WASHINGTON, DC – American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony D. Romero last week, following Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 election, reaffirmed the organization’s opposition to the incoming president’s policies, writing in a Nov. 6 digital newsletter, “We are ready to meet this administration with the full strength of the ACLU just as we did in 2016.”
Many polls and pundits believed the 2024 presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump would be extremely close, notes ABCNews’ Project 538, a website that features election forecasts based on polling data. It projected Harris had a “50-in-100” chance of winning, whereas Trump had a “49-in-100” chance of winning.
The New York Times reported that Trump won the Electoral College by a landslide—with 295 delegates—and, unexpectedly, secured the popular vote as well, garnering more than four million more votes than Harris.
A second Trump presidency has massive implications for virtually every issue, from the economy and reproductive rights to immigration and foreign policy, said the ACLU’s Romero, adding. It also “represents a clear and present danger to (America’s) democratic norms, processes, and institutions.”
Romero’s newsletter expresses concern about Project 2025, the expansive policy recommendation document published by the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank.
“Guided by Project 2025, (ACLU) believe(s) that (Trump) will try to make good on those promises…to deport one million immigrants every year and target the ‘enemy within’ —which, for Trump, means anyone that disagrees with him,” charged Romero.
As per Axios, not only has Trump denied knowing about Project 2025 (or its creators), but he has “disavowed” it, calling some of its proposals “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Despite Trump’s denial and disavowal, in 2018, the Heritage Foundation praised Trump for “embracing nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations from … ‘Mandate for Leadership,’” a series of policy publications for the 2016 Trump Administration.
Regardless of whether Trump follows through with Project 2025, upon his inauguration on Jan 20, Romero promises the ACLU “will continue (to mobilize Trump’s opposition) by working with ACLU affiliates to build firewalls that safeguard rights and liberties in states across the nation.”
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