Surviving Trump. Saving America
Navigating the chaos of today’s politics can be overwhelming —this show helps make sense of it all. In about 30 minutes each week, host Bella Goode breaks down the players, policies, and threats facing democracy — in plain language and straight talk. Your crash course in today’s politics
Four Seats to Take the Senate: Trump, the Money, and the Nine Races That Decide It
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FOUR SEATS TO TAKE THE SENATE
Trump, the Money, and the Nine Races That Decide It
Trump won Iowa by thirteen points in 2024. Today, more Iowans who voted in that election disapprove of him than approve — and the Iowa Senate race is close to even. That pattern repeats across the map. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the Senate, and for the first time this cycle, the forecasters say they have a real path to get there.
This episode ma...
THE BATTLE FOR THE HOUSE: Where Do Democrats Find 3 Net Seats?
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Twenty-one House seats are rated genuine toss-ups this cycle. Sixteen are held by Republicans, five by Democrats. Democrats need a net gain of three. This episode sorts every one of those races — plus four more that became contests for reasons the official ratings haven't caught up to — into a clear picture of where that path actually runs.
What's in This Episode
Episode 3 moves from the House math to the candidates who will decide it, applying four consistent factors — cash on hand, polling quality, the redrawn map, and the ca...
THREE SEATS TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY: The Maps, the Money, and the Scandals Deciding the House
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Surviving Trump
Republicans hold the House by just two seats — the margin they started this Congress with in January 2025. That's the baseline behind the entire fight: a net gain of three seats flips control. This episode breaks down where that fight is actually happening: the maps redrawn to protect it, the scandals threatening to lose it anyway, and the money both parties are pouring in to decide it.
What's in This Episode
Episode 2 lays out the ground fight for the Hou...
Not Just Any Midterm: The Stakes, Why They're Desperate and Why We Have a Chance
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They control the House, the Senate, the courts, and the White House. Every rising price, every unresolved war, every unreleased file is Trump’s alone to answer for. And for the first time in years, he has no one else to blame.
What’s in This Episode
Episode 1 lays out the stakes for the season ahead — who’s afraid of losing, why the numbers favor Democrats, and what it will actually take to win. The playbook is recognizable. From gerrymandering districts to buildi...
Not Just Any Midterm: The Stakes , Why They're Desperate and Why We Have a Chance
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Surviving Trump
It’s not long until the most consequential midterms of our lifetime. Season 3 of Surviving Trump: Saving America starts September 10th — nine episodes, tracking the 2026 midterms week by week, from the threats already in motion to exactly where your time and money matter most.
What’s in This Season
•Episode 1 (Sept 10): Sixteen threats to this election straight from Project 2025, plus new polling showing Trump’s approval at a record low.
•The House, in two...
NULLIFY: How to Overturn an Election Without Breaking a Single Law
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Summary
The thing about a “rigged election” is that you don’t have to prove it.
You don’t need fake ballots or hacked machines. You just need enough people who believe that if their side lost, something went wrong — and enough officials, lawyers, and judges willing to act on that belief.
This episode follows four ways that belief gets turned into power: pressuring officials not to certify results, weaponizing override mechanisms built for genuine emergencies, manufacturing the feeling of fraud through audits and investigations that find...
Sabotage-How an Election Gets Corrupted From the Inside
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Spencer Pratt went to bed on election night looking like a winner.
His odds on Kalshi and Polymarket were surging. Cable news loved it. X loved it. And then the ballots kept being counted.
As late mail ballots arrived and Nithya Raman pulled ahead, Trump-aligned influencers — on paid affiliate contracts with the prediction platforms — began posting fraud narratives. Trump declared the race “rigged.” The U.S. attorney’s office opened multiple “election fraud investigations.”
Nothing unusual had happened in Los Angeles. The count worked the way it always does. B...
How to prevent a midterm election: Cancellation, Suppression, and the Loyalty Machine
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Summary
On July 26, 2024, Donald Trump stood before a room full of conservative Christian voters in West Palm Beach, Florida, and told them: “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” The room cheered. A minute later, he said it again.
He has said versions of that five times over six years. To Elon Musk. To Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Off...
THE SURVEILLANCE STATE How Palantir and Silicon Valley Are Building the Infrastructure of Authoritarian Control
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Surviving Trump • Episode 34 • Series 4: Corporate Power and Control
It was 5:30 in the morning on October 30, 2025, still dark, when ICE agents began watching an apartment complex in Woodburn, Oregon. An AI targeting app had identified the neighborhood as a priority area — not because any individual had been suspected of a crime, but because the data said people like them lived there. Seven farmworkers were inside a van, carpooling to a job site. ICE smashed the windows. Six were handcuffed and made to sit on the pavement. An agent held his phone...
MUSK UNTETHERED How Elon Musk Accumulated More Unchecked Power Than Anyone in American History — And What He Intends to Do With It
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Surviving Trump • Episode 33 • Series 4: Corporate Power and Control
On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a bathroom sink. He posted a video. The caption read: “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in.” Within hours, he had fired the CEO, the CFO, and the head of legal policy — timed deliberately so the executives couldn’t cash in their stock options. He posted two words: “The bird is freed.”
The business world called it the dumbest deal in history. Investor Ross Gerber called it “the dumbest deal in th...
A Privileged Few: The Six Family Dynasties Funding Project 2025 — and the Government They’re Buying
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In 2009, Peter Thiel published an essay in which he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He was not alone in thinking it. He was just one of the few willing to say it publicly.
This episode is about what happens when the people who share that view have enough money to stop democracy from working against them. When a small number of people accumulate wealth on the scale we are now seeing in America — fortunes measured not in millions but in tens and hundreds of billions of dol...
CNN on the Block: The Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery Merger and What It Means for Democracy
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Surviving Trump • Episode 31 • Series 4
Hatice Cengiz was supposed to be getting married.
On October 2, 2018, she waited outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul while her fiancé Jamal Khashoggi went inside to collect documents for their wedding. He never came out. A United Nations investigation confirmed that Saudi operatives killed and dismembered him inside the building. His body was never returned. The United States intelligence community concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder.
Khashoggi was a Washington Post journalist. He was killed...
How the Ellisons Acquired CBS: The Deal that Gave Trump Control of the Message and the Ellisons a Media Empire
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On March 13, 2026, Pete Hegseth stood at a Pentagon press briefing and blurted out a secret. He said he couldn't wait for David Ellison to take over CNN. In one unscripted moment, the Secretary of Defense revealed what this administration has been carefully avoiding saying out loud: that the Trump White House wants indirect control of America's largest news organizations — not through government ownership, which the Constitution prohibits, but through billionaire allies who understand what is expected of them. The Ellisons are that alliance. This episode documents how it worked at CBS — and what it c...
The Threat to the First Amendment -- What Government Control of the Press Does to Journalism and Democracy
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Episode Summary
Before dawn on January 14, 2026, FBI agents arrived at the Alexandria, Virginia home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. They seized two laptops, her phone, an audio recorder, and an external hard drive containing her reporting materials. Her devices remained in government custody for weeks while courts fought over whether federal investigators could even look at them.
Natanson covers the Trump administration’s transformation of the federal government — the removal of career civil servants, the politicization of agencies, the dismantling of oversight. That is the story this...
Controlling the Press: Attacks on Media and How Project 2025 Is Dismantling America’s Communications
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Mary Walsh spent decades at CBS News. She started her career under Walter Cronkite. She survived ownership changes, ratings wars, the collapse of the network news business model, the rise of cable, the rise of streaming.
Then in early 2025, she wrote a memo and walked out.
Her reason: she had been told to aim CBS News’s reporting at “a particular part of the political spectrum.” She wrote: “Honestly, I don’t know how to do that.”
That’s what the end of a free press looks like. Not a bo...
WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING How the Administration Dismantled the Inspectors General — the Watchdogs Built to Hold Government Accountable
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On January 24, 2025, the Trump administration fired seventeen federal inspectors general by email. Two sentences. No cause given. No thirty days' notice to Congress, as the law requires. This episode documents how the administration has systematically dismantled the independent oversight infrastructure that holds executive power accountable — and what that costs ordinary Americans.
What's in This Episode
• Who the inspectors general are, what they do, and why Congress built them after Watergate
• The six tactics used to dismantle the watchdog system: termination, vacancy, capture, defund...
Firing the Experts: How Schedule F and Project 2025 Are Replacing Government Career Staff with Political Loyalists
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Ryan Schwank spent years training ICE officers. He taught them the use of force. He taught them constitutional law. He taught them the difference between a lawful order and an unlawful one.
In January 2026, he filed an anonymous whistleblower complaint with Congress. He alleged that ICE training had been cut from 72 days to 42. That the class on the constitutional rights of protesters had been reduced from two hours to ten minutes. That a directive had authorized agents to enter homes without judicial warrants. That thousands of new recruits were being sent...
Who Justice Pursues — And Who It Protects: When the Justice Department Serves the King Instead of the People
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He survived a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. He came home with a Purple Heart and post-traumatic stress disorder. On June 11, 2025, he joined a protest outside a federal immigration facility in Spokane, Washington. More than a month later, FBI agents arrived at his door at six in the morning, rifles drawn, and arrested him on federal conspiracy charges. If convicted, Bajun Mavalwalla faces up to six years in prison.
Meanwhile, the leaders of groups convicted of plotting to stop the peaceful transfer of power by force are having their guilty verdicts erased...
Reverse Discrimination How Civil Rights Now Protects White Americans and Men — and Makes Fighting Racism Illegal
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The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was created in 1957 to undo Jim Crow and protect Black voting rights. It was the institution you called when local power refused to recognize Black people as full citizens.
On December 9, 2025, more than 200 former Division attorneys published an open letter saying it was being destroyed. Three-quarters of its lawyers were gone. Its mission had been turned upside down.
The person running it is Harmeet Dhillon. She is not a civil-rights lawyer. She is one of Trump’s most reliable political operatives, kn...
Dismantling DEI: The War on Civil Rights Waged by Government and Institutions
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J.D. Vance stood before the March for Life crowd and announced that the U.S. would now cut foreign aid to any organization doing work tied to diversity, equity, or inclusion. A funding rule with a forty-billion-dollar reach.
That’s the pattern this episode tracks: explicit language about racism gets replaced; executive orders, grant conditions, and state laws do the real work of dismantling every structure built to make American institutions more fair.
What’s in This Episode
What the terms actually mean: Where “woke” came from...Cleansed Electorate: How Trump and Project 2025 are engineering a White Nationalist electorate for 2026
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In this episode, we follow the four doors that decide who gets to vote in 2026. who is physically here, who is allowed to belong on paper, where people are permitted to live, and whose ballot survives the gauntlet of new rules designed to thin the rolls and shift the count.
Trump 2.0 and Project 2025 didn't invent these tools. But they are deploying them together, at scale, in a midterm year. That's not politics as usual. That's a coordinated strategy.
What's in This Episode
Door 1 — Who is...
Housing Apartheid-How Project 2025 turns displacement and segregation into a national strategy for concentrating political power in white hands
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In September 2011, Rosetta Watson called the police in Maplewood, Missouri four times. Her boyfriend had broken down her door, punched her, choked her. He was convicted and sentenced to 200 days in prison. By the time he was sentenced, Watson had already lost her home — evicted under a city ordinance that counted her 911 calls as nuisance incidents against her address. She lost her Section 8 voucher. She moved eight times. Her abuser served 200 days and died in 2013. She is still living with what that ordinance did to her life.
Rosetta Watson’s story is n...
Only Afrikaners Are Allowed In: The refugee program is suspended. One group gets through. That group is white.
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Since January 20, 2025, the U.S. immigration system has been rewired — not by new laws, but by executive power alone. The refugee ceiling has been cut by 94 percent. More than 700,000 people will lose Temporary Protected Status by year’s end. And the entire U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has been suspended — with one exception. White South Africans get a dedicated processing facility in Pretoria, a government-chartered plane, and a welcome from senior State Department officials. Everyone else gets the door slammed.
This episode traces the full architecture: the Project 2025 blueprint, the 212(f) procla...
DACA at Risk How Project 2025, Court Battles, and a Two‑Year Clock Threaten a Generation of Dreamers
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Episode Summary: She grew up here. She’s raising U.S.-citizen children. And the country she has spent her entire life in still considers her provisional — a guest who can be asked to leave.
This episode is about the roughly 800,000 people living that reality, and the coordinated effort to keep them permanently temporary. Rising fees, closed doors, court rulings that strip work permits while leaving deportation protection in place, and a 900-page blueprint that treats DACA (Deferred Action for Chil...
Naturalized Citizens on the Target List: Who Gets to Feel Permanent?
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Episode Summary:
You did everything this country asked. You waited years, took the test, swore the oath, and became a citizen. Now a letter arrives saying a federal database has flagged you as a "potential noncitizen" — and you have thirty days to prove yourself all over again, or lose your right to vote.
That story is happening today. And it's part of a coordinated, three-layered effort to chip away at the citizenship and voting rights of 25 million naturalized Ame...
Birthright Citizenship Under Attack: Who “Really” Counts as American
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Episode Summary:
On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to stop recognizing some U.S.-born babies as citizens. That fight is now at the Supreme Court — and it’s about far more than immigration law. We look at what birthright citizenship is and why it was written into the Constitution after the Civil War, exactly what Trump’s order does and who it targets, the legal battle from “blatantly unconstitutional” to the Supreme Court’s sha...
The Consequences of Expanded ICE Operations: Inside Minneapolis, the Detention System, and the Resistance It Sparked
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In Episode 15, we examined how the ICE machine was built — through executive action, internal directives, expanded authority, and rapid hiring.
Episode 16 examines what happened once it began operating.
Using Minneapolis as a focal point, this episode traces the consequences of expanded ICE operations at three levels:
National reaction — how the country responded when intensified immigration enforcement moved into interior citiesCity-level impact — how schools, clinics, businesses, and local governments adjusted during the federal deployment
Neighborhood-level reality — what daily life loo...
How ICE Was Supercharged: Ideology, Executive Authority, and the Growth of Immigration Raids
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In Episode 15 of Surviving Trump, we examine how ICE was strengthened, accelerated, and reoriented during Trump’s second term.
This episode is not about one raid. It’s about how enforcement expanded — through political rhetoric, executive authority, internal policy directives, institutional loyalty, and rapid hiring.
When those forces align, operations intensify. Arrests increase. Detention grows. Procedural safeguards narrow.
Episode 15 breaks down how that alignment takes shape.
In This Episode
Voting Under Threat: How Trump Uses ICE, Armed Presence, and Fear to Intimidate Voters
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In Episode 14, Bella Goode examines how fear and federal power are being used to shape who feels safe enough to vote. This episode moves beyond rule changes and paperwork to focus on something more direct: raids, armed presence, mass voter challenges, and threats aimed at voters and election workers.
Rather than claiming elections will be cancelled or turnout will collapse nationwide, this episode explains how intimidation actually works — quietly, unevenly, and long before Election Day. It shows how immigration enforcement, ballot seizures, and aggressive “election security” rhetoric change behavior in tar...
The Endgame: One Man in Charge of Our Elections
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In Episode 13, Bella Goode examines a dangerous shift in how elections are being talked about—and increasingly, how they are being structured.
Donald Trump is no longer just disputing election outcomes after the fact. He is openly calling for Republicans to “take over the voting” and “nationalize” elections in places he claims can’t be trusted. Those claims are tied directly to familiar narratives about immigrant voters, big cities, and Democratic-run states being inherently corrupt.
This episode explains what that language really means, how power over elections is already b...
Weakening the Voting Rights Act: Removing the Last Safeguard
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For decades, the Voting Rights Act was the country’s strongest safeguard against racial discrimination in elections. It didn’t just promise the right to vote—it enforced it.
In Episode 12, Bella Goode explains how that safeguard has been systematically weakened over the past decade. Not through a single repeal, but through Supreme Court decisions, shifts in enforcement, and administrative strategy that leave the law standing on paper while stripping away its power in practice.
This episode traces how protections were dismantled step by step—and what that mea...
The Federal Government and Election Interference: demands, pressure and direct involvement
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In Episode 11 of Surviving Trump, Bella Goode examines how election interference is moving beyond state laws and into the federal government itself.
This episode looks at how voter data demands, law-enforcement pressure, and direct involvement by federal agencies are being used to shape who feels safe enough to register and vote. From blocked citizenship requirements to ballot seizures, voter-roll demands, and pressure on election officials, the focus is no longer just on rules—it’s on control.
Rather than waiting for Election Day, this strategy works earlier, quie...
Election Integrity: How Voting Rules Are Being Changed Before the 2026 Midterms
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In Episodes 6 through 9, Surviving Trump examined how political power can be shaped long before Election Day — through gerrymandering and census manipulation.
In Episode 10, Bella Goode turns to the next layer: the rules of voting itself.
This episode explains how changes to voter registration, mail and early voting, voting machines, and federal “election security” enforcement are being pursued ahead of the 2026 midterms — and how those changes affect who can participate, whose votes are counted, and which outcomes are treated as legitimate.
Rather than focusing on past...
Series 1 Trailer | Rigging the Rules
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This is the official trailer for Season 2, Series 1: Rigging the Rules.
In this series, I examine how elections can be reshaped long before anyone casts a ballot — through gerrymandering, census manipulation, election “integrity” laws, and the weakening of federal safeguards.
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Bella Goode is a pseudonym — but the voice, research, and mission are all real. A Republican turned Democrat advocate in 2016, I was raised by middle class parents in Pennsylvania. I’m a former marketing e...
Series 1: Rigging the Election Rules
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Surviving Trump | Season 2
In Series 1 of Surviving Trump Season 2, Bella Goode investigates how white nationalists protect political power long before Election Day. This series examines gerrymandering, census manipulation, voter suppression laws, proof-of-citizenship requirements, election administration takeovers, and the broader strategy tied to Project 2025.
From redistricting maps that lock in outcomes, to census undercounts that reduce representation, to voting rules that make participation harder, this series explains how election infrastructure can be reshaped to preserve control in a country that is becoming more diverse.
If you want...
Census Manipulation: Part 2
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How population data is being reshaped to lock in political power before anyone votes
Episode 9 examines the decisions already underway that will shape the 2030 census — changes to leadership, questions, staffing, and funding that determine who is counted, who is missed, and how representation and resources are allocated for an entire decade.
This episode explains why census manipulation doesn’t require interfering with elections themselves. The impact comes earlier: by shaping the population data used to draw districts, assign House seats, and distribute public funding long before ballots are...
Census Manipulation: Part 1
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How Population Data Shapes Political Power — Long Before Anyone Votes
Every ten years, the U.S. census quietly determines how political power and public resources are distributed across the country. In Episode 8, Bella Goode explains how the census has become a political target — and why the most consequential fights happen years before the official count begins.
This episode breaks down how census manipulation works in practice: pressure on scientific standards, changes to questions and definitions, limits on staffing and follow-up, and political interference in leadership and oversight. It a...
Gerrymandering: Part 1
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Season 2 began by laying out the larger picture: how the policies laid out in Project 2025 are tied to white supremacy and are shaping government decisions.
In Episode 6, the podcast moves from that overview to mechanics. This episode explains how redistricting and gerrymandering work, who controls the process, and how election outcomes can be shaped long before anyone votes — even when voters keep voting the same way.
What This Episode Covers
How congressional districts are createdWho controls redistricting in most statesHow packing and cracking workHow district lines ca...Gerrymandering: Part 2
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Episode 6 explained how gerrymandering works. In Episode 7, Bella Goode examines who is driving this strategy, how it connects to Project 2025, and what responses are underway.
This episode shifts from mechanics to accountability, explaining how political incentives, legal changes, and demographic pressure make aggressive gerrymandering more likely.
What This Episode Covers
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White Supremacy’s Ties to Project 2025 and Modern Tactics: When ideology becomes policy
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In Episode 5 of Season 2 of Surviving Trump, host Bella Goode connects the long history of white supremacy to its modern political expression: Project 2025. This episode closes the foundation series by showing how ideas that once lived in rhetoric and fringe movements are now being written directly into federal policy.
Building on the previous episode’s historical overview, Bella explains how white supremacy has adapted over time. When openly racist laws became unacceptable, the ideology didn’t disappear—it shifted into policies described as neutral, technical, or administrative. Project 2025 is the mechanism that b...
