Donald Trump started his second term in office with a plan: Project 2025. 

The document — a detailed policy blueprint put together by the right-wing Heritage Foundation — outlined not just a hardline policy agenda, but a novel theory of how to wield power to get it done. Its chapters showed how a conservative president could aggressively use executive authority to strengthen the parts of the government he liked, like immigration enforcement, and smash the parts he didn’t, like foreign aid and the civil service.

During his presidential campaign, Democrats attacked Project 2025 as a nightmarish glimpse into what Trump would do if reelected, while Trump dismissed it as an outside plan irrelevant to his presidency. We now know Democrats had it right: Trump embraced Project 2025 for real. After winning, he appointed Russell Vought — the intellectual force behind Project 2025 — to lead his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and put its ideas into practice.

By now, its slash-and-burn tactics have fundamentally broken many parts of the federal government. The administration has managed to fire or push out hundreds of thousands of its employees and tear up the procedures that govern policymaking and implementation. It has also demolished the guardrails that protect democracy from power: bulling through constraints on executive authority, usurping Congress’s core responsibilities, and attacking the civil rights and electoral rules that underpin American democracy. 

As a result, the next president will not just inherit whatever policy messes Trump leaves behind. They will also be leading a government that may be structurally incapable of enacting appropriate fixes to those problems.

Democrats have bemoaned the results, but it’s long been unclear if they actually understood the real lesson here. Project 2025 showed that wielding power now requires not just policy vision, but also a theory of government — a plan to manipulate and reshape the very structure of the state to make sure new laws can be more than just words on paper.

With the Trump administration collapsing in popularity, and Democrats surging in the polls, we may see a test as soon as 2029. If they indeed win the next presidential election, will Democrats have anything as potent as Project 2025 in store?

The most prominent Democratic response to Project 2025 — an effort from a leading think tank, officially called “Project 2029” — seems undersized. A grab-bag series of conventional policy proposals, addressing issues like kids’ online safety and “the annoyance economy,” it does not even seek to grapple with the fundamental problem of a broken government.

But after months of reporting, I’ve learned that there is a quieter effort underway to build a true equivalent to Project 2025: a set of ideas for remaking the government just as sharply as Trump and Vought did — and perhaps more permanently.

The real Project 2029, as I’ve taken to calling it, isn’t yet a public document. But its broad agenda has become a point of consensus across the Democratic Party’s major factions. And importantly, its core ideas have real buy-in among both congressional Democrats and the top 2028 presidential hopefuls.

Unlike with Project 2025, no one organization is leading the charge. Rather, the real Project 2029 has been emerging from collaboration between loose groupings of NGOs, ex-Obama and Biden officials, and academics. Unlike the official Project 2029, they have no interest in developing campaign-trail-ready proposals on issues like childcare. Instead, they are laser-focused on responding to the Trump-Vought assault on democracy and the state.

“If you’re focused on the outcomes, you’re missing the real work that’s going on,” a top Democratic policy mind involved in these efforts told me.

The brain trust involved does not see its goal as simply restoring the pre-Trump status quo. Quite the opposite: Their central premise is that the government was broken before Trump’s second term. The hope now is to use Trump’s demolition derby as an opportunity to (ahem) build back better: to take the federal government, at once a tangled mess and an authoritarian menace, and turn it into a 21st-century democracy.

Where Project 2025 was dedicated to breaking the administrative state — firing bureaucrats and destroying entire agencies — the Democratic counterstrategy aims to create a government that can implement duly enacted policies with speed and competence. And where Project 2025 aimed to demolish democratic guardrails, Project 2029 aims to right-size the presidency and put in new barriers to prevent abuse of power.

This renovated federal government would be simultaneously more efficient and more constrained: capable of reacting to economic crises and delivering benefits at lightning speed, while simultaneously incapable of prosecuting the president’s political enemies or wielding ICE against peaceful protesters.

These general goals are increasingly being sharpened into concrete proposals. While there isn’t an authoritative policy document at Project 2025’s level of specificity, some key ideas include:

• A new, vastly simpler and politically protected set of rules for hiring and promotion in the civil service;
• Creating entire agencies and Cabinet positions dedicated to battling corruption and inefficiency;
• Overhauling federal privacy laws to facilitate legitimate information-sharing while constraining DOGE-style data theft;
• Reviving a never-passed bill that would cap the president’s ability to declare emergencies at a 30-day duration;
• Eliminating barriers that block policies at the front end, like the Paperwork Reduction Act, while creating new judicial remedies for federal abuses — like permitting citizens to personally sue government officials who violate their rights;
• A rewrite of the 1946 law that governs the basic rules about how the executive implements policy; 
• Funding community-based organizations that can both assist in effective policy implementation and organize against federal overreach;
• Rewriting the basic structures of US government by blowing up the filibuster; Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico statehood; and overhauling the Supreme Court — though these remain far more contentious than the others.

While most of these ideas sound hyper-wonky, so did much of Project 2025. And experts on federal policymaking say that changes like these could have a transformative effect. Moreover, the degree to which Democrats are prioritizing government overhaul in their planning process is unprecedented — with clear evidence suggesting their interest extends across factional divides and up to its top leaders. 

“These are themes that are motivating people, that people genuinely care about [and] are putting time, energy, and money behind,” Don Moynihan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, told me. “They see the stakes as paramount — we have to do this or our democracy is imperiled.”

Policy advocates who have been toiling away on these issues, for their part, believe that there’s a unique window for their ideas to become reality. “It feels like there has been a turning point,” said Jen Pahlka, a former Obama official who has become one of the leading lights of the government reform movement. “I think people see, in their own lives…the way that [government] is just breaking down.”

This new Democratic approach is beset by internal contradictions. There are some difficult trade-offs between efficiency and restraining power, a tension the movement is only beginning to grapple with. And there’s a major question of whether Congress, even when dominated by Democrats, is capable of passing reforms on this level of ambition.

But if these problems can be worked out, and its ideas turned into practical legislation and executive orders, the next Democratic administration could accomplish far more than anyone might expect. 

What the real Project 2029 is

If one person embodies the real Project 2029’s vision, it would be K. Sabeel Rahman.

Rahman, who has a PhD in political theory, with a focus on the relationship between democracy and capitalism, emerged as a leading Democratic thinker in the mid-2010s — ascending to the leadership of Demos, a think tank associated with the party’s progressive wing. After Joe Biden won the presidency, he tapped Rahman to help lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), an obscure but exceptionally important White House bureau governing policy implementation.

Today, Rahman is a professor at Cornell Law School and, though he modestly suggests otherwise, one of the central figures in the Democratic project to reconceive American government. His forthcoming book, Remaking the State, will be an unofficial debut for many of its ideas.

This effort functions very differently from its conservative predecessor. While Heritage’s Project 2025 was a specific, dedicated group that produced a big blueprint document, the Democrats’ equivalent is more diffuse: a thinly connected network of people at think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities. Some involved organizations, like the Roosevelt Institute, are already prominent groups with a seat at the Washington table; others are obscure even by think tank standards. 

“There is no one plan — this is the biggest thing I want to convey,” Rahman said. “We desperately keep wanting a central planner, and we keep not having one. So instead, let’s stop trying to have one.”

Rahman and a handful of others have been trying to direct a process that can be — like a lot of Democratic Party processes — a little scattered and out of public view. He describes people coming together at conferences and convenings; collaborating on writing projects and sharing ideas through group chats and email chains.

“Efforts…have been happening below the water line, so to speak, with a lot of overlapping but often slightly distinct casts of characters,” said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a political scientist at Columbia University and former Biden official who held high-level positions in OIRA and the Department of Labor. 

A core task for this effort has been unifying ideas from two somewhat separate prongs of the Democratic brain trust. The first group focuses on restoring the power of the government to do useful things, quickly. The second aims to make democracy itself stronger, so future would-be autocrats can’t seize the reins the way Trump is trying to.

Both of those groups are responding to the Project 2025 agenda of blowing up the federal bureaucracy while empowering Trump. But they arise from different parts of the Democratic policy universe — and in some ways, the biggest challenge is making them cohere.

The focus on building a more effective federal government has its roots in a set of ideas often called “state capacity,” a major intellectual influence on the abundance movement. Its leading thinkers, like Pahlka, believe that the US government has been unable to function properly for decades due to bureaucratic hurdles — strict rules on data sharing, extensive multiagency review processes, and a glacially cumbersome hiring-and-firing process that protects incompetent workers and deters talented ones from going into public service. This bureaucratic mess, they argue, is the common thread underpinning liberal governance failures, from the healthcare.gov rollout debacle under Barack Obama to the disastrously slow and partial implementation of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Like many conservatives, this group is very interested in cutting red tape and adopting a more corporate level of efficiency. But they staunchly oppose Vought-style demolition of the administrative state. Instead, their ultimate aim is creating a more empowered government, one that is more nimble so it can deliver services and enforce regulation quickly and effectively. 

The ideas for constraining executive power, by contrast, come from what might be termed the pro-democracy movement. Originating largely in response to widespread alarm about Trump’s rise a decade ago, this movement thinks about government reform from the broadly opposite lens from the state capacity types. Looking at cases of democratic collapse abroad, they see an overly empowered executive branch as one of the chief threats to the republic’s survival — and have spent the past decade developing ways to constrain it.

Until very recently, the two groups’ work has almost exclusively operated on separate tracks. State capacity people often work in different think tanks, activist organizations, and academic fields than pro-democracy types. Their visions for policy reform have mostly proceeded independently, with virtually nobody trying to combine them.

The catalyst for change was the second Trump term — or, more specifically, Russell Vought and Elon Musk.

The twinned assaults on the structure of government from Vought’s OMB and Musk’s DOGE, their mass firings, and blatant power grabs, tore apart the policymaking basics Democrats had long taken for granted. Both the brokenness of the federal government and the health of democracy suddenly became immediately urgent concerns for the American left — and money and energy began pouring into developing a bold response.

Since then, the movements have begun to build out their respective policy visions. In October 2025, the Roosevelt Institute — the leading think tank for the party’s economic progressives — released a report essentially aligning itself with much of the state capacity movement’s vision of government repair. In January 2026, the center-left Searchlight Institute announced a new project involving Obama vet Mikey Dickerson, called Tech Viaduct, aimed at coming up with actionable reforms in this area. The Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, an academic project led by longtime Elizabeth Warren adviser Ganesh Sitaraman, published a paper on civil service reform in February that made the Trump-driven subtext of this new energy explicit.

On the democracy side, the Brennan Center for Justice — a longstanding voting rights group — debuted a comprehensive plan for democracy reform, including multiple specific reforms for topics ranging from restoring congressional authority to reining in executive branch corruption. In October 2025, Vanita Gupta, an associate attorney general under Biden, became the director of a new center at NYU aimed at developing “blueprints” for rebuilding “institutions that have been so core to our democracy.”

While most of the people and institutions involved still focus primarily on their policy silo, government efficiency or democratic guardrails, Rahman and others have worked to develop a consensus that pulls these ideas into one big agenda — not by issuing a single document but by getting people with compatible ideas on how to fix the problem into the same (literal and digital) rooms. 

Hertel-Fernandez, for example, focuses on the democracy side of the question — leading something called the Empowering Democracy Initiative (EDI) that develops ideas for changing the distribution of political power in American society. But he’s in close contact with other progressive outfits, like Roosevelt, that focus much more on state capacity.

“There is a lot more alignment on the overall vision,” Hertel-Fernandez said. “We see ourselves as working on different parts of this broader effort.”

The real Project 2029’s vision

Project 2025 was, from the outset, a very public undertaking. Think tank ideas don’t accidentally become major issues in a presidential election: Heritage wanted its ideas out there, using publicity to claim its role as the defining voice in the GOP’s future.

Project 2029’s key leaders, for the most part, have a different theory. Topics of vital importance to them, like restoring the independence of inspectors general and reforming interagency review processes, are not liable to capture most people’s attention. Instead, they aim primarily to build elite consensus in private conversations. Key figures in the effort insisted on speaking with me anonymously or off the record to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

That being said, there are a few venues where you can see their ideas breaking containment. Multiple sources pointed to The Reconstruction Papers, an essay collection published by the magazine Liberal Currents, as a place containing specific policy proposals that people in 2029 circles are taking seriously. EDI has also published a series of relevant policy papers.

But perhaps the single best publicly available guide to Project 2029 thinking is a recent series of policy papers published on the website Just Security called the “Reinvention Blueprints,” edited jointly by Rahman and Sam Berger (another Biden OIRA vet, who also works with Hertel-Fernandez at EDI).

In their inaugural essay in the series, Rahman and Berger explicitly synthesize the work of both the government efficiency reformers and the pro-democracy advocates into a coherent and unified agenda. They claim that the efforts of these two camps are not opposed, as they might seem, but actually two sides of the same coin.

Drawing on an influential article by law professors Emily Chertoff and Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Rahman and Berger argue the federal government is actually two “faces” rolled into one. There’s a civil state, which delivers benefits and promulgates regulations, and a coercive state, which arrests, prosecutes, and makes war. While the civil state is bogged down by endlessly procedural hoops, the coercive state can move at lightning speed — using broadly worded emergency and national security powers to sidestep any checks designed to safeguard democracy and human rights. Vought has done much to break or politicize the civil state liberals prize, while further empowering its coercive sibling.

“The levers of state power most unrestrained,” they write, “are the ones most prone to abuse.”

In this view, there’s also a crucial difference between government efficiency and executive discretion. On paper, Congress is supposed to set policy, and the president is supposed to implement it. In practice, however, the president has usurped a lot of policymaking authority. It’s possible to give some of that back to Congress by (for example) limiting presidential emergency powers, while simultaneously eliminating barriers to swift implementation of duly passed laws.

An emerging goal of the real Project 2029 is to turn these theoretical syntheses into policy: to build a plan for speeding up “good” government and slowing down “bad” government at the same time.

Berger and Rahman believe this could create a virtuous feedback loop between government efficiency and democratic health. Part of the reason that the Biden administration failed in its central purpose — preventing Trump from returning to power — is because its attempts to provide benefits to the American public were hamstrung by the government’s inability to implement policy swiftly and effectively. A state that works better is also one that (in theory) should enjoy greater support from the public — and thus be less vulnerable to anti-system demagoguery.

So how do you fix all this in practice? Here, the answer is a bit murkier. Without a central hub that can authoritatively say “this is the agenda,” it takes a long time to translate political principles into consensus policy proposals. It’s also somewhat early: Project 2025’s final document wasn’t released till after the April after Biden’s midterm elections. But some concrete ideas are nonetheless gaining traction.

As part of the Reinvention Blueprint series, two former high-level Biden officials working on personnel — Loren DeJonge Schulman and Rob Shriver — published a detailed proposal for fixing the civil service. This is one of the clearest areas where the efficiency and democracy concerns intersect. It is both the case that the slow and hidebound federal bureaucracy is a key reason that policy implementation fails, and that political interference with the civil service has been one of Trump’s most effective tools for enacting unlawful and authoritarian policies.

Their piece is thus focused on recommending efficiency reforms that do not create dangerous room for executive interference. They call for reform of Title 5, the provision governing civil service hiring, to cut through the thicket of contradictory rules governing personnel onboarding — shortening hiring processes that currently take months or years. They call for a new merit-based assessment of civil service performance. And they call for a reform of the federal pay scale, increasing the top-level salaries of civil servants to allow the government to compete with the private sector for top talent. All of this, in their view, can be done without creating more avenues for political interference with the bureaucracy — so long as there are clear safeguards written in to insulate civil service decisions from presidential dictates.

This proposal shows how the two theoretically contradictory approaches to fixing government can, with a little policy creativity, be accomplished at the same time — and even as part of the same legislative reform package or executive order.

You can see similar thinking at work in the EDI papers. Collectively, they focus on proposals for “power-shifting” — which means, among other things, using public policy to build up constituencies like organized labor that can check abuses of state (and corporate) power. But they also are deeply interested in power-shifting as a way to provide better services; one paper, by Biden Department of Labor vet Rajesh Nayak, focuses explicitly on how strengthening certain civil society groups could improve state capacity.

And there are plenty of other ways, often implicitly stated in the existing literature, in which the two areas of concern overlap. Democrats could, in a single bill, eliminate widely hated barriers to swift implementation — like the ironically named Paperwork Reduction Act, which mostly increased bureaucratic hurdles to policy implementation — while also curtailing executive discretion over declaring emergencies. They could reform the Privacy Act of 1974, the key act governing data-sharing inside the federal government, to get rid of months-long holdups for key information (like database access passwords) while empowering citizens to sue if their rights were violated.

Most of the prior ideas require legislation, which obviously makes them harder to implement, but also ensures they would persist. While many have been awed by the blitz of unilateral executive action during the Trump administration, his many reversals of Biden’s executive actions have also demonstrated the long-term fragility of this approach. Indeed, much of what seems like Trump’s legacy today could be just as swiftly undone the next time Democrats take the White House.

Understanding this dynamic, as well as the legal limits on the presidency, the most impactful Democratic ideas for transforming government are designed as new legislation. The danger of this approach is veto points: the Senate filibuster and a Supreme Court override. As such, many of the people I’ve spoken to are — following the new consensus among congressional Democrats — open to ideas for radically changing the balance of political power. Ideas here include filibuster abolition, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico statehood, expanding the size of the House, and various ideas for Supreme Court reform ranging from court-packing to jurisdiction-stripping.

“To do the things we all want to do, you just need to pass massive sweeping legislation,” Adam Jentleson, president of the Searchlight Institute, told me. “You’re going to need a lot of Senate seats to do it. And you’re also going to need to shift the balance of the courts.”

Not everyone involved is on board with steps this radical. The emerging consensus, inasmuch as it exists, is on executive branch reform. Ideas beyond that remain deeply contentious.

Its ideas, despite their shaggy structure, have penetrated nearly every corner of the party — and even brought people together across entrenched factional lines.

But the need for aggressive procedural moves was a major point of conversation at a conference I attended at Cornell in May, where I heard core elements of the Project 2029 vision floated for the first time. The event, titled “Rebuilding Democracy After Backsliding,” was held under Chatham House rules, meaning I can’t report the names of individuals attending nor attribute any remarks to specific individuals.

But it was clear to most of the attendees that the Senate and Supreme Court would be the biggest barriers to any kind of reform agenda — and that if Democrats win in 2028, they should be ready with ideas for muscling past veto points.

“A confrontation with the Court is coming,” one conferencegoer, a key figure in the Project 2029 conversations, said during their panel.

How this could happen for real

Given how loose this Democratic policy apparatus’ organizational structure is, it’s easy to be skeptical about its actual, real-world influence. What does it matter what a bunch of people are writing in obscure white papers or chatting about at conferences when none of them are going to be in Congress (let alone the next president)?

But what’s remarkable about the real Project 2029 is that its ideas, despite their shaggy structure, have penetrated nearly every corner of the party — and even brought people together across entrenched factional lines. They are widely popular among the people who will staff any future administration; in fact, they are already showing up in the rhetoric of party leaders and top 2028 candidates.

There is, in short, every sign that Democrats are actually serious about making dual-track government reform a central part of their next president.

Elizabeth Wilkins, president of the Roosevelt Institute, is the person who helped me appreciate this point most fully. An attorney and former Supreme Court clerk, she served in two senior roles in the Biden administration — first with Chief of Staff Ron Klain, and then with Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. She joined Roosevelt shortly after the 2024 election, putting her in charge of what is arguably the most influential policy shop on the Democrats’ left flank.

On paper, Wilkins looks like she should be a factional knife fighter. Khan’s FTC was the nerve center of the neo-Brandeisian movement, a subfaction of the progressive movement (in)famous for assailing intra-party rivals as corporate shills. Neo-Brandesians have a special hatred for the abundance and state capacity types — the Pahlkas of the world — and have spent much of the past year trying to paint them as neoliberal sellouts whose efficiency agenda is really Republican-style deregulation in drag.

Yet under Wilkins’ leadership, Roosevelt has embraced many state capacity ideas. In the past year, they have formally partnered with both Searchlight and the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank that serves as a hub for state capacity thinking, on events designed to build a shared left-center vision for fixing government.

“There is, at least in some corners, a useful consensus to be had about some of these reforms,” Wilkins said. “If you’re anywhere on the center-left to left-spectrum, there’s an opening to talk about what it looks like to [better] design and implement policy.”

Making government work should, in her view, quite obviously be a left-wing priority. She points to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has made cutting red tape central to his democratic socialist mayoralty, as proof of the left’s seriousness here.

“Mamdani is probably the most abundance-pilled mayor we have in America,” she said. “He’s got this idea that if you want the state to have a major role in public life, you should be most laser-focused on making government work.”

If state capacity reforms seem controversial but quietly aren’t, pro-democracy reform is universally and loudly agreed upon by virtually everyone. Obama, Kamala Harris, and nearly every top congressional leader have called for new policy changes designed to rein in the power of the presidency and restore Congress’s power. The Democratic congressional delegation has proposed detailed legislation on multiple different related fronts, ranging from protecting civil service independence to imposing restrictions on ICE activity.

The flag-carriers may be running for president

It’s tempting to see support for this whole program as wide but shallow — something Democrats talk about, but won’t actually care about acting on once they regain power. Yet the top-polling 2028 candidates have demonstrated real personal interest in some aspects of this, and some have gone even further.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is deeply invested in both sides of the coin: making government efficiency and abundance-style reforms a majority policy priority, as well as using California’s state resources to challenge Trump’s efforts to consolidate power in his own hands. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York co-founded House Democrats’ anti-corruption caucus, and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) has made challenging Trump’s self-interested abuse of power the centerpiece of his political identity. 

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has gone the furthest in embracing the Project 2029 worldview, making institutional reform pretty much his central pitch in interviews and public appearances. While his specific policy ideas tend to focus on some broader structural reforms — like expanding the Supreme Court and ending partisan gerrymandering — his general diagnosis is strikingly similar to the Project 2029 synthesis of state capacity and executive branch limitations (building on related ideas in his 2020 presidential run).

In one interview, he defined “the foundational issue” in American politics as figuring out “what it’s going to take for our democracy to function properly.” Proper functioning, in his mind, consists of two things: “a government that can provide basic services, and that can protect you from anyone who would make you unfree, including itself.” In another, he echoed the democracy reformers in putting executive branch overreach at the center of America’s problems: “If you have an executive branch that has shredded any institutions — even in the private sector — that could hold it accountable, you’re going to get really bad outcomes in your day-to-day life.”

When I spoke with him in May, he told me that the abundance and state capacity crowd “identified a bunch of things that are inarguably part of the [problem] with trying to build anything.” He also agreed with the basic view of his fellow Biden vets involved in Project 2029 — that their experience proved more radical reform to governing structures is the only path forward.

“If return to normal could be done, and could succeed, the last administration would have done it,” Buttigieg said.

This institutional message has become so central to his political identity that he’s turned it into a stump speech applause line. “I have come to believe that the kitchen table cannot be improved unless we are also reforming the institutional and political floor on which that kitchen table sits,” he said in an August address at a Black church in South Carolina.

There is, in short, both wide and deep investment in Project 2029-style ideas across the Democratic Party — which gives good reason to think that they will make up a pretty significant part of the next Democratic president’s agenda.

Will it really work?

The notion that Democrats are united around a set of policies that would, in a stroke, address the central pathologies of both the Biden and second Trump administrations almost sounds too good to be true. Alex Mechanick worries that it might be.

A professor at Johns Hopkins and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Institute, where he has become one of the leading voices in the state capacity movement, Mechanick has thought deeply about the interplay between these issues and constraining authoritarian power, and earlier this year he published the first academic paper to address the relationship in real depth. When we spoke, he expressed concern that much of the thinking in Project 2029 circles might be skating over some pretty significant conflicts.

Start with the premise, articulated by Rahman and Berger, that you can draw a useful distinction between authoritarian and beneficial forms of state capacity. Mechanick points out that many of the most worrying abuses of the Trump administration — like its use of the Federal Communications Commission and antitrust law to attack the free press, or its use of tariff exemptions to make corporations dependent on the president’s personal goodwill  — all involve traditional areas of economic policymaking that liberal state capacity types want to make more efficient. Liberating the civic state to deliver better policy, he worries, could just as easily turn it into a more effective tool for political repression.

“If you go down the line of the things the government ordinarily does, and you cross-reference them against abuses of power, I’m not sure that you get a clean separation,” he told me.

Nor does he think this problem can be solved merely by empowering Congress and constraining executive discretion. Even a well-functioning legislature cannot write self-executing laws. You also need the executive branch to have real latitude to decide how Congress’s general guidance applies in specific cases. In fact, he argues, doing Congress’s will almost requires a strong executive branch to carry it out. “You cannot run an effective state demanding constant legislative micromanagement,” he said.

If he’s right on both counts, then there is a real problem for the Project 2029 thinkers: They are minimizing the degree to which their two objectives — a more effective government and a constrained White House — are competing objectives.

“The frustrating reality is that there probably isn’t a solution that is going to eliminate all trade-offs,” Moynihan, the Michigan professor, tells me.

To see this in specific, look at debates over an issue that fascinates wonks on both sides of the project: the data-sharing provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974. It was initially passed to protect against the misuse of government data in Richard Nixon’s era. The law creates barriers to agencies cross-referencing information on citizens, like Social Security records being shared with the White House to facilitate political attacks on the opposing party.

Clearly, the regulation of government data use has become more important rather than less. But should it be made stricter — or looser? 

When democracy reformers talk, as in the third essay in the Reinvention Blueprints series, they tend to call for a strengthening of data-sharing rules — treating them as necessary to prevent rogue actors like DOGE and ICE from building data-powered tools for corruption or repression. But when state capacity thinkers like Pahlka talk about the law, they see it primarily as a barrier to good government — adding friction to efforts to swiftly implement policy in the internet-and-AI age. 

These kinds of specific tensions could pull apart the broad Project 2029 alignment.

“It’s a mistake to think that guardrails that will make it harder for us to deliver benefits will somehow stop an authoritarian,” Jentleson of Searchlight Institute said. “If I was faced with a trade-off [between efficiency and guardrails], I would generally — probably almost always — opt for the version that made it easier to deliver benefits.”

Mechanick’s paper suggests some thoughtful solutions to dilemmas like this, most notably empowering courts to respond more aggressively to executive aggrandizement. But many of the other 2029 thinkers I’ve spoken with have been pretty hostile to judicial power, seeing a system ultimately controlled by a 6-3 conservative majority as more of a danger to their vision than a potential ally.

Which raises another question: Is everyone a little too sanguine about the politics here?

It’s easy to say today that Democrats will pass whatever legislation they want come 2029. But it’s hardly guaranteed that Democrats win a trifecta in the 2028 election. And even if they do, their Senate majority may depend on the type of moderates who are unwilling to abolish the filibuster — let alone admit new states or expand the Supreme Court. There is a chance, maybe even a big chance, that the optimism about getting the real Project 2029 agenda passed is wishful thinking.

Bipartisan legislation isn’t out of the question here. Some, like Mechanick and Pahlka, think this might actually be more viable than a party-line push. Republicans have historically been quite willing to cut red tape; on the democracy side, they might be more amenable to new laws constraining the executive with a Democrat in the White House. This isn’t just conjecture: In 2022, Democrats and Republicans worked together to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act, a bill explicitly designed to cut off the avenues Trump used to try and overturn the 2020 election.

The problem is that this route might require untenable amounts of compromise. Already, the current policy package needs to bring together the center-left and left — leading them to skate over areas of reform, like the influence of public sector unions, that divide the Democratic coalition. Try to bring in Republicans, and it’s possible the entire thing becomes too unwieldy to get across the finish line.

That both key policy and political strategy issues remain so unsettled illustrates just how far the real Project 2029 has to go before it’s ready for prime time. 

Yet it is only 2026. Democrats have two and a half years, at the earliest, before they’d be able to retake power and win the White House. And the amount of intellectual firepower being brought to bear on these questions, along with major institutional backing and high-level political interest, shows that they are serious about finding answers — and implementing them once they retake power.

“When you have a next president in, there will be a set of plans for how we actually try and fix things,” a senior policy adviser involved in these efforts tells me. “Not just fix things, but make them better.”

Correction, October 15, 12:45 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated Alex Mechanick’s job title.

TIRANA — Student demonstrations in Tirana spiraled out of control Wednesday as protesters clashed with police for over 10 hours, setting buildings on fire, entering government institutions and looting.

While Albania has seen daily protests since the end of May over opposition to a Jared Kushner-linked resort in the south of the country, on Tuesday, students took to the streets over conditions in universities and dorms, the cost of living, and grievances over governance.

“The right to peaceful protest is a foundation of democracy and the state’s obligation to guarantee it. But violence cannot be a means of expressing dissatisfaction, nor should the use of force by the police exceed the limits of the law and proportionality,” President Bajram Begaj said in a public statement Wednesday. He called for the youth to engage in dialogue with him.

Starting outside the Ministry of Education on Wednesday morning, masked individuals threw stones, paving slabs, bottles and improvised pyrotechnics at the institution. They ripped up metal railings from the side of the road and used them to batter the iron gates of the building. After several hours, police with batons, tear gas guns, water cannons, and riot gear moved in, forcibly removing protesters and citizens from the vicinity.

Over the following hours, the situation escalated further as protestors set fire to benches, trees, and several buildings. They breached the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of Finance, damaged several private businesses and billboards, then moved to the main boulevard and encircled the prime minister’s office. They later broke into shopping centers and banks.

Economy Minister Delina Ibrahimaj condemned the “burning and destruction of institutional premises,” calling them “unacceptable acts.”

As of Wednesday evening, at least 40 demonstrators had been arrested and dozens of injuries had been reported by protestors, civilians, and the police. Several journalists reported being prevented from conducting their work by police who physically blocked them or seized their equipment. On Tuesday evening, one young man had his legs broken and required emergency surgery following an altercation with police.

The situation remains tense as protestors, mostly in masks, and police continue to battle it out on the city’s main boulevard, home to several parliament buildings, the president’s office, and the prime minister’s office.

The U.S. Embassy in Tirana warned its citizens to be vigilant and avoid areas impacted by the protest, noting that it could spread. Explosions and sirens continue to be heard throughout the city center on Wednesday evening.

Meanwhile, the delegation of the European Union to Albania stated it has taken note of allegations of excessive violence by police against protestors and journalists and expects the police to prioritize full investigations. The EU delegation also called for de-escalation from both sides.

It’s really hard to take Secretary of State Marco Rubio seriously. He’s a child of immigrants who has cynically sold his political soul to the most anti-immigrant administration in modern American history, one headed by the man from whom Rubio endured humiliating verbal abuse during his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. But Rubio is all-in for Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Last week he was on the world stage in Athens, Greece, for the sixth U.S.-Greece Strategic Dialogue, trying to put a good spin on what he called the Trump administration’s “unapologetic pursuit of national power.” 

The hollowness and hypocrisy of this boasting is plain to see: When Rubio warns that such pursuit of power is justified because “there is war again,” it’s impossible not to think of the administration’s needless war of choice against Iran and its catastrophic impact on the global economy. Same with his attempt at celebrating Trump’s investment in the “new frontier” of “super intelligence,” the president’s favored term for the deeply unpopular products of the environmentally and economically disastrous artificial intelligence industry. The lengths to which Rubio has to go to try to praise this administration’s unpopular policies would be laughable if they hadn’t all been so harmful on a global scale.

Where does a high-ranking representative of a failed administration turn when they’re in an impossible rhetorical situation like Rubio’s? As I argued in “The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate,” there’s a time-honored and finely tuned template for trying to make the ideas that define the administration’s worldview seem respectable, natural and desirable: Linking those ideas to a period of history you believe most of your audience has been taught to admire and take seriously. A speech at the Pnyx, where Athenians once gathered for popular assemblies that birthed democracy, provided a perfect opportunity to link America First to ancient Greek statecraft. Framed against the Acropolis, Rubio trotted out a whole raft of old slogans about how lofty ideals like “heroism,” “honor,” “duty,” “virtue” and “courage” characterize both the culture of “the West” and, by extension, the Trump administration’s supposed reclamation of those “not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.” 

But scratch the surface of the history Rubio cited, and those ideals look about as worthy of celebration as a new data center being built in your hometown or having to pay $6 a gallon for diesel.

The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker. 

Rubio mentioned the influence of Plato as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence upon the framers of the U.S. Constitution consisted primarily in legitimizing their conception of the new nation as an inegalitarian state in which only those whom they deemed worthy would have access to political power. 

Yes, Socrates taught and Plato wrote, as Rubio said, in the Parthenon’s shadow. But when ancient Greeks looked at that temple they saw a monument not to democracy but to the wealth and power Athens had amassed for itself by its coercive, imperial treatment of their fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was funded by income from the lopsided, extortionate alliances into which Athens bullied other city-states on the pretext of providing protection against the defeated Persians coming back to impose slavery upon the Greeks. It almost seems that Rubio knows this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like that ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West . . . resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”

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Oppression and exploitation of marginalized groups, promotion of authoritarian rule, imperial domination and wealth extraction; these aren’t aspects of “Western Civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or said he is, because these are the aspects of that heritage that correspond most closely to the Trump administration’s view of the world. 

In fact, the secretary’s speech was pretty direct about this. When Rubio decried how, before Trump, “we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history,” he can only be referring to the removal of Confederate statues that served to celebrate white supremacy. His grandiose description of America before European colonization as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition” erased the role of genocide and displacement of Native Americans people in this process.

But why should anyone be surprised to hear something so egregiously shameful from a Trump administration official? This is the very history that Trump has worked to suppress in museums, including the Smithsonian, and national parks nationwide. 

You can sense the desperation for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice to give this speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the parthenon would lend prestige to his claims. You can sense it in the fulsomeness of his praise of “Western Civilization,” as if just repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times will paper over the corruption scandal surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. These visual and rhetorical clichés are intended to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the profound weakness of the administration. They can’t point to any genuinely positive accomplishments. Going into the midterm elections Trump and his party have nothing to run on. So instead we get a speech like this — a ham-fisted appeal to the die-hard MAGA base, the kind of people who actually want to live in a dictatorial, corrupt police state and to delude themselves about history. 

But polls show that group is growing smaller every day. Americans aren’t falling for it anymore.

The post Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story appeared first on Salon.com.

MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has finally done something the far right approves of — calling a snap election on Nov. 29 that the anti-immigrant Vox party is hailing as “Spain’s last chance to be Spain again.”

Polling third in the race, Vox is Spain’s leading nationalist, euroskeptic force and it sees next month’s contest as its prime opportunity to remold the country after eight years of Sánchez’s socialist premiership by getting its people into top ministerial jobs.

Party leader Santiago Abascal greeted Monday’s election announcement as “excellent news.” His delight is hardly surprising given that polls suggest Vox is on track to make the biggest gains of any major party.

While the center-right People’s Party is expected to come first — with about 33% of the vote, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — it will almost certainly have to team up with Vox, which commands support of about 18%, to build a stable coalition.

Abascal will then be able to demand the inclusion of key elements of Vox’s agenda as its price for that partnership. Its goals include deportations of undocumented migrants, a benefits preference for Spaniards over foreign nationals, slashing EU health and safety rules in the farming sector and rolling back support for gender equality and the LGBTQ+ community.

Vox secured 33 of the 350 seats in Congress in 2023, but is now set to double that. Under the PP’s coalition leadership, it should be able to form part of a comfortable majority.

“This time round, Vox is much stronger,” José Antonio Fúster, spokesperson for the party and a member of the Madrid regional parliament, said. “We are going into a very important election, not so much for us, as for Spaniards … This is the last hope for Spain to be Spain again.”

Fúster would not be drawn on which ministries his party has set its sights on, warning against “selling the bearskin before it has been hunted.”

Pointing to talks with the PP in recent months in four regions where the two parties now govern in coalition, he said the shaping of policy was being prioritized ahead of institutional power. “That is the last thing we negotiate because it is the least important,” he said.

Pet portfolios

In August, Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé told POLITICO that forming part of the government was not the only option open to his party, but that in a hypothetical coalition with the PP, his party would seek a number of ministries “in proportion to our vote share.”

That would amount to a significant percentage. If current polls translate into results in November, Vox would be in a position to claim about a third of ministerial posts.

Analysts expect Vox to press for portfolios that focus on its pet policies, such as agriculture, domestic policy, immigration and industry. The culture and education portfolios could also be of interest to the party, given their relevance in the hard right’s campaign against so-called wokeism.

The regions where the PP and Vox currently govern together — Andalusia, Aragón, Castile and León, and Extremadura — offer clues: The government departments that Vox controls are mainly linked to agriculture, welfare benefits and the family.

The party is heading into the election campaign espousing three main ideas: the concept of “national priority” — ensuring that Spaniards have access to public services and benefits ahead of foreign nationals — a clampdown on immigration and broad deregulation.

Although Vox’s rise to prominence was driven by its fierce stance against Catalan nationalism nearly a decade ago, that debate has faded from the political arena. Now, its focus is, like its European far-right counterparts, more firmly on immigration-related matters.

“Before, Vox talked about immigration, but it wasn’t the nuclear issue it has become,” said Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Carlos III University and author of a book about the European far right. “Now, when Vox talks about social security payments, it talks about immigration; when it talks about the economy, it talks about immigration. Immigration is the issue that dictates everything.”

Vox also subscribes to the “remigration” policy being touted by many far-right parties, under which undocumented migrants and those who commit crimes would be deported. The PP has appeared to respond to Vox’s hard line by toughening its own stance, calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals and opposing a government migrant legalization program.

In each of the regions where the two parties are in coalition, Vox has ensured that its senior partner agreed to formally include the national priority principle in their governing agreement.

“But when it comes to national priority, the PP has added the caveat that it has to be implemented in line with the law,” said Miguel González, a journalist at the El País daily newspaper and author of a book about Vox. Legislation prevents discrimination against foreign nationals when it comes to accessing public benefits and services, meaning the policy is currently little more than symbolic in those regions. 

“In reality, in order to implement this properly, you’d have to change the immigration law,” González added.

Vox is eyeing an overhaul of that legislation to make it a workable policy.

“It’s very possible to change laws that are bad for Spaniards, so we have to roll them back and introduce new laws, making sure that Spaniards are not last in line,” Fúster said.

Deregulation nation

Deregulation also offers a platform from which to attack EU health-and-safety norms that are reviled by the farming sector, one of Vox’s main voter bases.

Fúster accepted that this could lead to clashes with the European Commission, but insisted that pressure from what he described as a rising tide of European parties sharing Vox’s values would “make sure that Brussels returns to the path of common sense.”

PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has criticized phytosanitary restrictions on farmers but has shown little appetite for conflict with European institutions.

In social policy, González said Vox might use the broader notion of deregulation to dismantle funding for gender equality and LGBTQ+ departments and projects, as it has done on a local level. Fúster was reluctant to be drawn on this: “We believe in the equality of Spaniards,” he said. “We don’t believe that anyone should have privileges above others.”

Fernández Vázquez of Carlos III University said that the origins of Vox suggest a bumpy ride for the PP. Vox would be the first far-right party to enter government in half a century since the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 — and there would likely be clashes.

The far-right party formed in 2013 as a breakaway from the conservatives in frustration at what its founders saw as the pusillanimity of the PP in the face of Catalan separatism. 

“I think the relationship between Vox and PP [in government] will be a bad one,” the researcher said. “Abascal and his colleagues are going to enjoy showing up Feijóo whenever they can, portraying him as lukewarm and weak.”

Fúster accepted “it could be a difficult relationship,” adding that the PP “don’t see things the way we do and we don’t share their vision.”

“We’re not willing to make concessions, we’re willing to have a frank, open and reasonable negotiation.”

But for now, the priority is simply to remove the Socialists. In his traditionally combative style, Abascal insisted the election was a chance to hold on to “the peace, prosperity and freedom that a mafioso government wants to snatch from us forever.”

Max Griera contributed to this article.

The Trump administration pressured diplomatic officials from the EU, Canada and Lithuania to pull out of an international conference on disinformation after organizers announced panels warning of the threat posed by American government officials and the country’s influence broadly, according to excerpts of a State Department cable seen by POLITICO.

The conference, titled #Disinfo2026, included sessions that described the U.S. as a “foreign information manipulation and interference” actor, or “FIMI,” which bothered the Trump administration, according to the cable. The conference is being held Wednesday and Thursday in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.

The State Department asked American embassies in several European countries and the EU to express Washington’s concerns and “assess” whether the governments involved in the conference agree with the U.S. being characterized as a FIMI actor, according to the cable.

FIMI is an EU term used to describe activities that try to distort public information, such as spreading disinformation online, usually by foreign actors such as Russia. The conference conflates the U.S. with “foreign adversaries like Russia and China,” which is a “false equivalence” that “obscures the scale and nature of Russian and Chinese interference in our democracies,” the cable states.

The demarche request appears to be an unusual administration effort to use allied government pressure to silence criticism from European citizens and Americans abroad (three U.S. citizens appeared on one of the panels that prompted the cable). It also marks an acceleration of the Trump administration’s years-long pressure campaign on the continent, which includes U.S. criticism of perceived EU censorship.

The recipients of the cable included U.S. embassies in France, Norway, Romania and Poland. The embassies each were told to tell their hosts — verbally, not in writing — that the U.S. was unhappy with the panels on American disinformation, according to the cable and a U.S. official, who, like others, was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation.

One of those panels, titled “USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back” featured two American researchers and a former CIA official and looked at how the U.S. had become a disinformation threat to Europe. Another, titled “Under attack: How the counter-disinformation community is dealing with US government pressure,” asked legal experts to weigh in on the threat of U.S. government travel bans against European figures.

The State Department asked some of those countries — but not all — to reconsider participating in the event, said the U.S. official familiar with the cable, which came from the secretary of State’s office.

Officials from Norway, Romania and Poland still appear on the conference agenda. Spokespeople for the ministries of foreign affairs in Norway, Romania and Poland did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. officials also contacted France’s Foreign Ministry, but it did not withdraw from the conference.

The Trump administration and its allies have repeatedly tried to pressure EU allies to align with Washington’s standards of free speech, which some in Europe consider to be too broadly defined. These efforts have included public criticism, closed-door lobbying against EU laws and visa restrictions for Europeans.

Domestically, the administration has dismantled U.S. government organizations that fight disinformation, including at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans have also taken issue with some European laws that force social media platforms to be more active in combating false information online, such as laws requiring age verification for potentially harmful content, which some have said amount to censorship.

As of Monday, Canada and Lithuania asked organizers to remove their ministry logos from conference materials, according to a conference participant, and the European External Action Service followed on Tuesday. European news site Rapporteur first reported on the removal of the foreign ministry logos.

“To me, I see a very strange reaction from the State Department to a conference of researchers using our First Amendment free speech rights to talk about how to stop lying and manipulation that undermines democracy and hurts our families and hurts our children,” said Adam Fivenson, who works for the Center for Security, Innovation and New Technology at American University and was on one of the panels the Trump administration took issue with. This panel still proceeded as scheduled.

The cable also notes that top officials in the State Department’s global public diplomacy section reached out directly to Canadian officials to express frustrations with Ottawa’s participation in the conference. This part of the State Department, led by Sarah Rogers, handles the public-facing aspects of diplomacy that are aimed at building support for U.S. goals among foreign populations.

Asked for comment, the State Department said in a statement: “While we are unable to comment on the details of diplomatic conversations, it should not be a surprise that countries would disaffiliate from this conference upon learning that it labeled the U.S. a ‘FIMI threat.’ Labeling the United States a ‘FIMI threat’ — a term normally reserved for describing influence operations of adversaries — undermines shared goals and should alarm those involved.”

After speaking with U.S. officials, Canada and Lithuania pulled their support from the conference, meaning they don’t appear on panels or in conference materials. The EU’s External Action Service, its diplomatic arm, was also removed from official programming.

Images reviewed by POLITICO show conference banners with the logos of all Canadian, Lithuanian, and EU diplomatic services covered. France remains the sole “main supporter.”

Spokespeople for the EEAS and Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry both said they withdrew because some of the conference programming didn’t align with their official positions, though they did not specify what those positions are.

The cable draws a clearer line between U.S. engagement with Lithuania and Canada and their decision to pull public support for the conference. After speaking to the local U.S. embassy, “Lithuania’s Foreign Minister [Kęstutis] Budrys stated the U.S.-focused sessions did not represent the views of the Lithuanian government and committed that no one from Lithuania MFA would participate,” the cable reads.

Die Regierungsbildungen in Berlin und Mecklenburg-Vorpommern könnten entscheidenden Einfluss auf eine Vorstufe eines AfD-Verbotsverfahrens nehmen. Im Hintergrund formiert sich ein Bundesrats-Antrag für eine länderübergreifende Arbeitsgruppe die Beweise für ein mögliches Verfahren sammeln soll.

Ein politisches Beben erschüttert derweil den Landtag in Sachsen-Anhalt. Bei der Wahl zum Landtagspräsidenten erhielt der AfD-Kandidat Tobias Rausch wohl Stimmen aus der tief gespaltenen CDU-Fraktion. Pauline von Pezold und Frederik Schindler analysieren, warum dieser Tabubruch zum Vorboten für die Ministerpräsidentenwahl im Dezember werden könnte.

Außerdem blickt die Folge hinter die verschlossenen Türen der Deutschen Parlamentarischen Gesellschaft. Dutzende Aufnahmeanträge von AfD-Abgeordneten liegen derzeit auf Eis – auch wegen Berichten über Alkoholexzesse und völkische Gesänge. Zum Schluss entlarvt sich ein Angriff von AfD-Chefin Alice Weidel auf Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz als handfeste Doppelmoral.

„Inside AfD“ ist der POLITICO-Podcast über die umstrittenste Partei des Landes. Trotz Radikalisierung und Beobachtung durch den Verfassungsschutz wächst die AfD weiter. Wie ist das möglich? Was treibt ihre Anhänger, Strategen und Gegner an? Wie funktioniert das Innenleben der Partei? Und was bedeutet ihr Aufstieg für das politische System Deutschlands?

Antworten liefern immer mittwochs Pauline von Pezold von POLITICO und Frederik Schindler von WELT — unaufgeregt, aber kritisch.

Fragen und Feedback gern an insideafd@politico.eu.

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ATHENS — The U.S. and Greece are launching a new counterterrorism information-sharing program, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday during an official visit to the Greek capital.

In a press conference alongside his Greek counterpart Giorgos Gerapetritis, Rubio said Greece was particularly exposed to threats posed by mass migration, human trafficking and different forms of terror.

“What we do not wish to see under any circumstances is that the birthplace of the West is threatened by bad decisions, by inaction, and by failure to address challenges,” he said, calling Greece a “strong and model NATO ally” and a “source of stability in an unstable world.”

Gerapetritis said Greece was willing to cooperate with the U.S. and provide maritime assistance in the Strait of Hormuz, ⁠if a viable peace process exists there.

Later Wednesday, Rubio will deliver a speech from Pnyx Hill, beneath the Acropolis, one of the most important sites of Athenian democracy. Assistant Secretary for Global Public Affairs Dylan Johnson said Rubio would use the opportunity to call for a “renewal of the Western spirit.”

Rubio will describe the shared inheritance of Americans and Europeans as stretching “from Athens and Rome to Christendom to the founding of the American Republic” and warn that Western civilization has forgotten some of its “essential qualities,” Rubio’s aide said.

The foreign policy chief stood by U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle after U.S. senators and Greek opposition parties expressed concerns over reports that she had ​threatened to use U.S. influence to topple the Greek government.

“Suffice it ⁠to ​say, our embassy here is doing a ​great job. Our ambassador has been a strong ambassador here,” Rubio said when asked whether Guilfoyle’s conduct is in compliance with State Department ethics.

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