Project 2025’s oligarchic power and executive absolutism

The world created in October 1945 no longer exists. It ended in 2022, when the US Heritage Foundation tasked director Paul Dans and his team at the HF with establishing Project 2025. Project 2025 is a child of a previous Heritage Foundation project, ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ published in January 1981, which served as a policy blueprint for the then-incoming Reagan administration. Dans, in a March 2025 Politico Magazine interview, states that Donald Trump is the perfect candidate to execute Project 2025. 

How does all this relate to the rest of the world? Project 2025 is diametrically opposed to any notion of democracy. It is a blueprint for the unlimited power of the president. The kidnapping of the president of Venezuela demonstrated that power. Dans states that Project 2025 believe that “the Constitution vests the executive power squarely and solely in the president of the United States.” Voters elect the president.

That president rules with full executive authority. Dans believes that since the days of Woodrow Wilson, “encroachments on the executive power were anti-democratic and unconstitutional.” He sees democracy as an exercise where “every four years the people vote for a president to put forward new policy, and if his policies are being impeded by an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy, that is a problem that needs reformation.” Project 2025 wants a president with unlimited executive powers – a king.

With the rise of populist leaders globally, one begins to see how other far-right, centre-right, and centre-left political parties are buying into this way of thinking as a survival strategy. With growing immigration challenges across the world, disruptions to systems that once worked, and the optics of very different societies emerging, influenced by the previous two, European, Asian and African political orders are beginning to gravitate to their own versions of Project 2025.

This is not a temporary disruption. This is a full systemic rupture of the geopolitical landscape. The multilateral world we know is no longer considered necessary by Project 2025. What we are living through is a poly-crisis of democratic regression, centralised power, geopolitical fragmentation, environmental stress, and a global debt crisis, all happening simultaneously. The systems we created in 1945 to stabilise and manage a multilateral world are being abandoned at the speed of light. Powerful states with old and new wealth are increasingly ignoring intelligent politicians and turning to the wealthy elite – the people with money – to lead the way. Not only to lead it, but to have their way.

Dynastic oligarchs are being asked to serve as the bankers, intelligence, and political face of the new world they are creating, with unrestricted powers to determine the future of nations. Gaza is one such case. With the establishment of the Board of Peace, Donald Trump has made the first move to abandon the United Nations and set up an alternative global power base that willing nations can join for free, but after three years, must pay US$1 billion to become a permanent member.

Jared Kushner is restructuring much of the Middle East, not as a representative of multilateral government institutions, but on behalf of Project 2025 and his father-in-law. He is a salesman of dynastic oligarchic power, not democratic policy or institutional order.

The dynastic oligarchs of the region, many of whom have ruled like despots for generations, are welcoming him with open arms. Project 2025 affirms them. Women in some countries, such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, still face significant legal or practical limitations to full electoral participation. The death penalty is still in existence in thirteen countries in the region. Many of them are now flocking to join Trump’s Board of Peace. 

With dynastic oligarchic representatives like Kushner reshaping countries, unchallenged by conventional institutions, normative fragmentation is at its peak. Our geopolitical order has not managed to maintain a reasonable sense of the coherent, shared set of norms, values, principles, and rules of legitimacy that we had in 1945.

Under the influence (or is it fear?) of Project 2025, the global order has become structured by multiple, competing normative frameworks that all claim authority simultaneously. We have a crisis of moral and political consensus about what is right, just, and legitimate in governing society.

What does this all mean for Africa and South Africa? Frantz Fanon warned Africa’s newly independent states in the 1960s that they were entering a world where the rules were already written. The same applies in the world of Project 2025. While most of the world agreed to rules and governance frameworks after World War 2, Project 2025’s new rules invite countries to be structurally present, but intellectually marginal.

The only power in the room is the power of the dynastic oligarchs, and Donald Trump is king of that group. While Africa still seeks the revival of multilateralism and democratisation, Project 2025 and America seek the gradual obliteration of voting and the installation of full executive authority of the dynastic oligarchs as presidents. No other voice is allowed into the room under Project 2025. 

Africa missed its moment to be a major shaper of the global order. We knew a shift in the global order was coming. A failed OAU, replaced by an AU trapped in politicking, multiple electoral abuse cases, corrupt leadership, personal enrichment and perpetual states of poverty have all contributed to Africa feeding off the scraps of the global order, instead of leading it.

Africa’s own dynastic oligarchs, now emboldened by Project 2025, are digging in their heels. Sitting on mineral resources that the world needs, they are making deals that will silence and enslave Africa for the next century.

Project 2025 isn’t about America. It is about creating a new world order. By America. For the control of a mostly once-free world by dynastic oligarchs. 

Once again, Africa wakes up too late.