Biden? Harris? I don't care. Stopping Trump and Project 2025 is all that matters.

Democrats are all atwitter, having a hard but necessary discussion about President Joe Biden’s age and ability to continue as the party’s presidential candidate.

The political media and associated pundits and poll watchers are also on the case, frisking about like a dog with a roast-beef-scented chew toy, gleefully excited to have a new toy to toss around.

Apparently, it got dull for them to focus on the fact that the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee is a convicted felon who fomented an insurrection, still denies the outcome of the last election and wants to round up millions of immigrants and put them in camps while they await deportation. (Rounding up people and putting them in camps is not a thing that, historically speaking, ends well.)

Those pesky details about Donald Trump have largely been cast aside since Biden got on a presidential debate stage, acted old and prompted the news media at large to say, “Yipeeeee! A different kind of crisis!”

Don't let Biden's age distract from Trump's lunacy or Project 2025

I pray the rest of us won’t be so easily distracted, because while the Democrats are chasing their tails and the chattering class is paying rapt attention to the tail-chasing, Trump is doing things like promoting calls for “televised military tribunals” for his political enemies while his allies announce a “second American revolution.”

That last bit came from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, whose organization wields immense power in the conservative movement and created Project 2025, a painstakingly detailed and hellishly authoritarian plan for a second Trump presidency.

Last week, Roberts said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Darn nice of him to give us lefties the bloodless option, but if I’m being honest, a marshmallow-soft dude named Kevin with a fascism kink doesn’t strike much fear in me.

Project 2025 is very real and very scary, assuming you like democracy

What does keep me up at night is Project 2025, a governing blueprint designed by a collection of former Trump administration officials who seem to have looked at Adolf Hitler’s path to power in 1930s Germany and thought, “Yeah, there are some pretty good ideas here.”

Trump recently denied any connection to Project 2025, a sure sign he’s very connected to Project 2025, as every other word out of his mouth is a lie.

Have we forgotten about Trump?Calls to replace Biden vs. silence on Trump? America has lost its political mind.

Again, the people who came up with this plan are predominantly folks with close ties to the former president.

Roberts has said that The Heritage Foundation’s goal is “institutionalizing Trumpism.” During Trump’s first term, according to The Heritage Foundation itself, he “embraced nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations” the group put forth.

Biden's age is an issue, but understand where Project 2025 might take us

I encourage everyone to read as much as they can about Project 2025, starting right here with the group’s “Mandate for Leadership.”

These are but a few things being plotted:

• Remove thousands of federal workers and replace them with political appointees loyal to Trump (for historical comparison, on April 7, 1933, the German government under Hitler issued the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” which removed Jews and anyone disloyal to the Nazi Party from government jobs).
• Eliminate the Department of Education and defund the Department of Justice.
• Undo all Biden-era climate change policies.
• Keep LGBTQ+ couples from adopting children in order to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”

Project 2025 will undermine American democracy

And here are a few direct quotes from the Project 2025 mandate:

• “The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country.”
• "This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors."

Authoritarian plans like Project 2025 lean heavily on 'elites'

Of so-called liberal elites, who make up a sizable swath of the American population, the writers say: “Their outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored.”

Kamala Harris should get more say:Harris should be a bigger part of the Biden campaign. It may save Democrats.

Cool. It's an impressive body of work from a pack of dictator-curious weirdos with, I’d guess, some unexamined daddy issues. And it would be nice to ignore the whole mess. But Project 2025 is serious, as is the broader threat posed by Trump returning to office and, thanks to broader immunity granted to him by his pals on the Supreme Court, pretty much doing whatever he wants.

Whether Democrats ride with Biden or not, we've got work to do

The Democrats, one way or another, will sort out the BIDEN-IS-OLD Armageddon we’re living through. The nominee will be Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris or possibly someone I’ll call “Democratic Nominee TBD.” 

And here’s the thing: I don’t care. I'll vote for a tin of tainted meat if that’s what it takes to knock down Trump’s self-serving lunacy and Mr. Second-American-Revolution’s relentlessly un-American Project 2025.

You can spend all day cursing the past or the passage of time, or dreaming of the perfect Democratic nominee. Or you can take an honest look at Project 2025 and the stakes of this election and agree all that matters is protecting our democracy and telling the nitwits promising a “bloodless” revolution where they can stick their mutton-headed fantasies.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk