixon wielded his monarchical power covertly—most notoriously during Watergate—and brazenly, claiming that Article II of the Constitution empowered him to impound funds already allocated by Congress and to conduct widespread, warrantless wiretaps.

Nixon’s assertions of executive authority faced resistance; Congress and the Supreme Court blocked the impoundment and wiretaps, respectively. But his claims also conditioned a generation of Republicans to embrace an unrestrained executive. Among those who came of political age during the height of the imperial presidency were future Vice President Dick Cheney and future Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Both sought to institutionalize Nixon's vision of virtually unlimited presidential power as young White House staffers.

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Cheney, as a special assistant to the president and an executive assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, worked to purge liberals from the federal government and cripple disliked agencies. His goals were straightforward: consolidate Nixon’s power, cement his ideology, and dismantle roadblocks to his agenda.

Rehnquist, meanwhile, became the imperial presidency’s legal mercenary. While he viewed himself as the Administration’s “resident constitutional theorist,” to quote journalist John Jenkins, his actual role was more cynical: spinning constitutional justifications for Nixon’s schemes. When the Nixon Administration needed a lawyer to defend the constitutionality of its mass arrests and surveillance of anti-war demonstrators, or to pressure a liberal justice off the Supreme Court, it turned to Rehnquist.

He also traveled the country to lambaste perceived enemies of the Nixon Administration. His rhetoric was harsh and apocalyptic, labeling student anti-war protesters as “new barbarians” threatening the “essential values of our system of government.” Rehnquist suggested curtailing their rights to protest and vote, and later warned ominously that “law and order will be pursued at whatever cost in individual liberties and rights”—a thinly veiled threat of force against nonviolent protesters.

Nixon’s fall initially seemed to signal the end of the imperial presidency. His clandestine crimes shocked even staunch conservatives and catalyzed congressional efforts to curtail presidential power and corruption, including the War Powers Act. The Department of Justice and intelligence agencies also issued new limits on presidential power. The resignation and the subsequent reckoning challenged a core tenet of Nixon’s philosophy: that the President was above the law.

This apparent demise of the unchecked presidency scarred Nixon’s former staffers. As the journalist Charlie Savage has recounted, Nixon’s resignation and the Watergate reforms “left a deep impression on Cheney.” Cheney would later lament that the post-Nixon limitations on presidential power represented “the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy.”

Rather than accept this new constitutional consensus, however, Nixon’s former aides redoubled their efforts to create an unbridled executive. Wounded by their boss’s downfall, they gradually reclaimed and expanded executive power over the following decades.

As Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford, Cheney battled the post-Watergate reforms that he viewed as eroding the Constitution’s “institutional arrangements” and unduly restricting presidential authority. He found intellectual support from a senior Justice Department official named Antonin Scalia. And as Congressman from Wyoming, Cheney fought to sabotage congressional oversight of President Ronald Reagan, including during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Rehnquist, appointed to the Supreme Court by Nixon in 1971, also emerged as a central figure in the effort to reclaim expansive executive power. His thinking and advocacy shaped a generation of conservative lawyers, including future Chief Justice John Roberts. While clerking for Rehnquist in 1981, Roberts witnessed the Justice advocate for a sweeping interpretation of executive power in the case of Dames & Moore v. Regan.

Roberts would move into the Reagan Administration after his clerkship, and it was in Reagan’s Department of Justice, under Attorney General Edwin Meese, where the quest for a more powerful presidency found new life.

As Attorney General, Meese also focused on appointing conservative judges with experience in Republican administrations. Thus, in 1986, Reagan promoted Rehnquist to be chief justice and added Scalia, whose experiences had shaped his belief in vast presidential authority, to the Court. Other young conservative lawyers in the Reagan administration—including future Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—absorbed Meese’s ideas about expansive executive power before later Republican presidents made them federal judges.

It took until the George W. Bush Administration, in which Cheney served as Vice President, for the full restoration of the imperial presidency to materialize. Through the aggressive use of military force, indefinite detentions, and invasive surveillance, the vision of an unshackled presidency—first articulated in the Nixon era and refined during Reagan’s tenure—gained new force.

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The Bush Administration saw this unabashed use of presidential authority as a decisive break from the constraints imposed after Nixon’s fall. John Yoo, a principal architect of the Bush Administration’s executive excesses, has argued that Watergate “led to a period of congressional supremacy that contributed to the failed Ford and Carter presidencies.” Yoo further claimed that Reagan’s “rejuvenation” of the executive branch reversed this malaise before the Bush heyday.

These ideas now shape the thinking of the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court. Its conservative supermajority counts Roberts, Thomas, and Alito as members, along with Brett Kavanaugh — who worked for Bush and has named Rehnquist as his “first judicial hero” — and Neil Gorsuch, who also worked for Bush. 

The culmination of their decades long push for greater executive power came in July when they — joined in part by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Court’s remaining Republican appointee — ruled that presidents had broad immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts.” The ruling institutionalized the imperial presidency.

Roberts’ opinion conspicuously omitted any discussion of Nixon’s crimes, yet its underlying legal rationale echoed Nixon’s infamous claim that “when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” This legal framework would have been unimaginable in 1974 to all but a handful of conservative ideologues embittered by Nixon’s resignation. But now it’s enshrined in constitutional law.

The relentless rise of expansive notions of executive power has begun unraveling the democratic principles Nixon’s resignation was thought to uphold. Project 2025 represents the latest dark inheritance of this ideological lineage — one that transcends any individual. It is the product of a patient, persistent movement that has outlasted presidencies and weathered political storms.

The next chapter of this disturbing democratic decline will unfold this fall. Candidate Trump, mired in legal trouble, seeks refuge in the imperial presidency. “Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he says. Project 2025 gives these pretensions a blueprint; a Supreme Court he reshaped is all in. The choice is up to voters.

Duncan Hosie is a legal scholar and the Steven Polan fellow in constitutional law & history at the Brennan Center of the NYU School of Law.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.