‘We’re so back’: How the Heritage Foundation is creeping back into Trump’s sphere after months of criticism

After Donald Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, the organization behind it “kind of went dark,” an official admitted.

Kamala Harris linked the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – a radical conservative 900-page blueprint for the second Trump administration, which includes proposals for shutting down the Department of Education and federal limits on abortion – to the Trump campaign.

After Democrats hit Project 2025 hard in campaign ads, the organization faced widespread backlash and had no choice but to quietly back away. Trump’s campaign also publicly shunned the proposals. “We did not anticipate that,” a Heritage official told Politico’s Playbook. “And wish it didn’t happen. But you know, we had to do what we had to do.”

As Trump distanced himself from the document, the think tank also stopped touting it on social media. Their president, Kevin Roberts, even pushed his own book publication launch back from September to after the election.

Now the book, titled Dawn’s Early Light, the foreword of which is penned by vice president-elect JD Vance, has been published, and the mood seems to be changing in the group, who are creeping back out of the shadows into Trump’s sphere after months of fierce criticism.

Last week in Washington D.C, the group marked the book’s publication with a cocktail party where one Heritage official, with “a nervous laugh,” told Politico’s Playbook: “We’re so back.”

open image in gallery

At the event attended by Playbook, Roberts gave remarks to the room where he sounded “pretty optimistic” about the likelihood of Project 2025’s proposals coming to pass.

A Heritage official told the column that the think tank has prepared a list of 20,000 names who could fill jobs in Trump’s second administration.

“I happen to know a 922-page book where there’s a perfect plan for doing that,” Roberts said, according to Playbook. “And I happen to work with the people who are perfect to implement it.”

Roberts also reportedly remarked on his differences with Robert F Kennedy Jr when it comes to abortion. During his independent presidential bid, Trump’s pick for health secretary praised Roe v Wade, saying he was “for choice and medical freedom.” It has caused ruffles in the Republican party.

“We might agree to disagree,” Roberts said. “But we’re going to work on whatever we can that we agree on, and I will hold out hope that maybe I can change his mind.”

The Independent has contacted the Trump campaign for comment.

open image in gallery

The Trump campaign repeatedly denied that the president-elect had anything to do with Project 2025, despite former Trump officials having contributed to it and his own running mate’s direct connection to the think tank.

In the foreword of Roberts’s book, Vance writes: “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.” He also noted in the introduction that Heritage is “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

In the summer Trump posted on Truth Social that he knew “nothing about Project 2025” and that some of the proposals were “abysmal.”

“I have no idea who is behind it,” he said. A photo since emerged of Trump on a private jet sat next to Roberts in 2022.

After moving to delay his book publication, Roberts told The Independent in August: “There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours – and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country.”

“That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election,” he said.