The Heritage Foundation, one of America’s most influential conservative think tanks and advocacy organizations, has changed its core values to accommodate Donald Trump.
Heritage was founded in 1973 by brewer Joseph Coors and Paul Weyrich, a former John Birch Society member who also co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. The group prepared a gameplan for the Reagan administration with 2,000 action steps, more than half of which were implemented.
Now Heritage is putting together a blueprint for a second Trump administration called Project 2025. Heritage says it wants to “institutionalize Trumpism,” and conservative Christian organizations are on board with its plan.
Heritage says 91 conservative groups have signed on to Project 2025. Thirteen of them are Christian organizations:
- Alliance Defending Freedom (a legal group begun by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and others)
- ACLJ Action (a political group affiliated with the American Center for Law and Justice, led by Trump attorney Jay Sekulow)
- American Family Association (a group that boycotts advertisers)
- California Family Council (a state group aligned with Focus on the Family)
- Concerned Women for America (founded by Tim and Beverly LaHaye)
- Eagle Forum (founded by anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlalfly)
- Family Policy Alliance (Focus on the Family’s public policy partner that’s active in 40 states)
- Family Research Council (a D.C. political group founded by Focus)
- First Liberty Institute (a conservative legal group)
- Freedoms Journal Institute (a Black educational group)
- And three educational institutions: Hillsdale College, Liberty University and Patrick Henry College
- A 14th group, Turning Point USA, isn’t officially Christian but is embraced by many of the Christian groups in this list.
Kevin D. Roberts, who took over leadership in 2021, explained Heritage’s agenda in an interview with The New York Times. The interview illustrates the group’s ideological evolution in the Trump era.
Trump: From ‘clown’ to winner of the 2016 election
Like many conservative groups, Heritage was initially skeptical of candidate Trump. In 2015, the group’s president called Trump a “clown.”
In 2015, the group’s president called Trump a “clown.”
After Trump’s stunning 2016 victory, Heritage quickly pivoted, aiding his transition and placing more than 60 of its employees and alumni in the administration.
Mark Esper was an executive with Heritage before he served as one of Trump’s defense secretaries. Esper is among 17 of Trump’s former top appointees to declare Trump unfit for office. Heritage now employs four former Trump cabinet members who remain loyal to the former president.
Heritage remains faithful to Trump and backs his claims of election fraud with its own election fraud database. Roberts claims Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election, and Heritage’s election integrity efforts have tried to restrict access to voting.
Presidential power
Heritage criticizes presidents who exceed their authority, at least when the presidents are Democrats. “Conservatives argue that President Barack Obama used executive orders to achieve results he failed to get through Congress,” said Heritage in an opinion piece about executive orders.
President of the Heritage Foundation Kevin D. Roberts speaks during a news conference with members of the House Freedom Caucus outside the U.S. Capitol on September 12, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
But Roberts said Heritage hopes to help Trump pursue a “unitary executive theory” and execute a wholesale expansion of presidential power far beyond anything Obama ever imagined. Giving Trump more control over agencies including the Department of Justice would “get the executive branch back in some sort of equilibrium,” Roberts said.
Trump has promised that if re-elected he will turn “his” Department of Justice on “the Biden crime family.” Roberts says that would be “a waste of time” but not wrong. “That’s in his authority.”
Destroy the ‘administrative state’ and remake civil service
Heritage and Trump consider the 2 million civilian members of the federal work force the “deep state.” Given the chance, Heritage is planning an unprecedented reduction in the federal workforce, starting with people who aren’t loyal to Trump.
“Those of us working on this project intend to make sure that the deep state can no longer throttle conservative governance through administrative sabotage,” said Roberts, who plans to take another swipe of the long-running conservative boogeyman, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding to PBS and NPR.
Roberts predicts 50,000 or more federal employees could get the boot if Trump is elected.
“The administrative state … what we’re trying to destroy is the political influence it has over individual American sovereignty,” he said.
Fired employees will be replaced by “rock-solid conservatives” according to the Heritage plan.
War and peace
Heritage helped develop Reagan’s doctrine of peace through military strength and the think tank supported American military interventions in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua and Iraq.
Heritage also backed America’s support of the war in Ukraine, at least until Trump criticized it. The group now opposes aid to Ukraine, blames American “saber-rattling” for causing the war and claims it is concerned about the Biden administration’s lack of transparency about the funding.
As Roberts told the Times: “We believe that the manner in which the Ukraine aid packages have been put together, the manner in which they’ve been debated or really not debated in Congress, the manner in which they’ve not been analyzed, the manner in which there’s no transparency, the fact that there’s no strategy actually is a violation of the principle of peace through strength.”
Joe McCarthy déjà vu
One reason for cutting the federal workforce is alleged communists in the ranks.
“These men and women, these communists, really, are in positions where they’re dictating with the power, the authority of law, what other Americans do,” Roberts told conservative radio host Jesse Kelly.
In his Times interview, Roberts expressed his admiration for Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who made a name for himself in the 1950s Cold War era by claiming hundreds of communists and Russian spies had infiltrated the U.S. government.
“His motivation was, as you know, that real communists, like capital-C Communists, had infiltrated the federal government, which we learned in hindsight he was right about,” Roberts said. “Obviously, at least some of his tactics were terrible, but what he got right was the motivation. And perhaps if he had not used those tactics, or maybe if he had been a political leader not prone to those kinds of tactics, the result would have been a lot more fruitful and effective for American society.”
January 6
Regarding the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Roberts told the Times: “A lot of the people in Jan. 6 were just knuckleheads,” but Black Lives Matter riots “were far worse.”
“The amount of ink that has been spilled, the amount of political gain that Congresswoman Cheney has made as a result of that is just atrocious,” he said. “And I think the far bigger threat to our republic is the Biden family.”
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