To the Editorial Team: Remember Project 2025? Republicans barreled into office at the beginning of Trump’s term with this voluminous document in their briefcases. The various sections of Project 2025 promised to re-make the American government. Maybe less clear to the public was the project’s ambitions to reconstruct American democracy. The words of one of its principal cheerleaders and contributors, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, clanged ominously: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts’ revolution has turned out not to be so bloodless. The killings in Minneapolis, the many incidents of violence in ICE pursuits, deaths in detention, deportations of immigrants to dangerous countries … all speak as a counterargument to a tidy reordering of American life. Is the left responsible for the blood? Hardly. The blood that has been spilled in the Mideast and Iran is a consequence of Donald Trump’s strategic choices, if we can call any of his actions strategic, and his enablers in Congress.

In 2024 did American people vote to see its long-preserved democracy dismantled? Two years in, are we pleased to see the self-serving corruption that flouts legal standards and funnels over two billion dollars into Trump family coffers? To watch our Justice Department used as an instrument to attack the administration’s perceived enemies? To witness the daily assaults on our free press that is designed to challenge, not please, our leaders?

The targeted attacks on democratic institutions are too large and numerous to list. Focus on one most recent proposal from Trump: snipers and drones on top of his proposed triumphal arch in D.C. , in supposed defense of national security. In the midst of a top-down bloody revolution, who do we think those snipers might be firing upon? Whose nation might Trump be securing?

In this year when we celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, with our votes in November we can assert that our democracy belongs to we, the people. Vote early, vote securely. Don’t let those who cheer their revolution in white papers steal our votes, our democracy.

Tom Denton

New Paltz