By Cindi Branham
We’re not done with the darkness of Project 2025.
10:45 am. Your Day Under Project 2025, Continued
Before you hang up with your sister, she lets you know that your brother’s cancer is no longer going to be treated, because when his company changed over to Trumpcare, protections were lost for pre-existing conditions. The treatments will be out of pocket now, and he can’t afford thousands of dollars per treatment on his own. You’re going to lose your brother, but not before he and those who love him go through a devastating journey to death.
1:45 pm.
After wrecking your car and injuring yourself when you slipped on the black ice, your car is drivable – just – and you’ve made it in to work late. Your boss complains about not being able to hire people to do the back-breaking labor the undocumented immigrants once did.
You just miss your Muslim friend in the next cubicle, who was taken to a deportation camp because of his religion, and you have no way to check up on him and his family. They’ve been disappeared.
2:30 pm.
Today, you’re also worrying about your own job, because the economy went into a nose-dive once the rounding up and deportation of the targeted classes of people started. The boss may be complaining about not being able to hire enough people, but you’ve sensed for a while now that the minority-owned business is also in a targeted class.
4:30 pm.
Your wife comes home and tells you that her colleague at work is still harassing her daily, and it’s getting to the point she needs to quit for her health. She’s gone to HR, but the colleague is in a favored class, and they don’t want to do anything.
The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission affords her no alternative protections. They still exist, but with Trump loyalists in charge, they are little more than dead weight, with no idea or concerns for their role in governing.
5:00 pm.
The mail is in. Bills. And a notice that your Social Security retirement date has been pushed out until the age of 70. Your 401K hasn’t been performing well since Trump took over and destroyed the robust economy he inherited from Past President Biden, the same as he did in his first term with Past President Obama’s strong economy.
6:00 PM
The news comes on. Remember how many times Trump threatened to go after his perceived enemies?
There are several items on people from the past administration who have been picked up as traitors. They include many of Trump’s past opponents, like Kamala Harris, Hillary and Bill Clinton, the Obamas, and several Democratic governors and members of the House and Senate. Nancy Pelosi has been a political prisoner since January 20, 2025.
6:10 pm.
Your son calls from the police station to tell you that he’s been arrested, even though he did everything you taught him about police encounters. He thinks they may be targeting those who participated in a protest last week against draconian oppression of persons of color. “The Talk” didn’t protect him. The police now work directly for Trump.
You hang up and start making calls to bail bondsmen and attorneys for help. Your heart is crushed and your fears are overwhelming.
6:45 pm
It’s time for your daily visit to the nursing and memory care home your father is living in. Visiting is an every-day necessity because the standards are minimal since Trump’s cancellation of this and many other protectionary guidelines, and your father is no longer able to care for himself.
Because you and your wife must work, you can’t bring him home. Your combined salaries are helping by supplying healthier food options for your extended families and even a few neighbors.
You worry: if there’s another pandemic, he, his fellow patients, and the staff may be wiped out because the government can’t be depended on to even do as well as they did on COVID 19, and we all have no confidence in that reaction.
Information from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is being suppressed because the government doesn’t want you to know what’s really happening and blame them for not controlling it better. The CDC’s top management was replaced by loyalists as Trump’s new term began, so they – along with most other government agencies – can’t be trusted even when they do come out with information and guidelines,
Before Trump was elected and took over the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there was promising research being done. They were very close to a cure for Alzheimer’s, but there’s no one to lead the research or test the drugs before release.
10:00 pm
As you’re getting ready for bed, your boss calls and says you’ll have to work 12-hour shifts through the next weeks, starting tomorrow, until he can find more workers to do that back-breaking work the undocumented immigrants once did, before they were deported en masse. Your job and theirs.
Your boss will work you a 12-hour day come election day and won’t give anyone time off to vote. You’ve essentially been cancelled. Strangled.
Project 2025 foretold the elimination of overtime pay (until an unreasonable number of weekly hours is reached). You didn’t believe it would happen this way, but Alabama’s a “right to work” state, which is possibly better translated as “your employer has every right to fire you with no legal consequences” has you in a corner.
Let’s throw another kink in here: Government agencies will be privatized, awarded to the highest bidder or the closest insider. Profit becomes the priority, and services will suffer. That means people suffer. As a contractor to a corrupt government, there’s little incentive to care for individuals; rather, our government is complicit in profit over people.
How do we, as Alabamians, matter? I ask: How much to we want to matter?
There are other ways we school ourselves and help to inform our families and friends to approach this challenge – probably the greatest we’ve faced in most of our lifetimes by voting.
We don’t succumb to fear and inaction, misinformation and manipulation, the desired results of the Right. You know who will continue our form of government, however flawed it is, and you know who won’t. You know who threatens whole classes and demographics of our population, and who won’t.
They would love to bring this upon us with no resistance on our parts. But resist is what we’ve done successfully over the last 8 years…so far.
The one thing we all do: Take nothing for granted. Nothing.
