Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time yesterday and spent the better part of his first day signing dozens of executive orders. The text within the orders reads like the conservative fever dream they are, utilizing legal verbiage and lots of collegiate-level vocabulary. There are bits of Trump’s demanded language peppered throughout, but it is clear to me as an uneducated layperson that he didn’t write any of these orders.

These are the executive actions outlined in the Mandate for Leadership, colloquially referred to as Project 2025.

To be as informed as possible during the coming years, I have tasked myself with reading through these orders and summarizing them. I will do my best to maintain objectivity in my summaries, but I make no promises. If I feel the need to editorialize, I will do so in plain fashion in the form of a footnote highlighted for clarity. Since the drafters of these proposals didn’t bother leaving out all of the rhetorical content, I don’t see why I should either.

From what I have scanned so far, these orders are everything that the Heritage Foundation had in mind. They want to restructure the federal government to consolidate nearly limitless power to the executive branch. They have accepted Trump as the first iteration of the strongman that will head the newly emboldened executive. He surely wasn’t their first choice, but I’m sure he was easy enough to manipulate through bribery and flattery that it made him a perfect choice. If he failed, he could be laughed off as an unserious candidate who should stick to reality TV. When he succeeded, they saw the opportunity to get their agenda onto his desk on day one.

The orders he signed on day one were that agenda, and it was the first day of what may be the final years of American democracy. So long as free speech still applies to all of us, I will continue to speak truth to power. It is incumbent upon all of us to do that now more than ever.