J.D. Vance says Project 2025 group is the ‘most influential engine of ideas’ for Trump

As former President Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, Trump’s own vice presidential running mate is praising the man whose organization created the document billed as a transition plan for a potential second Trump term.

Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to “Dawn’s Early Light,” a forthcoming book from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, whose organization created Project 2025.

“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 wrote in the foreword, according to a copy of the text obtained by the New Republic. “The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

Vance goes on to say that conservatives should rally around Roberts’ ideas in the book, writing: “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.”

In the book, Roberts declares that “America is on the brink of destruction” and seeks to lay out a “promising path for the American people to take back their country,” according to a description of the book from publisher HarperCollins. 

That language is very similar to language found in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s transition plan if Trump wins in November, which says that, “With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”

Trump has recently tried to distance himself from Project 2025 after Democrats called attention to the extreme ideas in the nearly 1,000-page document. However, dozens of contributors to the document worked in the Trump administration — and could work for him again if Trump wins in November. 

Project 2025 calls for revoking approval for the abortion drug mifepristone, which the document says is “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.” It also calls for purging the federal government of people disloyal to Trump, eliminating regulations that bar anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, and abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, which would make it harder for families to afford college.

Polling shows Project 2025 is unpopular with voters and could be an electoral drag on his presidential ambitions in November. A survey from Navigator Research found 43% of registered voters said they have an unfavorable view of Project 2025, while just 11% said they view it favorably and 46% said they don’t know.

While Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, Roberts said the Heritage Foundation was not upset because they understood their document “had become a liability.”

“So no hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025 about the statement, because we understand that Trump is the standard bearer and he’s making a political tactical decision there,” Roberts said in a July interview with the Raleigh-based news station WRAL, according to Media Matters for America.