What is kryptonite for Democrats in 2024? 

A serious debate about what former President Donald Trump would do versus what President Joe Biden has done.

With Biden upside down on issue after issue with American voters, including all important unaffiliated voters, the Democrats’ hope is the next five months will focus on prison terms, porn star payments, Justice Alito’s flag pole and screeching about the “end of democracy.”

Too often, Trump helps them.

That’s why it’s important for actual policy differences to be put in the spotlight. The good news is conservatives have presented a detailed agenda for the next conservative president. The substance is serious and well researched. 

It’s driving the Democrats nuts.   

Why? Because many of Trump’s policies are popular, and Biden’s simply aren’t. 

America needs a reminder Donald Trump, over the course of his four years, was a very consequential president. For 206 weeks of his 208-week term (before things went completely off the rails on Jan. 6, 2021) Trump put together a series of impressive policy gains that produced significant improvements in economic policy, defense, foreign affairs, energy independence and the environment.

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You can look it up. It’s in a 50-page compendium compiled by the Trump White House at the end of his term.   

This was the product of “good Trump,” who let very smart people craft wise policy that was either successfully enacted by Congress or pushed through the regulatory processes. His challenge was that “bad Trump,” the mercurial Twitter spewing, bombastic wild man too often overshadowed or obscured his own accomplishments. 

Here are a few:   

• Created 7 million new jobs, lifting middle class incomes dramatically and cratering the unemployment rate to 3.5%. 
• Jobless claims were the lowest in half-a-century
• Unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanics and women hit record lows, as did poverty rates for those groups. 
• Nearly 7 million people came off food stamps
• Enacted a $3.2 trillion tax cut while significantly reducing the regulatory burden on businesses, which energized the economy, particularly small business.

That’s just the economy. There were similar achievements across the government, including landmark international agreements. 

This was accomplished despite the shambolic start to the term. It was clear in December of 2016 the Trump team was completely gob smacked when they won. There was no serious transition plan, a dearth of personnel prospects and barely a framework of a policy agenda for the all-important initial six months of his presidency.

Job one this time is to be ready to roll the day after the election.

Enter Project 2025 from The Heritage Foundation. Since 1980, Heritage has produced the “Mandate for Leadership,” offering a nuts-and-bolts conservative agenda. Former President Ronald Reagan adopted it and it became the blueprint for the Reagan Revolution.

The latest version clocks in at about 1,000 pages and it is rock-ribbed conservative.

It is freaking out the progressives to the point they will send forth propaganda teams of members of Congress to lie about what’s in the plan, calling it the end of the federal government and the demise of democracy.

In the words of one media report on Project 2025, discussing how it alarms progressives, the plan proposes “the elimination of certain federal agencies, the overhaul of others and the stocking of all departments with loyalists to conservative causes.”

For most conservatives, this is a dream come true.

Let’s examine one of the liberals’ talking points: the end of democracy.

One way the plan does this, they claim, is by rolling back the power and influence of the federal bureaucracy. Ironically, if Trump does weaken the bureaucracy, he strengthens the hand of people who were democratically elected, forcing Congress, not bureaucrats, to shape policy.   

When they say this is the “end of democracy” they mean the end of their unchecked ability to undemocratically shape federal law and policy. 

In a closing piece in the Mandate for Leadership, Ed Feulner, Heritage’s founder and the architect of the first successful blueprint 44 years ago, wrote the aim now, as then, is to “build an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society flourish for all” — while extinguishing the Biden dumpster fire. 

That’s the plan. It’s reasonable. It’s actionable.

And that is why Democrats are scared to death of Project 2025.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.