There’s Another Link Between Trump’s Campaign And Project 2025
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Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s newly-minted running mate, praised and wrote the foreword for an upcoming book penned by an architect of Project 2025, the right-wing “presidential transition project” from which Trump has desperately tried to distance himself in recent weeks.
The book, “Dawn’s Early Light” by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, is scheduled for release in September. A description from its publisher says it “blazes a warpath for the American people to take back their country,” and says conservatives should “burn down” various “corrupt” institutions, including the Department of Education, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as Ivy League colleges and The New York Times.
“Just as a controlled burn preserves the longevity of a forest, conservatives need to burn down these institutions if we’re to preserve the American Way of life,” the book’s summary states.
Roberts’ book appears to have initially been called “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” according to a page for the book on Harper Collins’ website. But the name is different on the book’s Bookshop and Amazon pages – changed to the slightly less inflammatory “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.”
Both versions of the book’s cover state that Vance wrote the foreword. He’s also the top “blurb,” praising Roberts for articulating “a genuinely new future for conservatism.”
“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” Vance raves in the blurb. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
Robert has used similarly violent rhetoric recently himself.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless ― if the left allows it to be,” he said in an interview that surfaced earlier this month.
As recently as Wednesday morning, Trump was attempting to disclaim any association with Project 2025.
“I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25,” he claimed on Truth Social Wednesday.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment about Vance’s contribution to Roberts’ book.
Trump’s vice presidential pick is known for his numerous ties to hard-right voices within the conservative movement, and in particular within Silicon Valley. His embrace of Roberts’ book is yet another link between the Trump campaign and Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation, a major right-wing think tank in Washington, D.C., is the lead group behind Project 2025, a 900-page policy document and transition plan detailing ambitious right-wing plans to purge the federal government and replace tens of thousands of civil servants with political appointees; dramatically weaken environmental protections and labor rights; severely limit abortion access nationwide; and pursue a federal execution spree, among scores of other conservative policy priorities.
The project’s website also includes a resume portal for a “Presidential Personnel Database,” with the stated goal of assembling “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
The policies outlined in Project 2025 poll poorly, and Democrats have pounced on it as they try to define Trump’s policy agenda.
While it’s true the project is technically independent of Trump’s campaign, at least 140 former Trump administration officials were involved with the project, CNN found, and its three primary leaders are Trump administration alumni.
What’s more, Trump praised the Heritage Foundation, and Roberts specifically, in a 2022 speech. “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” Trump said of the Heritage Foundation.
As leader of the think tank, Roberts wrote the foreword to Project 2025’s main document, officially titled, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” He opens by declaring that, as in the 1970s, “our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline.”
Roberts decries the evils of “fatherlessness,” calls the overturning of Roe v. Wade “just the beginning” of an abortion rights rollback, and refers to “transgender ideology” as a modern manifestation of “pornography” (and pornography, he says, “should be outlawed). He advocates for the “dismantling” of the so-called “administrative state,” for “seal[ing]” the border, and promoting “educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities.”
In sum, he writes, “Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.”
According to its promotional material, Roberts’ book promises to play on similar themes. Neither the Heritage Foundation nor the book’s publisher, Broadside Books, an imprint of Harper Collins, responded Wednesday to HuffPost’s request for a review copy.
