Former President Donald Trump has recently been trying to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming it was cooked up by “the Project.”strong rightAnd he knows nothing about it.
But it turns out that there is a lot of power coming from inside the house.
Kevin Roberts, the self-proclaimed “head” of Project 2025, has a book coming out in September — and the book’s foreword was written by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, who praised the idea.
“Never before has the American Right attempted to articulate a truly new future for conservatism with the depth and stature of Roberts,” Vance wrote, according to The book’s Amazon page. “We all now realize that it is time to circle the wagons and load the muskets In the fight ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
What ideas? Like Vance, Roberts is obsessed with the idea that the left controls America’s major institutions — he includes Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, and even Boy Scouts of America. The book argues that “conservatives must burn down” these institutions “to preserve the American way of life.” (Vox has requested a copy of the book, but has not yet received one at the time of this writing.)
Apparently, this is Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the virally unpopular Project 2025 and his long agenda of what he should do if he wins, which includes proposals to restrict access to abortion and centralize the president’s executive powers.
And that’s another indication that Trump chose Vance There may be political problems for him Vance has a fascination with provocative and extreme right-wing thinkers and has a history of praising their ideas. He’s not the mate made to win over swing voters who worry Trump might be too extreme — quite the opposite.
The book was written and announced before Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate. But there are some indications that those involved had some late second thoughts about it. it was Originally announced “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America” has a cover image matching the word “Washington”.
More recently, however, subtitles has been changed “Taking Back Washington to Save America” and the match disappeared from the cover.
Roberts led Project 2025 – and contributed to some of its controversial proposals
Project 2025, which I recently wrote about at length, is the conservative movement’s detailed and concrete plan for what the next Republican president will do with his powers.
It was drafted by people who have long worked closely with Trump and includes many policies that Trump clearly supports — such as centralizing power in the presidency over career civil service professionals, reducing regulations and abandoning efforts to fight climate change. It also includes some proposals that Trump currently considers politically problematic: aggressively using federal power to prevent abortions, limiting coverage of some contraceptives, and banning pornography.
Project 2025 was put together by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which worked on it with more than 100 conservative groups. A lot though Its 922-page policy document Written in dry, unsettling language, Roberts writes a fiery introduction. The porn ban is specifically his idea – he wrote:
Pornography should be banned. Those who produce and distribute should be jailed. Academics and public librarians who brush it off should be classified as registered sex offenders. And the telecommunications and technology companies that facilitate its spread should be shut down.
On abortion, Roberts wrote: “Conservatives in the state and in Washington, along with the next conservative administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.”
Roberts, who has led Heritage since late 2021, has a history of controversial statements. “We are in the process of a second American revolution, which will be bloodless if the left allows it,” he said Recently Dr.
But Vance is a big fan. “I was thrilled to write the foreword to this incredible book, which offers a bold new vision for the future of American conservatism,” he said. June tweeted.
Tucker Carlson, who was a big presence at the recent Republican National Convention, He also praised The book and Roberts’ “Plan to Save America”, calling it “profound and wise”.
Vance agrees somewhat with the most extreme ideas of Project 2025
Project 2025’s 922-page plan contains many proposals, not all of which JD Vance necessarily supports.
But he is on record backing ideas on two of Project 2025’s most contentious issue areas.
The first is abortion. Project 2025 lays out a sweeping agenda for how the next president can use federal powers to prevent abortions, including using an old law called the Comstock Act to prosecute people who mail abortion pills and working to bar women from traveling out of states that ban abortions. States to get abortions with.
Vance is on the record supporting this idea. Last year, he signed One letter demanded that the Justice Department prosecute physicians and pharmacists “who break federal mail-order abortion laws.” In 2022, he said he was “sympathetic” to the idea of a federal government should be closed Efforts to help women who travel outside their state for abortions. That year he Also said: “I definitely want abortion to be illegal nationally.”
At other points, Vance struck a different tone. “We have to accept that people don’t want a blanket abortion ban,” he said last december. And this month she said He supported a Supreme Court decision that allowed the abortion bill to keep mifepristone available. Here, Vance is trying to align with Trump, who — fearing a political backlash — argues that he wants abortion to be just a state issue despite his long alliance with the religious right. But Vance’s record suggests his real agenda may be otherwise.
A second controversial area where Vance sympathizes with Project 2025 is the centralization of presidential power over the executive branch. The plan offers several proposals to rein in what conservatives see as an out-of-control “deep state” bureaucracy — chiefly, by firing more career civil servants and making more political appointments across government.
Vance, as I wrote last week, supported the highest version of this agenda. In 2021, Vance said That in Trump’s second term, Trump should “fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every single civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” The courts will try to stop it, Vance continued, and Trump should then “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson and say, ‘The Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’
So it’s no big surprise that Vance would write the foreword to a book by the architects of Project 2025. They agree fundamentally on how they see the world and on most of what they want outside of politics: fighting the left for control of institutions and expanding government power to end abortion.
