Inside the radical Trump support group behind Project 2025

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation think tank and architect of the controversial Project 2025 political manifesto, spoke glowingly in May about his ties to Donald Trump.

“I became personally close to the president,” Roberts told the Financial Times in his office near the U.S. Capitol in Washington. “And we talk often.”

Roberts was confident that Trump would embrace and adopt many of Project 2025's recommendations, ushering in “the most glorious golden age of conservative reform since Ronald Reagan.”

Heritage had “an understanding, based on discussions with President Trump and his staff, that a large percentage of these recommendations will be incorporated into implementation,” Roberts said.

A few months later, as one of the toughest White House races of all time enters its hectic final stages, Roberts, Project 2025 and Heritage itself are — at least temporarily — excluded from the Trump orbit.

Project 2025, which includes large portions written by former Trump administration officials, offers a draconian menu of radical conservative action plans in the event the Republican returns to the White House next year.

Proposals include drafting ideologically loyal officials, collecting data on abortions and restricting the use of abortion pills, strict limits on illegal immigration to ease detentions and deportations, a ban on pornography and restrictions on contraception.

Trump has promised to implement some of these plans during the election campaign. But Project 2025 has become so toxic — and such an obvious target for Democrats — that the former president and his allies now insist they have nothing to do with it.

“The only official policies for a second term are those that come directly from President Trump and his campaign,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said last week.

Earlier this year, Trump himself said of Project 2025 that he had “no idea who was behind it” and called some of its plans “ridiculous and abysmal.” Chris LaCivita, his campaign manager, said Heritage was a “pain in the ass.” Howard Lutnick, Trump's interim chief of staff, called Project 2025 “radioactive” in a recent FT interview.

But with just a week to go before the Nov. 5 election, the Heritage document remains an albatross around Trump's neck as he makes his final pitch to voters.

Kamala Harris, Trump's Democratic rival, mentions it again and again at rallies and in ads in the battleground states that will decide the race, and her campaign believes it is a powerful guide to the extreme policies the former president will pursue in the fall of his victory.

“Just Google Project 2025,” Harris said at a recent rally in Atlanta, Georgia. “Can you believe they put that in writing? . . . It is a detailed and dangerous blueprint for what Donald Trump will do if elected president.”

The 922-page blueprint for a republican government is not new. Heritage launched it in April 2023. But the document's radical agenda has thrust Heritage into the political spotlight in a way that is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, in the exalted world of American think tanks.

This turmoil has significantly raised the stakes for Heritage in the race for the White House. A Trump victory would be a major boost for the think tank and its leaders. But Heritage will face backlash if it loses again.

“If Trump wins, Heritage will be in a good position, despite all the criticism of Project 2025. I think if Trump loses, they're going to be blamed a lot,” said Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, another right-wing think tank, and a former Heritage analyst who still works with it on U.S. issues. China relations.

Close observers of Heritage say his status as a political lightning rod stems from his populist evolution over the last decade.

The change began in 2014, they say, when Jim DeMint, a former senator from South Carolina who led the Tea Party movement, became its president and its political arm – called Heritage Action – clashed with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill .

Over the years, Heritage has become increasingly isolated in foreign policy and more focused on social issues. Then came Roberts, the former head of Wyoming Catholic College who later worked for a conservative political group in Texas. He was named head of Heritage in October 2021 and has aggressively promoted its work since then.

“We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it,” Roberts said War rooma podcast by Trump's former political adviser Steve Bannon, in July.

EJ Fagan, a political science professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago who has written a book about the rise of partisan think tanks, said of Roberts that it “feels like he wants to be a Fox News host as much as he does.” “want to be president of a research organization”.

Roberts has exposed “the stuff that the conservative activist class really wants, which is deeply unpopular,” Fagan said, referring to Project 2025. But it's also a “pretty good representation of what the people who end up in are “(Trump’s) government wants to be appointed,” he added.

Critics say Roberts overreached in the heat of the campaign and became too loud for Trump and other Republicans to win over more moderate voters.

A Conservative leader who spoke to the FT said the think tank should have done its job quietly and handed it over to the Trump team after the election. “It was a total mistake,” the Conservative leader said.

A well-known veteran conservative political analyst in Washington told the FT he was considering removing his time at Heritage from his public resume.

Roberts fought back defiantly. In September, he told Fox News that Heritage would come back with a different plan in the next election cycle and deliver “a slap in the face to the Democrats.”

Eli Lehrer, a former Heritage analyst and now president of the R Street Institute, another right-wing think tank, said the characterization of Project 2025 is exaggerated.

“If you're a progressive you have a lot of reasons to dislike it, and conservatives have reasons to dislike it too,” said Lehrer. “Is building a fascist theocracy a deeply sinister plan? No, it’s not that.”

Heritage remains flush with cash and supported by donors large and small, which could help it survive scrutiny regardless of the election outcome.

In 2022, the company received more than $95 million in contributions and grants and had net assets of $332 million, according to its most recent federal filings. But Heritage also faces growing competition from other think tanks in Washington that are allied with Trump but less connected to Project 2025.

If the former president wins, all eyes will be on whether Heritage and Roberts are welcomed back into the fold — and whether their ideas are implemented. Roberts said that “final decisions” on policies would be made by Trump and that his think tank showed “real humility” about its role.

“Neither I as an individual, nor Heritage as a company, nor any of the organizations that are part of Project 2025 have the presumption to say that we will dictate what President Trump or any other president-elect will do,” Roberts said.