Originally at Newsweek
Vice presidential candidate JD Vance writing the foreword in Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts’ new book has raised eyebrows online.
This month, former President Donald Trump denied having any ties to Project 2025, an initiative developed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to make significant changes to the backbone of the federal government. It is designed to be implemented if Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, wins the election in November. Project 2025 told Newsweek at the time: “Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”
Democrats and Republicans critical of Trump did not buy it when the former president said, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” and they have been using the initiative to showcase Trump’s so-called extremism as a way to deter voters from supporting him.
On Wednesday, Roberts’ book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, which is set to be published in September, started to gain traction on X, formerly Twitter, because its foreword was written by Vance, an Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate.
Kyle Tharp, managing director of Courier Newsroom, a liberal news source, posted on Wednesday morning: “Wow. The architect of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, has a new book coming out in September about taking over Washington. JD Vance wrote the foreword.” The post went viral, gaining 555,900 views by Wednesday afternoon.
Vance also left an editorial review on Amazon, writing: “Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism… 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.”
When reached for comment by Newsweek, Vance’s office referred to the senator’s comments on Project 2025 during his interview with NBC News’ Meet the Press on July 7: “I want to be clear here that Trump explicitly has said his own transition team runs the Trump transition and will run the Trump administration. Again, you have a whole host of organizations, some of which have good ideas, some of which have bad ideas, and some of which have both.
“And I’m sure the Trump administration will talk to a lot of people as it’s crafting an agenda to bring back American manufacturing jobs, to lower inflation, and to bring peace and prosperity back to the world…what the media and the Democrats are trying to do is attach its most unpopular elements to the Trump administration. It’s a 900-page document. I guarantee there are things that Trump likes and dislikes about that 900-page document. But he is the person who will determine the agenda of the next administration.”
Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation and the “Project 2025 head,” according to his new book’s Amazon page. The book “outlines a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution’ for voters looking to shift the power back into the hands of the people.”
The X account for Republican Voters Against Trump wrote in response to Tharp’s post: “JD Vance, Trump’s VP pick, says this about the book written by the head of Project 2025 Kevin Roberts: ‘In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.’ But Trump’s campaign claims they have nothing to do with Project 2025…”
Molly Jong-Fast, a Vanity Fair special correspondent and political analyst for MSNBC, wrote: “How inconvenient.”
American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal rapid response organization, wrote: “The Trump-Vance ticket is lying about knowing nothing about #Project2025. JD Vance is close friends with Project 2025 mastermind Kevin Roberts and more than 100 former Trump staffers were involved in creating the extremist policy guide for a future Trump administration.”
Newsweek counted 31 Project 2025 contributors who served at various levels in and around Trump’s administration.
What is ‘Second American Revolution?’
This month, Roberts explained his idea of a “Second American Revolution” in a series of X posts.
“Americans in 2024 are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats. These patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box,” he said.
“Like the First American Revolution, the second began when a corrupt ruling class sought to overthrow the existing institutions of American life. But whereas the British passed laws and imposed colonial officials, our elites have been more subtle.
“The good news is, patriots across the country are coming together, organizing the groundwork of resistance, and fighting back. We will save the institutions that we can, start new ones wherever needed, and unapologetically destroy those that are hostile to human flourishing.”
In a statement to Newsweek, Roberts echoed the remarks he made on X and said: “Unfortunately, it’s the Left that has a long history of violence, so it’s up to them to allow a peaceful transfer of power. As we saw in 2020, organized groups on the Left have the capacity to carry out violent riots, take over cities, and weaponize taxpayer-funded agencies to target their political opponents.”
Roberts was presumably referring to the civil rights protests, some of which turned violent, during the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a Minneapolis police officer.
“In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back,” Roberts said. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”
Read the Original Story
