Originally by at The New York Times
Donald Trump disavowed the set of conservative plans after it became a popular target for Democrats, but his running mate, JD Vance, wrote a foreword for a forthcoming book by its principal architect.
“Dawn’s Early Light,” a forthcoming book by the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin D. Roberts, calling for a “second American Revolution,” features a foreword by Senator JD Vance, the Ohio Republican whom Mr. Trump tapped as his running mate in July.
“In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Mr. Vance writes in his introduction, which was obtained and published online by The New Republic on Tuesday. The book is set for publication in September.
Mr. Vance announced in June that he had written the foreword for Mr. Roberts, whose think tank became an influential bastion of conservative policymaking during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and enjoyed exceptional influence during Mr. Trump’s time in office, providing a staffing pipeline for his administration.
But Mr. Vance’s endorsement of the book became more politically fraught after Mr. Trump publicly disavowed Project 2025, a set of sweeping policy proposals for a hoped-for Republican presidency that the think tank began preparing more than two years ago under Mr. Roberts’s direction. The project, which has been billed by Heritage as an attack on the “deep state” and proposes disbanding multiple federal agencies, excluding abortion from health care and ending an array of climate change programs, has become a popular target for Democrats.
Will Martin, a spokesman for Mr. Vance, wrote in an email Wednesday that “the foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025.” Mr. Vance “has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for,” Mr. Martin wrote, adding: “Only President Trump will set the policy agenda for the next administration.”
In a July 5 post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump wrote that he knew “nothing” about Project 2025 and its authors. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote. In a Fox News interview last week, he described its architects as “a group of very, very conservative people,” some of whose ambitions were “absolutely ridiculous.”
But Mr. Roberts presented Project 2025 as a direct response to the frustrations of Mr. Trump and his inner circle to the resistance and legal roadblocks their agenda faced in some quarters of the federal government during his presidency — an experience that has informed Mr. Trump and his advisers’ plans to overhaul federal staffing should he be re-elected in November.
Early in the project, the organization hired several veterans of Mr. Trump’s administration who were involved in directing both policy and hiring personnel. The Daily Signal, Heritage’s online publication, described the project as a “four-point game plan for a conservative president to dismantle the deep state that undermined Trump.”
In recent months, Democrats, including both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the campaign trail, have seized on Project 2025 as a talking point, presenting it as evidence that a second Trump presidency would be more radical in its vision than the first, and more effective in enacting it. Mr. Roberts further fueled the attention in early July when he remarked on the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that the United States was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The attacks on the project have apparently gained enough traction with voters to prompt Mr. Trump’s disavowal.
The former president’s statements have left Heritage in a complicated position. In an onstage interview at a Heritage event at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025 and the co-editor of “Mandate for Leadership,” complained that liberals had mischaracterized the project. He called the criticism of it “Projection 2025.”
“The people who are screaming the loudest about it,” he said, “they’re really the ones defending the deep state. They’re defending the end of democracy.”
But he did not address Mr. Trump’s attacks, and Heritage announced this week that Mr. Dans would be leaving his position. In response to the news, the Trump campaign said in a statement that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Mr. Roberts’s book is the latest Heritage-related project to be caught up in the maelstrom, in large part because of the connection to Mr. Vance. The Biden and, later, Harris campaign has released statements and heavily edited video clips falsely suggesting Mr. Vance has endorsed Project 2025.
Crystal Bonham, a spokeswoman for the organization, said that Project 2025 was mentioned only once, briefly, in “Dawn’s Early Light,” which she characterized as a long-range conservative policy vision mixed with Mr. Roberts’s own story of growing up in difficult circumstances in Lafayette, La.
But in recent weeks, Mr. Roberts’s publisher, Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of Harper Collins, pulled offline a digital advance copy of the book that had been available for download for book reviewers and booksellers, and the book’s publication may be delayed.
Broadside has also dropped the original subtitle, “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” and cover art featuring a charred match, and has toned down similarly incendiary promotional language for the book.
Ms. Bonham said the changes were made at Heritage’s request after the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump on July 13, though they had been discussed earlier.
“This was in the spirit of lowering the temperature of politics right now and getting back to constructive conversations around policy and the future of the country,” she said.
There had been no discussion of removing or altering Mr. Vance’s foreword, Ms. Bonham said.
Mr. Vance wrote a preface to a Heritage report in 2017, several years before Mr. Roberts took the helm at the organization. The two met and bonded over the course of a two-hour conversation shortly after Mr. Vance was elected to the Senate in 2022, Ms. Bonham said, comparing notes on their similar upbringings and policy views.
Mr. Roberts happened to be holding a news conference on July 15, at Heritage’s Republican convention event, when Mr. Trump announced that Mr. Vance would be his running mate.
“You will see a broad smile on my face,” he told reporters. “As you may know, we are good friends.” Vance, he said, was “someone that privately we were really rooting for.”
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