NEW YORK — Kevin Roberts, the president of the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, took a victory lap at a lavish party on Tuesday night, selling his book and vision for a transformed country on the march against China to a crowd of conservative elites.
The book launch for Roberts’ “Dawn’s Early Light” was originally scheduled for release on Sept. 24 of this year. The book was delayed, however, after Project 2025, the foundation's vision for recreating the United States in its image, became a central talking point in the presidential campaign. The fact that Vice President-elect JD Vance wrote the foreward for Roberts’ book only doubly raised its profile, so the group punted the book’s release until after the election.
At the penthouse bar at the luxurious Kimberly Hotel on East 50th Street in Manhattan, some reporters were told to “Go to hell” and others from conservative outlets were welcomed. Roberts sat down with Fox News Host Brian Kilmeade in front of a packed room of conservative donors and activists.
“Americans want to wake up in a normal country again,” Roberts began, likely euphemistically referring to Project 2025’s plan to all but erase federal protections and anti-discrimination measures based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
Roberts went on to say that his desire to transform America was rooted in childhood trauma. His brother committed suicide at just 15 years old in 1983, his parents divorced and his “hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana was going through the oil bust.” In Roberts’ telling, this trauma was enabled by “big government” and its proponents.
“What JD Vance saw a little bit later, is what tens of millions of Americans are facing now, because of the opioid crisis, and frankly, not because of ill intention by people who want big government, I'm going to ascribe good motives there, but government has displaced the very factors that allowed me to flourish: family, friends, communities, churches, civic organizations,” Roberts said.
These individual issues also appear in Project 2025. The plan's answer to the oil bust is to tear down barriers protecting public land, allowing oil and gas companies to expand their operations there. Many of the Project 2025 partner organizations have called for either restricting or eliminating no-fault divorce.
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Roberts proceeded to name the “uni-party” as the real enemy, in a move that would have felt at home at one of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s campaign events, saying: “The institution in DC that stands in the way is not the Democrat Party or the Republican Party or just K Street. It is this antagonist known as the uni-party.”
In Roberts’ analysis, Trump represents a break from the establishment, despite some of his recent cabinet appointments, like reported Secretary of State pick Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and that Trump has been a Republican power broker since 2012, when Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, traveled to New York during his presidential campaign to seek Trump’s endorsement.
As part of Roberts’ plan to rebel against the uni-party, he called on the incoming administration to fully embrace and enlarge the military-industrial complex. While gesturing to free markets, he called on Vance to implement an industrial policy rooted in the defense industry, which would, in some ways, continue President Joe Biden’s project of military Keynesianism.
According to Roberts, the United States needs to build up “the most lethal force in the world,” a force Roberts claims he would like to be “the most sparingly used.” However, Roberts said that the purpose of this even larger military would be “confronting” with China.
“And one of the things that I talk about extensively, as you know Brian, in the book, is confronting the Chinese Communist Party. You and I are both sons of the Reagan Revolution,” Roberts said. “We understood the Soviet Union was an existential threat, certainly with its nuclear capabilities, it was, and Russia is, but China is even more sinister. It's more insidious in what they have done under this communist regime.”
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Roberts cited vague notions of “self-government” as the driving force in his desire for the United States to confront China. Self-government, which he says would give way to a “golden era of conservative policy reform.”
While the Heritage Foundation did not write the GOP's platform, the think tank is undoubtedly influential in Republican policymaking. By their own calculation, Trump enacted some 64% of their recommendations in his budget in 2018, for example.
As attendees mingled after Roberts’ interview with Kilmeade, they exchanged expectations for the incoming Trump administration. Some hoped he would follow through on his dovish campaign rhetoric, others thought he might escalate conflict in the Middle East.
In conversations with Salon, many expressed hope that Trump might take up their own pet issue, like dismantling the administrative state, ending diversity initiatives or directing public funds to religious schools. When asked what their priority would be for a second Trump term, no one cited tariffs or tax cuts.
While there was a sense of victory in the air, the cracks in Trump’s coalition also shined through. Disagreements between the self-fashioned libertarians, neoconservatives and nationalists previewed the factions vying for power within the Republican Party, factions which stand to come to the forefront in his next term.
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