During the recent presidential debate, Kamala Harris once again described the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as Donald Trump’s plan for a second term. Trump himself has repeatedly thrown the think tank and its plan under the rhetorical bus, even though a great many of the people who worked on it had roles in his first administration. He’s claimed he didn’t read it, which is plausible enough. It’s difficult to imagine Donald Trump reading a 920-page document of any kind. Whether he’ll implement some or all of the proposals found there is an entirely different question.

Like clockwork, Heritage cooks up a right-wing maximalist wish list of what it would like from each prospective Republican administration every four years. In that sense, there’s nothing particularly special about this particular program. Really, liberal warnings about Project 2025 are a proxy for a much larger set of anxieties about how just how bad a second Trump term could get.

In 2016, many progressives believed that Trump represented an imminent “fascist” threat to the very existence of American democracy. His first term seemed to reveal this rhetoric as baseless hysteria. He did many of the things that any Republican would do, like cutting taxes for the rich, weakening environmental protections, and appointing union-busters to the National Labor Relations Board and antiabortion justices to the Supreme Court. All bad enough, of course, but the promised MAGA dystopia never quite came. His failure to deliver on his signature 2016 promise to “build the wall” is emblematic here. His administration reinforced or replaced barriers in some stretches of the border, but less than fifty miles of the border got completely new barriers.