JD Vance endorses the ideas of Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts as a “fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics” and a “surprising — even shocking” path forward for conservatives, the Republican vice presidential nominee writes in the foreword Roberts’ next book.
The preface was obtained and published in full for the New Republic on Tuesday. Roberto book comes out in September. Its title was recently watered down to remove references to the “burning” of Washington DC.
In the preface, Vance finds parallels between his training and Roberts’s, and between their views on US needs. Both grew up in poor families in parts of the country “largely ignored by American elites,” with Roberts in Louisiana and Vance in Ohio and Kentucky. Both are Catholic, with Vance converting in later life. They both had grandparents who played an important role in their upbringing.
Now both are in D.C., with Roberts “just steps away” from Vance’s office.
Vance praises Roberts for using his position as president of the Heritage Foundation, a large right-wing D.C. thinktank, to promote a more radical conservative vision rather than resting on the foundation’s laurels.
“The Heritage Foundation is not a random outpost on Capitol Hill; is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans, from Ronald Reagan to donald trump,” writes Vance. “However, it is Heritage’s power and influence that makes it easier to avoid risks. Roberts could earn a good salary, write decent books, and tell donors what they want to hear. But Roberts believes that doing the same thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.”
Trump’s campaign has tried to distance the former president from Project 2025, a conservative roadmap for a second Trump term that includes policy ideas unpopular with voters that Trump needs to win. But Vance’s ties to Roberts, like the preface, make it harder for Trump to argue that he doesn’t know what the project is.
In the hours before the foreword was published by media outlets, Project 2025 director Paul Dans said he was stepping down from his role and that some work on the project was being terminated, although it is unclear what this means. The project largely consists of a more than 900-page political manifesto and an effort to find potential officials for a second Trump term. Roberts said the plan to create a “staffing apparatus” for all levels of government would continue.
Roberts has faced scrutiny in recent weeks for comments that the US is “in the process of a second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it.” His links to a radical part of the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, and belief that birth control should be banned were also revealed by the Guardian.
Vance previously said that Roberts “is someone I trust a lot, who has very good advice, very good political instincts,” he said. told the Notus news agency in January. He said Heritage, under Roberts, has gone from a “relatively vanilla” think tank to a think tank that is willing to participate in the right-wing struggles and debates about where the party should go.
On two issues in particular, Vance praises the way Roberts exposes the risks and his goals: controlling big technology companies and focusing on a Christian vision of the family.
He notes that Roberts argues that the US founders would not have imagined the way companies like Apple or Google would accumulate power to “censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence services and other federal bureaucrats,” saying that this “deserves the Right’s scrutiny, not its support.”
And Vance agrees with how Roberts recognizes that “cultural norms and attitudes are important.”
“We should encourage our children to get married and have children,” Vance writes. “We should teach them that marriage is not just a contract, but a sacred union – and, as far as possible, for life. We must discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families.”
This belief in family also means that conservatives need to ensure that families are not just for rich people, which requires creating better jobs and listening to young people when they say they can’t afford houses or families, he writes.
“Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian vision of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand,” Vance writes.
To create the America that Roberts and Vance envision, conservatives need to go on the offensive — not just remove policies they don’t like, but also rebuild the country in what Roberts called the “second American Revolution.”
“The old conservative movement argued that if we got the government out of the way, natural forces would solve problems – we are no longer in this situation and we must take a different approach,” Vance writes. “As Kevin Roberts writes: ‘It’s good to take a laissez-faire approach when you’re in the safety of the sun. But when dusk falls and you hear the wolves, you have to surround the wagons and load the muskets.
“Now we are all realizing that it is time to round up the wagons and load the muskets. In the struggles that lie ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
