The Conservative The Heritage Foundation , a backbone of Republican Right leaners , is having internal issues just the Democrats and the Progressive Lefties…
The Heritage Foundation currently finds itself engulfed in an internal struggle that mirrors the one roiling the Republican Party: how to harness the energy unleashed by Trumpism without being completely overrun by its conspiracy- and nativist-minded elements, particularly among the rising generation that has known little else. Long accustomed to placing its experts in key positions in Republican administrations, as it did in Trump’s first term, Heritage presented its Project 2025 as just the kind of master plan an uncompromising second Trump administration would need to implement its agenda.
But once Trump took office, Heritage was instead pushed to the side. As it tried to work its way back into the center of power, the foundation was consumed by a vicious in-house conflict. An old guard of establishment experts saw themselves swamped by an influx of more radical, often younger conservatives eager to remake the institution for the post-Trump right in their image: terminally online, ruthless in fighting the culture wars and vehement in rejecting the dogmas of postwar conservatism.
A watershed moment came last October, when Roberts posted a video to X in support of Tucker Carlson, who had been widely criticized for inviting the 27-year-old white nationalist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes onto his show. Condemnations flooded in from across the right, with several of Carlson’s closest allies breaking with him over his decision to turn his show into what one of them, the Israeli American philosopher Yoram Hazony, recently called “the leading clearinghouse for virulent antisemitism on the political right.” Roberts leapt to Carlson’s defense, denouncing the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and arguing that conservatives should “feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class” and the “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”
Roberts later apologized to Heritage staff for his choice of words, which some had criticized as playing into antisemitic tropes, and for having “let down this institution.” But when I asked him about the video, he insisted that it was Heritage’s job to figure out how to bring together a coalition that can win elections and exercise power effectively….
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This mass turnover, multiple former staff members told me, was intentional. “There’s this movement that’s been brewing on the right, and they have crept into a variety of mainstream conservative institutions and taken over,” one former senior Heritage analyst, who insisted on anonymity for fear of professional reprisal, told me. That’s what had happened at Heritage. “It was planned,” the analyst said. “And it was a coup.”
The troubles at Heritage could be said to have started with Project 2025. Since 1980, Heritage has put out a policy manual, the “Mandate for Leadership,” roughly every four years for any potential incoming Republican administration. Its inaugural 1,000-page booklet went to the cabinet of Ronald Reagan, who used it as a script for the Reagan era. Project 2025 was not a wholesale reinvention but a rebrand….
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Many Heritage staff members told me that Project 2025 was compiled with DeSantis, a strategic policy thinker, in mind. But DeSantis dropped out of the race in January 2024, and Heritage was forced to pivot. After Trump sealed the nomination, a deluge of critical press coverage homed in on Project 2025 and its aims: to radically “deconstruct the administrative state”; strip the government and civil society of “woke” D.E.I. initiatives; close the borders; and consolidate power in the executive branch.
Trump vehemently denied any knowledge of Project 2025, which many in the media interpreted as gaslighting. But multiple former Heritage staff members told me that Project 2025’s showy publicity infuriated Trump. According to them, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign managers, were incensed that they hadn’t been consulted and called Heritage to demand that they stop associating Project 2025 with the next Republican administration. (The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
After Trump won, Roberts and other Heritage leaders found themselves scrambling to place their people in the new administration. Roberts acknowledged to The Times in late 2024 that Project 2025’s brand “had become a political liability.” A crop of new organizations were challenging Heritage’s previous dominance, including the America First Policy Institute, founded by officials from the first Trump administration. Linda McMahon, the future secretary of education; Brooke Rollins, the future secretary of agriculture; and Pam Bondi, who wou…
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Many former Heritage employees predict that aligning with online activists and Gen Z-ers is a doomed strategy. “They don’t reflect Republican politicians nationwide,” says the former senior Heritage analyst, “and they’re a tiny, tiny part of the Republican Party even in D.C.” Dreher went further. To be a conservative, he says, seems “dispositionally to be against radical change. But these guys, if they want to tear it all down, OK, what are you going to replace it with?”
In the opening chapters of his 2024 book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” Roberts unspools a long metaphor about the productive properties of destruction. “Fire transforms rot and deadwood into new soil, clears the ground for new life to take root,” Roberts writes, and conservatives must “plant new trees — that is, found new institutions.” He continues, “None of this will matter, however, if conservatives remain unwilling to take the crucial third step: to destroy the institutions that can’t be saved.”….
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