President Donald Trump has finally told the truth about something. He’s embraced Project 2025. Anyone who believed his disavowals last year during the campaign is, of course, a fool. And the media, reporting those disavowals, looked foolish. Trump knew, as he has known all his life, that all you have to do is lie about something, and the press, following the rules of objectivity, will report straightforwardly what you said. So he largely got away with it. The Kamala Harris campaign tried to tie Trump to the project, as in this ad; but it didn’t manage to convey the project’s extremism with any force.

And now? The Democrats have another huge opportunity to hang Project 2025 around Trump’s neck. It should be easier now, for two reasons. One, it’s not purely hypothetical anymore. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, a community-driven initiative, the Trump administration has already checked off 48 percent of the project’s goals. Two, Trump and OMB Director Russell Vought’s open promises to shred the federal bureaucracy give Democrats a huge target. The question is, do they have the skill—and the guts—to hit it?

Alas, that question, as usual with the Democrats, should have a clear answer but doesn’t. The obvious strategy is to call all hands on deck and, now that Trump has said what he said, make this shutdown about not only Obamacare subsidies but two other things: about the looming job cuts themselves and about Vought personally because his name and his extremist, un-American goals to remake the United States as a Christian nation should be known to every American.

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The first message should be simple: What Trump and Vought are about to do here is the second coming of Elon Musk and DOGE. The DOGE effort was not exactly popular: Last spring, poll after poll, like this one, showed that while the general concept of cutting the size of the federal government had appeal, people really didn’t like the way Musk and his minions were going about it. This time around, Democrats can plausibly say that it’s going to be worse. DOGE staffing cuts came to around 300,000. An estimated 750,000 federal employees are being furloughed due to the shutdown. Vought probably thinks most of them are expendable. It shouldn’t be hard to make these cuts deeply unpopular.

Second, tell Americans who Vought is, what he believes, the things he has said. He’s a Christian nationalist who believes Trump is "God’s gift" to America and wants the U.S. to be "a nation under God." These are of course completely un-American ideas. Article 6 of the Constitution contains the "no religious test clause," which applies to holding a public office or trust in the U.S.; but beyond that, the Founders were crystal clear that American citizenship and civil rights were open to all—as Thomas Jefferson once put it, citing John Locke, neither "Pagan nor Mohametan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth [of Virginia] because of his religion." George Washington said that "religious controversies are always more productive of acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause," and therefore each should be left to worship (or not) as he or she saw fit. I could go on and on and on.

Making these two arguments requires the Democrats to take two moral and unambiguous stands. The first is in defense of an activist federal government. The second is in defense of the religious pluralism upon which this country was founded.

I’d love to be able to write with confidence that I think they’ll do it. Odds are they won’t. Most of them shy away from moral arguments. They’re afraid—not all of them, but most of them—to go toe to toe with Trump on a topic like religion. There is utterly no reason for this. Most Americans agree with them. Polls will often show that a disturbingly high percentage of Americans want this country to be a Christian nation, but when you look at crosstabs, you see quickly that the number is high because among Republicans it’s around 75 percent. It’s well under 50 percent among independents, which is the number that matters. Still, the Democratic Party has trained itself over the years to stay away from such matters.

They also just don’t speak with one voice and hold together. Right now, the only poll I’ve seen on the shutdown looks very good for them. A Washington Post survey found that respondents blamed Trump and Republicans over Democrats by 47 percent to 30 percent. Interestingly, independents blamed Republicans over Democrats by 50 percent to 22 percent.

You’d think and hope that would gird Democrats’ loins. And maybe it will. But remember: Three Senate Democrats voted for the Republican version of the bill to reopen the government. Four more need to cave for the Republicans to get their bill through. Democratic senators are heading back to their states this weekend, where they’re going to hear from furloughed federal workers about how they need their paychecks.

In a sense this is understandable and defensible. Democrats tend to care about these people’s actual lives, whereas Republicans don’t give a crap about them since they’re just a bunch of deep-state Trump haters anyway. Also, Democrats genuinely don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of federal employees lose their jobs, both on a simple human level and because Democrats believe these people are doing important work.

So that’s all nice. But at the same time, the Democrats could win this fight. If the Post poll is right, they’re already winning. And now that Trump has introduced the unpopular Project 2025 into the equation, the door is open for the Democrats to make Trump’s posture here even more unpopular. Also, I’d argue that to the extent the shutdown will result in chaos, well, people understand that it’s Trump who is the sower of chaos in this country. Majorities are far more likely to blame Trump for chaos than Democrats.

So the Democrats can win this. They need to stand together and stick to principles. I just wish history suggested they were better at this.

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Last week’s quiz: The Shock of the New. A quiz on art from 1900 to 1910, cuz it seemed to me it was time for something a little high-minded.

1. Paul Cézanne painted this mountain many times, over many years. In the 1890s, the renderings were representational and literal; starting in the early 1900s, they grew more and more abstract until his 1906 death.

A. Mont Saint-Michel

B. Mont Blanc

C. Mont Sainte-Victoire

D. Pointe Percée

Answer: A, Mont Saint-Michel. I went to the huge Cézanne retrospective in Philadelphia about, oh my God, 25 years ago now. There must’ve been 30 paintings of that mountain, all in a row. You could see abstract art being born on that wall.

2. Henri Matisse is the most famous artist of the fauvist movement, given its name by a critic who visited a 1905 group show and, after contemplating their aggressive use of color, dubbed the artists "fauves," which means:

A. Mad-hatters

B. Wild beasts

C. Harlots

D. Subversives

Answer: B, wild beasts. The critic was Louis Vauxcelles. He also coined the term cubism, apparently. Clever lad.

3. In 1900, he was painting "normal" paintings like Landscape at Arnhem, which is just what it sounds like. These were a far cry from the later, aggressively abstract style for which he is far better known, a style so ubiquitous that it found its way to kitchen linoleum patterns and shampoo bottles.

A. Piet Mondrian

B. Stuart Davis

C. Wassily Kandinsky

D. Paul Klee

Answer: A, Mondrian. Here’s an example of floor tile patterned on Mondrian. And here is a collection of L’Oréal hair products featuring a Mondrianesque motif. 

4. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is arguably the most famous modern artwork of all time. In this 1907 work, Pablo Picasso portrayed five prostitutes—but they were not from Avignon. In what city did his real-life subjects live?

A. Madrid

B. Barcelona

C. Paris

D. Marseilles

Answer: B, Barcelona. The house where they worked was on Avignon Street, or Carrer d’Avinyo, as they called it. 

5. Cubism was probably the most famous artistic school that began in the early 1900s. Picasso, of course, was its leader. Who was the second-best-known cubist painter?

A. Juan Gris

B. Edvard Munch

C. Henri Rousseau

D. Georges Braque

Answer: D, Braque. Too easy.

6. Besides abstraction, another hallmark of art of this period was that it showed the gritty rough-and-tumble of proletarian life. One famous work along these lines, by George Bellows in 1909, gave us a graphic depiction of what?

A. A cockfight, with men wildly cheering

B. A longshoreman cutting another man’s throat

C. An alcohol-fueled sexual assault

D. A boxing match

Answer: D, a boxing match. You’ve seen it, surely. Here it is. Actually, he did several.

This week’s quiz: "To live is to suffer …" More high-minded falderal—a quiz on philosophy!

1. What ancient Greek philosopher came up with the allegory of the cave?

A. Socrates
B. Aristotle
C. Diogenes
D. Plato

2. Niccolò Machiavelli came from which Italian school of philosophy?

A. Roman
B. Florentine
C. Ligurian
D. La scuola di San Giovanni in Fiore

3. Who was the seminal early modern philosopher who coined the famous phrase, "I think, therefore I am"?

A. Francis Bacon

B. René Descartes

C. Baruch Spinoza

D. Thomas Hobbes

4. Match the school of philosophy to the person who was a leading adherent of same.

5. Where did Hegel famously encounter Napoleon in the flesh in 1805, leading him to declare the emperor to be the "world-soul on horseback"?

A. Bremen

B. Leipzig

C. Jena

D. Cologne

6. Match the modern French philosopher to the idea or area of study with which he is associated.

Hard to believe those French guys (and Deleuze and Lyotard and so many others) were once so influential in America. I wonder if they still even teach these thinkers. If you know, drop a line to fightingwords@tnr.com. Answers next week.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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