J.D. Vance has made it impossible for Trump to run away from Project 2025

Former President Donald Trump has lately been trying to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming it was cooked up by the “severe right” and that he doesn’t know anything about it.

But it turns out the severe right is coming from inside the house.

Kevin Roberts, the self-proclaimed “head” of Project 2025, has a book coming out in September — and the book’s foreword is written by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who lavishly praises its ideas.

“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes, according to the book’s Amazon page. “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.”

What ideas? Like Vance, Roberts is obsessed with the idea that the left controls major American institutions — he lists Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education and even the Boy Scouts of America. The book argues that “conservatives need to burn down” these institutions if “we’re to preserve the American way of life.” (Vox has requested a copy of the book, but has not yet received one at the time of this writing.)

Obviously, this poses a problem for Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the virally unpopular Project 2025 and its lengthy agenda for what he should do if he wins, which includes proposals to restrict abortion access and centralize executive power in the presidency.

And it’s one more indication that Trump’s pick of Vance might be politically problematic for him. Vance has a fascination with provocative and extreme far-right thinkers, and a history of praising their ideas. He is not a running mate tailored to win over swing voters who are concerned Trump might be too extreme — quite the opposite.

The book was written and announced before Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate. But there’s some indication that people involved had some late second thoughts about it. It was originally announced as “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” with a cover image showing a match over the word “Washington.”

More recently, though, the subtitle has been changed to “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match has vanished from the cover.

Roberts headed Project 2025 — and contributed some of its most controversial proposals

Project 2025, which I recently wrote about at length, is the conservative movement’s detailed and specific plan for what the next Republican president should do with his power. 

It was crafted by people who have long worked closely with Trump and includes many policies Trump clearly supports — like centralizing power in the presidency over career civil service professionals, slashing regulations, and abandoning efforts to fight climate change. It also contains some proposals Trump currently finds politically problematic: aggressively using federal power to prevent abortions, restricting some contraceptive coverage, and banning pornography.

Project 2025 was put together by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which worked on it with more than 100 conservative groups. Though much of its 922-page policy document is written in dry, wonkish language, Roberts wrote the fiery introduction. The porn ban is his idea specifically — he writes:

Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. 

On abortion, Roberts writes: “Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.”

Roberts, who has led Heritage since late 2021, has a history of controversial statements. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” he recently said. 

But Vance is a big fan. “I was thrilled to write the foreword for this incredible book, which contains a bold new vision for the future of conservatism in America,” he tweeted in June.

Tucker Carlson, who was heavily featured at the recent Republican National Convention, has also praised the book and Roberts’s “plan to save America,” calling it “deep and wise.” 

Vance agrees quite a bit with Project 2025’s most extreme ideas

Project 2025 contains a multitude of proposals in its 922-page plan, not all of which J.D. Vance necessarily supports.

But he’s on record backing ideas similar to those put forth in two of Project 2025’s most controversial issue areas.

The first is abortion. Project 2025 lays out a sweeping agenda by which the next president could use federal power to prevent abortions, including using an old law called the Comstock Act to prosecute people who mail abortion pills, and working to prevent women from abortion-banning states from traveling out of state to get abortions.

Vance is on record supporting these ideas. Last year, he signed a letter demanding that the Justice Department prosecute physicians and pharmacists “who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws.” In 2022, he said he was “sympathetic” to the idea that the federal government should stop efforts to help women traveling out of their states to get abortions. That year, he also said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”

At other points, Vance has struck a different tone. ““We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans,” he said last December. And this month he said he supported a Supreme Court decision that allowed the abortion bill mifepristone to remain available. Here, Vance is trying to align with Trump, who — fearing political blowback — argues he merely wants abortion to be a state issue, despite his long alliance with the religious right. But Vance’s record implies his true agenda might be otherwise.

The second controversial area where Vance is sympatico with Project 2025 is centralizing presidential power over the executive branch. The project lays out various proposals to rein in what conservatives view as an out-of-control “deep state” bureaucracy — mainly, by firing far more career civil servants and installing far more political appointees throughout the government.

Vance, as I wrote last week, has backed a maximalist version of this agenda. In 2021, Vance said that in Trump’s second term, Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” The courts would try to stop this, Vance continued, and Trump should then “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

So it’s no big surprise that Vance would write the foreword for a book by Project 2025’s architect. They fundamentally agree on how they see the world, and in much of what they want out of politics: a battle against the left for control of institutions, and expanded government power to stop abortions.