The necessary if alarming national debate over President Joe Biden’s cognitive fitness shouldn’t obscure the reason the stakes in that debate are so high: Former President Donald Trump has been fundamentally, dangerously unfit for office since before he took the oath the first time, in ways far worse than the ravages of age that are central to Biden’s situation. That’s why it’s so urgent that Democrats field a candidate strong enough to prevent Trump’s return.

A second Trump term would almost certainly be even more disruptive to the norms of democracy than his first term was. The institutional guardrails on presidential power that restrained his worst instincts last time — that prevented him from using the military against civilians, from weaponizing government against his critics, from shattering NATO, from overturning a national election — won’t necessarily hold now that he understands where they are and how they work.

Instructions for disassembling those guardrails are contained in a roughly 900-page document titled Project 2025. Compiled by more than 100 conservative organizations and backed by more than 200 officials from Trump’s first administration, it is nothing less than a blueprint for systematically consolidating power around the presidency to a degree that approaches autocracy.

No one should buy Trump’s recent, implausible disavowal of that blueprint. And everyone should familiarize themselves with it — especially those considering voting for Trump in November, or just not voting, in light of Biden’s struggling campaign.

Project 2025 is the brainchild of The Heritage Foundation, the far-right think-tank behind some of Trump’s most radical policies in his first term. The organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in a recent interview that the current project, implicitly premised on Trump’s return to office, will drive “a second American revolution” — one that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

If that doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, consider some of the project’s specific recommendations and goals for a second Trump term:

• It would place much of the federal bureaucracy, currently made up primarily of non-political civil servants, under direct control of the president by stripping their civil-service protection.

No longer would expertise in a given area determine who fills those functions; political fealty to the president would become the only criterion.

• It would greatly expand the role of the U.S. military on domestic soil, using armed forces to capture undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and deploying soldiers for other domestic law enforcement purposes.

That possibility must be pondered in combination with Trump’s reported interest in invoking the archaic Insurrection Act to use the military against Inauguration Day protesters on his theoretical first day back in office.

• It would turn the FBI into little more than the personal police force for the president, diminishing the agency’s staffing and eliminating the director’s 10-year term — thus making that person a purely political appointee who can be hired or fired at will based on literally nothing but loyalty to the president.

There’s much more of this dystopian fantasy, all of it easily available online at www.project2025.org.

This radical-right manifesto has been out there awhile but has come under renewed scrutiny lately. Trump responded to recent public outrage over the plan by claiming on social media last week: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

None of that is believable or even coherent. Some of Trump’s closest allies are publicly behind the project, including likely officials in a second Trump administration. And if he knows “nothing” about it, how does he declare in the same sentence that it’s “ridiculous and abysmal”? Does that include the plan to strip civil service protections, which Trump himself tried to do in his first term?

This document should serve as a warning that there are actually worse possibilities in the White House than potential infirmity.

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch