Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, praised the vision of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in the foreword of a forthcoming book that could conflict with the Trump campaign’s effort to distance itself from Heritage’s Project 2025 transition effort.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book “Dawn’s Early Light” on Tuesday, the same day of a shakeup at Project 2025, which has become an important election-year issue as Democrats and others argue that the nearly 1,000-page vision it set out is extreme.
“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes in his foreword. “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.”
Vance’s words, which echo Roberts’ frequent calls to tear down U.S. institutions entirely to start anew, show the overlap between Trump’s closest allies and the people fueling Project 2025.
Still, Vance spokesman William Martin distanced Vance and the Trump campaign from Project 2025 in a statement on Tuesday.
“The foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025. Senator Vance has previously said that he has no involvement with it and has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for,” Martin wrote in an email. “Only President Trump will set the policy agenda for the next administration.”
Trump’s top aides have repeatedly criticized organizers of Project 2025 for what they say is a false impression that the transition effort is associated with the campaign. After Tuesday’s shakeup at Heritage, Roberts is now leading Project 2025 operations directly.
The book, scheduled to be published on Sept. 24, outlines a vision for what its publisher calls “ a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution’.” Its subtitle is “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” though earlier descriptions of the book listed it as “ Burning Down Washington to Save America.”
The publisher’s description says it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build or to take back, adding that some are “too corrupt to save.” Among those it lists are Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Also, on Tuesday, Paul Dans, who had directed Project 2025, left the Heritage Foundation amid continued criticism of the plan. Roberts said his departure came after the project completed what it set out to do.
In his foreword, Vance calls for something more than removing bad policies of the past, but instead to “rebuild.”
“We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like,” Vance writes.
As Vance wraps up, he quotes Roberts as saying that when twilight descends and a person hears 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,” Vance adds. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
DNC spokesman Alex Floyd said in a statement that Vance’s language “echoes the same dangerous rhetoric we’ve heard from him and Donald Trump for years.”
The New Republic was first to report the contents of the foreword in full.
Vance also writes about things he and Roberts have in common, including difficult upbringings, influential grandparents, and the Catholic faith. He also writes about parenthood, which has been a contentious issue for him recently after an interview resurfaced where he said Democrats running the country are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
In the book, he praises the idea that we should “encourage our kids to get married and have kids,” and teach them that marriage is a sacred union, ideas that he says come from “the old American Right that recognized — correctly, in my view — that cultural norms and attitudes matter.”
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Smith reported from Providence, Rhode Island, and Swenson from New York. Associated Press writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
