Vance’s Links to the Project 2025 Leader Complicate Trump’s Attempts at Distance – The New York Times

Vance’s ties to Project 2025 leader complicate Trump's efforts to distance himself. - The New York Times

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.

Even as Donald J. Trump is trying to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, his running mate’s contribution to a new book by the project’s principal architect is complicating his efforts.

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.”

There is no evidence that Mr. Trump has been directly involved in Project 2025, which Heritage began in April 2022, months before Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign. The think tank has drawn up aspirational policy blueprints for incoming Republican presidencies since Mr. Reagan was elected in 1980 — though Project 2025’s flagship document, the 922-page “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” is more extensive than its predecessors.

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.”

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