Michael Anton, a contributor to Project 2025’s over 900-page Mandate for Leadership, has been chosen as Trump’s Director of Policy Planning (DPP) at the State Department. Since the DPP is not a Senate-confirmed position, he is all but certain to take on the role shortly after Trump’s inauguration.
While Project 2025 does not tell us what any individual contributor added to the tome, Anton has written publicly about his policy plans – under his own name and under at least one pseudonym.
Anton’s essays can only be described as far-right, conspiratorial, ethnonationalist screeds.
- In “The Coming Coup,” Anton helped lay the groundwork for and popularize lies about a grand conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.
- In “Citizenship should not be a birthright” and its companion “Birthright Citizenship: A Response to My Critics” Anton argues the United States should upend over 100 years of legal precedent and end birthright citizenship, based almost entirely on an altered quote from the Senate debate over the 14th Amendment in 1866.
- In “Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism” and “The Flight 93 Election” – both written under a pseudonym – Anton argues that diversity is bad, Americans are no longer fit for liberty, the Constitution does not grant rights to non-citizens (it does), racism, a person’s “natural affinity for people who look, think and speak like himself” is good,immigration is a threat to national security,the people who immigrated to North America and founded America were not actually immigrants, but something else (which means we don’t have to let in immigrants today), and, finally, that if we let a Democrat get elected they will immediately put conservatives in prison and become a dictator.
This last point, quite obviously, did not happen after Joe Biden became president.
Anton’s open disdain for the people of other countries matters. As the DPP, Anton will oversee “a source of independent policy analysis and advice for the Secretary of State” with three mandates:
- Strategic planning and coordination, which has the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) shape the Secretary of State’s priorities, lead the creation of the National Security Strategy, and assist with coordination and collaboration between the U.S. and its international allies and partners.
- Policy development and debate, which has the S/P lead policy development on priorities for the Secretary of State and the Administration and work to cultivate spaces for policy debate and innovation by creating and managing spaces for staff to safely voice disagreements with policies and strategies set by higher-ups.
- Policy and messaging, which has the S/P draft speeches for the Secretary of State.
As for the policies and strategies he is likely to pursue in foreign relations and national security, he believes that immigrants, Democrats, and even moderate Republicans are national security threats. He argues that Americans are “less fit for liberty every day,” which is why he is happy to abandon small-government ideals, saying that limited government is “of limited application” and isn’t right for modern America.
Of course, if liberty is not right for Americans, it is even less so for people elsewhere in the world since “differing histories, laws, religions, habits, and even climates differentiate the peoples of the world in ways that are not so easy to change—and accustom to liberty some better than others.”
In short, Anton’s writings suggest that his priority as DPP is to take away freedoms and civil liberties at home and abroad until everyone agrees that racism is good, immigration is bad, and that Democrats are the real fascists.