The Trump campaign’s recent dishonest efforts to distance itself from the deservedly reviled Project 2025 policy agenda created by his former aides and closest allies got even less convincing Monday with Trump’s choice of MAGA hardliner J.D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has praised Project 2025’s authoritarian, anti-equality, anti-freedom policy agenda.
Vance is a close ally of the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s primary sponsor. Vance he was “thrilled” to write the introduction to Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ new book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America.”
Heritage sponsored a “policy fest” on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Held at a symphony hall a few blocks from the secure zone, the policy fest was a day-long series of speeches and panels promoting the kinds of policies laid out in Project 2025.
Roberts addressed the RNC audience just after the lunch break. He said Heritage welcomes the recent media coverage of what he called “the conservative movement’s plans for taking back this country,” claiming that “the vast majority of American people” support the project’s efforts to undermine the federal government’s regulatory powers and dismantle the administrative state.
Roberts tried to make the case that Policy 2025 is “a plan among a unified movement to speak on behalf of the everyday American, the Forgotten American.” In reality, Project 2025 would gut the federal government’s ability to protect American workers, families, and communities from corporate wrongdoing, predatory financial institutions, irresponsible polluters, and more. Roberts’ book title is reminiscent of a joke told among Federalist Society operatives describing their long game to repeal the New Deal and reverse a century of precedent and progress: “Rome Wasn’t Burned in a Day.”
At the same time, Project 2025 would grant a future President Trump virtually unchecked power to use federal agencies to target his political opponents, personal enemies, and mainstream media. That’s why historian Heather Cox Richardson has called it “a playbook to end American democracy.”
When Vance was running for the Senate in 2022, Right Wing Watch noted his support for Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and Vance’s contempt for democratic checks and balances:
If you’re wondering what kind of United States Vance envisions, it’s one where Trump rules with an iron fist and only employs loyalists at all levels of government. “If I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Vance said.
Vance added that if the courts rule against such a move, Trump should defy them. That kind of stance explains why Vox calls Vance a “naked authoritarian” with a worldview that is “fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.”
Earlier this year, Jack Jenkins at Religion News Service reported on Vance’s connections to Catholic integralism, a right-wing Catholic version of authoritarian Christian nationalism.
