Trump’s Government-in-Waiting Shared Their Plans for the Death Penalty. It’s Terrifying.

A blueprint for a second Trump term issued by conservative groups contains many alarming wake-up calls for progressives. One that may have been overlooked is the ambitious plan to revive and expand the federal death penalty—and it highlights why Biden must act now to prevent a bloodbath for people condemned to death.

The report by Project 2025, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” offers a detailed set of policy goals and recommendations for Trump, should he return to the Oval Office. As the AP puts it, “Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s return.” Behind the scenes, leaders of Project 2025 are collaborating with the Trump campaign and plotting a rapid-fire post-inauguration rollout of a right-wing agenda.

Given its membership, it should not come as a surprise that the Project 2025 agenda includes ambitious plans to revive and expand the federal death penalty. But it still should serve as yet another wake-up call for progressives as to why they cannot afford to sit on their hands during the 2024 presidential campaign, and to the Biden administration as to why they should stop temporizing about capital punishment.

The section of “Mandate for Leadership” dedicated to laying out a program for the future Trump Justice Department locates the discussion of the federal death penalty in a broad but familiar context. It argues that a “disturbing number of state and local jurisdictions
have enacted policies that directly undermine public safety [and] leave doubt about
whether criminals will be punished.”

“Mandate for Leadership” acknowledges that “the prosecution of criminal offenses in most jurisdictions across the country must remain the responsibility of state and local governments,” but claims that “the federal government owes a special responsibility to Americans in jurisdictions where state and local prosecutors have abdicated this duty.” It suggests that the next administration should provide “greater attention and additional federal resources … to protect the rights of American citizens and federal interests.”

It offers a variety of examples of such attention and additional resources—and that is where its death penalty recommendation comes in.

“Capital punishment,” the Project 2025 report concedes, “is a sensitive matter.” But it quickly leaves such delicacy behind and delivers red meat for its conservative readership.

“The current crime wave,” it continues, “makes deterrence vital at the federal, state, and local levels. However, providing this punishment without ever enforcing it provides justice neither for the victims’ families nor for the defendant.” The facts belie this claim about a crime wave—but the report uses it to offer a death penalty one-two punch.

First, “the next conservative Administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.” “Obtain finality” is a convoluted way of saying execute them and do so with dispatch.

The report doesn’t stop there. It then recommends an expansion of the federal death penalty. The next administration “should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes—particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children—until Congress says otherwise through legislation.”

That the Supreme Court has in the past ruled that the death penalty should not be used for crimes that do not involve the death of the victim, such as child rape, seems not to matter to Project 2025. Perhaps the authors of “Mandate for Leadership” think that the current Supreme Court would take a different view.

And, with Trump, the authors of Project 2025’s death penalty plan know they will have a very receptive audience. In fact, he has long loved the death penalty.

That love affair goes back at least to 1989 when, as the Washington Post notes, “Trump, then a celebrity real estate developer, took out full-page advertisements … to call for a return to the death penalty after a female jogger was beaten and raped in Central Park. Five black and Hispanic teenagers were arrested and convicted in the case, spending years in prison. The ‘Central Park Five’ were later exonerated.”

He said at the time, “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” Since then, as the Post observes, “Trump has weighed in … on a number of other cases,” using Twitter to make his pro–death penalty feelings known.

During his time as a candidate for president and then during his term in the Oval Office, he has frequently talked about, and talked up, the death penalty. He has embraced it as a sign of his toughness and masculinity and a blunt instrument of public policy.

He has long wanted to expand the range of offenses for which someone could get a death sentence. In 2018, Trump proposed executing drug dealers.

He also claimed that leaders in China and Singapore had told him that the death penalty was an effective method for dealing with drug problems.

That same year, Trump’s attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, sent a memo to all United States attorneys “strongly” encouraging them to seek the death penalty for people caught “dealing in extremely large quantities of drugs.” He claimed, echoing Trump, that doing so would “aid in our continuing fight against drug trafficking and the destruction it causes our nation.”

And, in the waning months of Trump’s presidency, his administration went on a killing spree, reviving long-dormant federal executions. It put 13 people to death in a span of six months.

Along the way, the Trump administration dramatically expanded the federal government’s ability to carry out the death penalty by issuing a rule allowing it to hang, electrocute, gas, or shoot individuals it did not want to kill by lethal injection.

Since he left office, Trump has continued to embrace capital punishment. In 2022, he used speeches delivered in Las Vegas and at the America First Policy Institute to bemoan this country’s crime problem and again offer the death penalty as a surefire way to deal with it. “To put it simply, we are a nation in decline,” he said in Vegas. “The streets are flowing with the blood of innocent crime victims. … We need to end the crime wave immediately.”

Death sentences and executions for convicted drug dealers are an important part of his program for doing so. “It sounds horrible, doesn’t it?” Trump asked, “But you know what? That’s the ones that don’t have any problem. It doesn’t take 15 years in court. It goes quickly, and you absolutely—you execute a drug dealer, and you’ll save 500 lives.”

Trump’s death penalty fantasies seem to know no limit.

Last September, he took to Truth Social to suggest that Gen. Mark Milley, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for what he did in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection. He wrote that Milley’s phone call to reassure China after the storming of the Capitol was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”

Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” offers a way for Trump to turn his fantasies and fervor about the death penalty into a chilling plan of action. That is why, at the very least, Joe Biden should use his clemency power to commute the sentence of everyone now on the federal death row. It is why progressives, who now may harbor doubts about Biden, must enlist as loyal foot soldiers in his reelection campaign.