What might America look like under a second Donald Trump term? Few resources paint a clearer—or more chaotic—picture than the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for a vast overhaul of the federal bureaucracy, as well as a playbook of immediate executive actions that could annihilate decades of Democratic progress in mere days. Last week the former president sought to disown the document, but Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast and Jeff Sharlet are more than a little skeptical. And on the latest episode of Inside the Hive, the two discuss precisely what voters should fear most in the 922-page plan—and whether the country truly condones, or even wants, an authoritarian MAGA makeover. “The majority will accept fascism,” says Sharlet. “We’ve never seen a country where that wasn’t true.”

The ambitions of Project 2025 are hard to wrap your head around. It calls for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants; the abolition of the Department of Education; a national crackdown on abortion pill access; and an unprecedented reshuffling of the federal bureaucracy, rendering each agency a mere appendage of the executive office. Taken together, Project 2025 is “an organized assault on American democracy in a way that we did not see with the first Trump admin—because with the first Trump admin, he just brought in his friends, people he met on the internet, people who went to his golf club,” says Jong-Fast. “He wasn’t as ideologically committed in a certain way.”

Needless to say, Project 2025 has generated endless hand-wringing. But its policy particulars, according to Sharlet, are hardly what’s fueling the MAGA movement, which, at its core, remains rooted in a cult of personality. “It astonishes me now that at this late day, we are still talking about Trump in terms of policy instead of the appeal. When you see a crowd of thousands chanting ‘bullshit, bullshit,’ are they talking policy? No, they’re talking about strength. And this is what Trumpism is. It’s always about strength,” he contends. “If Trump was to change his mind about any of his policies tomorrow, the people would follow. And that’s what we have to pay attention to. ’Cause the threat here is not a particular policy, as awful as those are.”