Ohio Senator JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, praised Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ vision in the foreword to a forthcoming book, which may conflict with the Trump campaign’s efforts to distance itself from Heritage’s transition efforts under Project 2025.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book, “Dawn’s Early Light,” on Tuesday, the same day a shakeup occurred at Project 2025. The project has become a key campaign issue as Democrats and others argue that the nearly 1,000-page vision it lays out is extreme.
“Never before has a figure of Roberts’ depth and standing within the American right attempted to articulate a truly new future for conservatism,” Vance writes in his foreword. “The Heritage Foundation is not just an 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 echo Roberts’ recurrent calls to completely tear down U.S. institutions and start over, and they show the overlap between Trump’s closest allies and the people pushing Project 2025.
Nevertheless, Vance spokesman William Martin distanced himself from Project 2025 in a statement on Tuesday from Vance and the Trump campaign.
“The preface has nothing to do with Project 2025. Senator Vance has previously stated that he is not involved in it and disagrees with its demands in many respects,” Martin wrote in an email. “Only President Trump will set the policy agenda of the next administration.”
Trump’s top aides have repeatedly criticized Project 2025 organizers for creating the false impression that the transition effort is connected to the campaign. Following Tuesday’s restructuring at Heritage, Roberts now directly leads Project 2025’s operations.
The book, scheduled for release on September 24, lays out a vision of what the publisher calls a “peaceful ‘Second American Revolution.'” The subtitle is “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” although previous descriptions of the book listed it as “Burn Washington to Save America.”
The publisher’s description says the publisher identifies institutions that conservatives need to build up or reclaim, adding that some are “too corrupt to save.” Institutions listed include elite universities, the FBI, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In addition, Paul Dans, who had led the 2025 project, left the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday after continued criticism of the plan. Roberts said his departure came after the project had achieved its goal.
In his foreword, Vance calls for more than just the elimination of bad policies of the past: rather, he calls for a “rebuilding.”
“We need an offensive conservatism, not just one that tries to stop the left from doing things we don’t like,” Vance writes.
In conclusion, Vance quotes Roberts as saying: “When dusk falls and you hear wolves, you must line up your wagons in a circle and load your muskets.”
“We all now realize that it is time to surround the wagons and load the muskets,” Vance adds. “In the battles ahead, these ideas are an indispensable weapon.”
DNC spokesman Alex Floyd said in a statement that Vance’s language “reflects the same dangerous rhetoric we have heard from him and Donald Trump for years.”
The New Republic was the first newspaper to publish the full contents of the foreword.
Vance also writes about things he and Roberts have in common, including arduous childhoods, influential grandparents and the Catholic faith. He also writes about parenthood, which has been a topic of contention for him recently after an interview resurfaced in which he said the Democrats who run the country are “childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and therefore want to make the rest of the country unhappy, too.”
In the book, he praises the idea that we should “encourage our children to get married and have children” and teach them that marriage is a sacred bond. These ideas, he says, come from “the old American right, which recognized – rightly in my view – that cultural norms and attitudes matter.”
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Smith reported from Providence, Rhode Island, and Swenson from New York. New York writer Hillel Italie of the Associated Press contributed to this report.
