Trump can't kill Project 2025 because it's GOP policy. And then there's JD Vance.

In a desperate attempt to extinguish media attention on Project 2025, the Trump campaign “forced the architect [Paul Dans] of the ultraconservative Project 2025 manifesto out of his job on Tuesday,” according to The Daily Beast.

However, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has made it clear that Project 2025 is not going quietly into the night. “Project 2025 will continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local,” he wrote on Twitter/X. Roberts will take point on the plan.

After all, “Roberts said in a statement that the policy work was always set to conclude after party conventions.” And Project 2025 ‘shaped’ the GOP platform adopted at the Republican National Convention.

Parts of the Project are already being deployed across the country, as journalists have reported over the past month. Donald J. Trump cannot kill the plan developed in large part by his own administration appointees.

Despite the bravado present in this statement, the Trump campaign is inextricably tied to Project 2025.

Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.

And who’s good buds with Roberts? That would be Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, who penned a “glowing” forward to Roberts’ upcoming book, previously titled Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America. That subtitle has changed, given media attention on Project 2025, to Taking Back Washington to Save America. The glowing match on the cover is gone as well. Plus reviewer copies have disappeared, according to The New Republic (TNR).

Unless it is rewritten, the forward echos the violence presented in that initial sub-heading. TNR downloaded an advance copy of the book before it disappeared from NetGalley.

Here are excerpts from Vance’s forward. Read the full statement at TNR.

Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism. 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…

The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems—we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach. As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the 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. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.

Roberts (and others) have pointed out that The Heritage Foundation produced a playbook for the Reagan Administration, a playbook that Ronald Reagan implemented. It helped get us to where we are today.

Finally, I’ll leave for another day the breathtaking hypocrisy exhibited by Vance’s criticism of monopolistic power in Silicon Valley, given that Peter Thiel helped him become a venture capitalist and underwrote his Senate campaign in 2022.

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KATHY GILL, Associate Editor

Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com

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