Inside the legal plans by foes of Donald Trump and Project 2025 to fight his second-term agenda

If Donald Trump is elected, he’ll take office next year having learned the lessons of four years of legal battles in his first term.

If Donald Trump is elected, he’ll take office next year having learned the lessons of four years of legal battles in his first term, during which inexperienced personnel, slapdash policymaking and his own indifference to how the federal government worked made his agenda especially vulnerable to legal challenges. The 2024 Republican nominee already has a clear idea of how he’d jumpstart a second term, with plans to immediately enact hardline immigration policies and to dismantle civil service protections for thousands of federal employees. His allies, including the influential conservative organizations that have participated in the endeavor known as Project 2025, have crafted policy papers and vetted potential Trump-aligned staff that could swiftly be hired to the federal government, so that his vision could be quickly and effectively implemented. (Trump himself has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 but many of his policies and goals overlap.) “Honestly, the Trump administration was often sloppy in the way they rolled out these executive orders, including the first Muslim travel ban,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson told CNN, referring to the Trump ban on migrants from several Muslim-majority countries that was the target of one of nearly 100 lawsuits brought by the Evergreen State against the Trump administration. Ferguson said his office was “building the airplane as we were flying it” at the time. Now, the Washington Democrat – who is running for governor – has spent the last year pulling together a legal playbook so that his successor will be ready to hit the ground running in the event Trump wins again. Those kind of preparations – researching case law, writing memos, shifting around staff – are being done across the country by liberal advocacy groups, blue states and other organizations that fought Trump in court. They’re thinking through the kinds of plaintiffs they’d recruit, where in the country they’d file their lawsuits, how they’d shape their legal arguments to adjust for how the judicial landscape has changed in the last several years and bulking up on litigative staff.