Heritage Foundation president delays release of new book after Project 2025 backlash

Kevin Roberts says he’s delaying book release until after election to ‘fight like hell to take back our country’

The president of the Heritage Foundation has delayed the release of his new book until after the election following backlash against the conservative think tank for its Project 2025 initiative.

Republican senator and vice presidential nominee JD Vance has written the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light by Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts.

“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,” Roberts told The Independent in a statement. “That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”

Democrats, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, have linked Project 2025 to the Trump campaign, something that was made easier when Vance joined the Republican ticket, due to his direct connection to the think tank.

“In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote in the book’s foreword, obtained by the New Republic. The book was previously set to be released next month.

Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, speaks at the 2023 Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture in Washington, April 12, 2023. He has delayed the release of his book amid backlash against Project 2025 (AP)

Earlier this week, the Harris campaign sent out a press release that connected Vance to Project 2025. The email said the think tank and Trump were working together to “turn American democracy into a billionaire-backed dictatorship.”

Roberts said he doesn’t see the delay as a retreat and that conservatives will focus on taking the fight to the Harris campaign in the coming months.

“The Democrat establishment is more radical than ever, and Kamala Harris promises to advance their destructive agenda of high inflation and open borders for four more years,” he told The Independent. “We can’t let that happen.”

“In the coming weeks, conservatives are fully committed to focusing our efforts on helping defeat the left at the ballot box and securing a resounding victory for the American people,” he added.

The Harper Collins website states that in the book, Roberts “announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.”

Project 2025 consists of roughly 900 pages of reports that the think tank aims to have turned into policy in a future Republican administration. Think tanks in Washington often write up policy ideas hoping that they may become legislation.

Project 2025 includes proposals for shutting down the Department of Education and federal limits on abortion. Democrats have used the plans to attack the Trump campaign and convince voters that his agenda is more conservative than they may think.

Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from the initiative even as former Trump officials have contributed to it. When Project 2025 director Paul Dans revealed last week that he was stepping down from his post, the Trump campaign released a statement lauding the project’s “demise.”

“Donald Trump speaks for himself. Nobody else speaks for him. The Trump campaign has its own agenda. That’s not the same as Project 2025,” Vance also told RealClearPolitics last week.

But he noted in his book introduction that Heritage is “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”