The Looting Blueprint: From Pardons to Project 2025, and Why Local Pushback Matters

From pardons to bailouts to county boards, Trump’s machine is a smash-and-grab operation. The only way to stop it is to disrupt it.

Authoritarians rarely try to build lasting states. They build smash-and-grab machines, designed for immediate extraction, not long-term stewardship. And we can watch it play out in real time.

Just this week, the Trump administration pledged a $20 billion bailout to Argentina’s Javier Milei, a man Trump calls a “fantastic and powerful leader.” Milei has gutted social programs, fueled inflation with whiplash austerity, and then leaned on his friends abroad to keep the lights on. The result? Washington is preparing to buy Argentine bonds and shovel U.S. taxpayer money into Milei’s re-election campaign disguised as economic “stability.” Even Steve Bannon squawked a one-word review on Gettr: “Wat.”

Meanwhile, American farmers are furious that the bailout comes as Argentina cuts export taxes on soybeans to flood the Chinese market, undercutting U.S. growers already clobbered by Trump’s own tariffs. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it: “Donald Trump wants to lend $20 billion of our money to bail out a political ally and his global investors before an election.” Neera Tanden added the kicker: “Someone needs to explain the rationale for cutting USAID but bailing out Argentina from their own whack policies.”

Argentina today joins a long list of short-lived authoritarian experiments that end with foreign bailouts, currency collapses, and broken promises. Think Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet’s Chile, or the Argentine junta of the 1980s, regimes that looked “strong” until the debt came due. These weren’t durable governments; they were short, ugly, profitable looting runs that enriched elites while leaving ordinary people to sift through the rubble.

And that’s exactly what Donald Trump and his coterie of planners, financiers, and enablers are engineering here at home. The pardon economy, Project 2025, deliberate financial sabotage, and even the rhetoric spilling out in county board meetings are all pieces of the same puzzle: hollow the system, cash out quickly, and leave someone else holding the bag.

Let’s start with the most obvious racket: pardons. In Trump’s hands, clemency isn’t a mechanism of mercy; it’s a market. Immunity becomes the coin of the realm. Allies who keep quiet, cronies who remain loyal, or donors who stay generous all get their receipts stamped “forgiven.” This is governance as patronage: not blind justice, but targeted immunity. Think of it as a loyalty rewards program, “PardonPoints”, where miles never expire and the only qualification is fealty.

And the cost isn’t abstract. As Liz Oyer, the U.S. Pardon Attorney, told Congress, Trump’s clemency spree has already drained taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars. Victims of financial crimes saw more than $330 million in restitution wiped away, with the public forced to pick up the tab. Add in lost fines, unpaid penalties, and investigative resources, and the overall hit to victims and taxpayers tops half a billion dollars.

Oyer didn’t just crunch numbers; she pulled back the curtain on how clemency became a pay-to-play racket. She testified about a Ponzi-scheme operator whose restitution vanished after relatives hosted a six-figure fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, and a telecom executive who saw tens of millions erased after his company’s PAC maxed out donations. Each case looked less like justice served than like invoices stamped “Paid in Full” by Trump’s political machine.

For her trouble, Oyer was fired, not for botching the math, but for refusing to rubber-stamp the restoration of gun rights to Mel Gibson, Trump’s Hollywood pal. She lost her job because she wouldn’t hand a lethal weapon back to an actor with a history of racist rants and domestic abuse allegations. That’s how the pardon economy works: reward loyalty, punish dissent, and send the bill to the public.

Then there are the individual transactions. Oyer testified about white-collar felons whose restitution vanished after family members cut fat checks to Trump’s political committees. A Ponzi-scheme operator convicted of bilking retirees got his debts erased after his brother hosted a six-figure fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. A telecom executive facing tens of millions in restitution had his slate wiped clean shortly after his company’s PAC maxed out donations. Another fraudster’s family poured money into a Trump-aligned super PAC in the weeks before his pardon papers were signed. Each story reads less like justice served than like an itemized invoice for presidential access.

That’s what a “pardon economy” looks like: a pipeline transferring wealth upward by erasing the obligations of the well-connected. It does two things at once: it locks down loyalty, and it teaches everyone else that corruption is a survivable offense, so long as you pick the right team. The rule of law becomes the rule of leverage.

But why stop at individual favors when you can rewrite the entire playbook? Enter Project 2025. The glossy, 922-page policy document was bad enough, but the undercover reporting from Democracy Now! revealed something even darker: a second, hidden phase.

Russell Vought, Trump’s former OMB director, boasted over coffee in a DC hotel suite that “80% of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies.” He bragged about drafting memos justifying the president’s power to deploy the military against protesters. He talked about firing civil servants, ending agency independence, and using executive choke points to gut abortion rights.

Trump may publicly shrug, “I don’t know what the hell Project 25 is,” but Vought made the truth plain: “He’s been at our organization. He’s raised money for our organization. He’s very supportive of what we do.”

They are writing the blueprints for a rapid, short-lived consolidation of power. They’re not planning governance; they’re planning seizure.

Max over at UNFTR laid it out in brutal detail: the economic policies of this administration are designed to implode. Tariffs that hit consumers, rate cuts to juice short-term corporate gains, deregulation to let monopolies and polluters run wild, all of it is sabotage in plain sight.

But it’s sabotage with a purpose. Max again: “They want to drastically cut rates to stimulate the top end of the corporate economy to cover for the other areas of the administration’s agenda that are going to tank it for the vast majority of us.”

Call it short-term authoritarianism. A bloodless coup meant to plunder the treasury. Create the crash, funnel the benefits upward, and prepare the memos to call in the military when the public notices. Historically, authoritarian regimes that follow this pattern burn bright and collapse quickly. The only question is how much damage they inflict before they fall.

Trickling Down to Coos County

And if you think this is only about Washington, think again. Authoritarian rhetoric doesn’t stay bottled up in think tanks and White House memos; it filters down to your county board.

At a recent Coos County meeting here in Oregon, Commissioner Rod Taylor, a January 6 insurrectionist or “J6er” as he proudly calls himself, parroted the talking points almost word for word. He claimed George Floyd “died of a drug overdose,” dismissing the jury’s verdict of murder as “gaslighting.” He painted right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk as a martyr, declaring, “Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. His children do not deserve to grow up without a father.” And he wrapped it all in a civics-class bow: “We need to learn to disagree better.”

The rhetorical moves were textbook: factual inversion, martyr-making, bothsides-ism, and finally the soft-sounding bromide of “civility” to paper over the authoritarian core. Cast the right as perpetual victims, dismiss systemic injustice, and reframe accountability as persecution, that’s the playbook.

What’s most striking is how seamlessly Taylor slid from these national talking points into county housekeeping, affordable housing projects, foundation grants, zoning minutiae. That juxtaposition is the tell. Authoritarian rhetoric is normalized as just another item of county business, smuggled in between sewer lines and timber grants. Big lies become background noise.

This is why the fight isn’t just national. Project 2025 needs county commissioners willing to repeat its talking points, school boards willing to enact its culture wars, and local institutions too timid to resist. If we don’t snuff out these narratives at the local level, we’re handing the playbook live actors.

Mock the theater, yes, ridicule the idea that George Floyd “just overdosed” or that loyalty deserves a lifetime supply of pardons, but also act. Demand transparency. Protect civil servants from political purges. Force public records disclosures. Build strike funds and mutual aid networks to withstand economic sabotage.

Because here’s the truth: they aren’t building for sustainability. They’re building for speed, for seizure, for extraction. “I want to be the person who crushes the deep state,” Vought declared. And in the pardon economy, in the Project 2025 blueprints, in Rod Taylor’s remarks, we can see exactly what that means.

The only way to stop it is to stop it everywhere, yes, in DC courtrooms, but also in your county board meetings. The Death Star is only as dangerous as the local officials who flip the switch.

Elections matter. So does the plumbing. Voting is the pressure valve; nonviolent disruption is the emergency brake. If we only show up every two years, the machinery Trump and his allies are building will still be in place, ready to cash out the gains no matter who sits in the Oval Office. We have to do both: elect, and disable.

Disruption doesn’t have to mean chaos, and it certainly doesn’t have to mean violence. It can start small. Imagine a rolling, one-day-a-week work stoppage where teachers, small retailers, or service workers simply don’t show up. Visible, coordinated, and impossible to ignore. Or a month-long consumer boycott of billionaire-owned companies, paired with buy-local vouchers and mutual aid so that the burden falls on corporations, not communities.

Other tactics scale in the same spirit. Sector-wide sympathy stoppages, even four hours during rush hour by transit workers or port crews, can ripple through the economy. Coordinated mass cancellations of auto-renew subscriptions or memberships show up instantly on corporate balance sheets. Local small businesses can join in by closing for a day in solidarity and turning storefronts into mutual-aid hubs, flipping the story from “hurting locals” to “protecting community.”

The disruption doesn’t have to come only from the streets. Municipal governments can pass ordinances to shield civil servants from political purges, force hearings on privatizations, or refuse to honor dubious federal directives without judicial review. Professionals, doctors, teachers, librarians, clerks, can pledge to uphold ethical standards even against unlawful political orders, denying authoritarians the cooperation they depend on. And when visibility matters, citizens can flood county offices with phone calls, plaster public spaces with art, or stage sit-ins at symbolic storefronts.

None of this is fanciful. It is lawful, nonviolent, and effective when coordinated. The point is to make extraction costly and repression visible, to prove that authoritarianism cannot run on autopilot. Voting may change who is in the chair, but disruption changes what the chair can do.