As the Trump campaign seeks to distance itself from Project 2025, the conservative road map spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has written a forward for a new book by the leader of the far-right governing plan.
While Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has delayed the release of his book, Vance’s forward was leaked last week.
Former President Trump claimed he never heard of the plan or of those involved, many of which joined the effort following a stint at his White House.
Democrats have aggressively attacked the plan for being too extremist and said the 900-page document and its authors will guide Trump’s next administration regardless of what he says.
The project makes a wide range of policy proposals, including a broad reshaping of executive powers, curtailing access to abortion pills, and removing thousands of federal civil servants for conservative replacements.
Project 2025 Director Paul Dans stepped down from the role last week, Roberts announced, amid growing criticism from the Trump campaign. Roberts said he would lead the effort moving forward.
Vance’s forward for the Heritage Foundation president’s book is the latest connection demonstrating a close tie between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign.
A Vance spokesperson told The Associated Press the forward “has nothing to do with Project 2025,” adding “Senator Vance has previously said that he has no involvement with it and has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for.”
Roberts’s connections extend beyond Vance and up to the former president himself. A photo first published by The Washington Post shows Roberts and Trump flying together to a foundation conference in April 2022.
During his speech to the conference, Trump hinted at Heritage’s upcoming project. “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” he said.
The Trump campaign told the Post that Roberts never briefed Trump on the flight.
The New Republic first obtained an advance copy of Roberts’s book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” through a platform called NetGalley, which later removed the copies.
It is unclear whether the book will be subject to any changes before its official publication or if Vance’s forward will be in the final version.
In the forward, Vance predicts that Roberts’s book will pave the way for a new age of conservatism in which the right goes on the “offensive.”
Here are five excerpts.
‘It’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets’
“The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems—we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach. As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
Thinks Roberts taking risk by publishing the book
“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism. The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Yet it is Heritage’s power and influence that makes it easy to avoid risks. Roberts could collect a nice salary, write decent books, and tell donors what they want to hear. But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.”
Warns against idolizing tech companies, free market
“Roberts understands economics and supports basic free market principles, but he doesn’t make an idol out of decades old theories. He argues persuasively that the modern financial corporation was almost entirely foreign to the founders of our nation. The closest eighteenth-century analogue to the modern Apple or Google is the British East India company, a monstrous hybrid of public and private power that would have made its subjects completely unable to access an American sense of liberty. The idea that our founders meant to make their citizens subjects to this kind of hybrid power is ahistorical and preposterous, yet too many modern ‘conservatives’ make such an idol out of the market that they ignore this. A private company that can censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence services and other federal bureaucrats deserves the scrutiny of the Right, not its support.”
‘We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids‘
“Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred—and to the extent possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families.”
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“That means better jobs at all levels of the income ladder. That means protecting American industries—even if it leads to higher consumer prices in the short term. That means listening to our young people who are telling us they can’t afford to buy a home or start a family, not just criticizing them for a lack of virtue. Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.”
Relates to Roberts’s upbringing
“He grew up in a poor family in a corner of the country largely ignored by America’s elites—but his corner was in Louisiana and mine in Ohio and Kentucky. Like me, he’s a Catholic, but unlike me, he was born into it. His grandparents played an outsized role in his life, just as mine did. And now he works far from where he grew up, just a few steps from my office, in Washington, DC: he is the president of one of Washington’s most influential think tanks, and I’m a US senator.”
“My childhood was not, by any objective measure, easy. Neither was that of Kevin Roberts. Both of us were negatively impacted by family instability, and both of us were saved by the resilience of the thick network of family—grandparents, aunts, uncles—that is often the first and most effective component of our social safety net. Both of us saw how a factory leaving a town could destroy the economic stability that provided the foundation for those families. And both of us learned to love the country that gave both of us and our families second chances, despite some bumps along the way. In these pages, Kevin is trying to figure out how we preserve as much of what worked in his own life, while correcting what didn’t.”
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