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Former President Donald Trump has frantically tried to distance himself from Project 2025, which has grown into a political liability for Republicans. But ties between the campaign and Project 2025 keep popping up, including in the acknowledgments page of an upcoming book by one of the lead authors of the arch-conservative manifesto.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’s book, titled “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” sparked a media frenzy last week because it features a foreword written by J.D. Vance. As interest in the book rose following Trump’s pick of Vance as his vice president, a digital version of the text vanished from a website where publishers share advance copies with book reviewers.
The Intercept has reviewed a proof of the book’s acknowledgments page. In it, Roberts thanks Heritage Foundation colleagues, including Roger Severino, who wrote a Project 2025 chapter urging further abortion restrictions, shouts out prominent conservative media personalities, and praises Vance by name.
“And to Sen. J.D. Vance, thanks for inspiring me and millions of Americans with your story, and now with your leadership,” Roberts writes. “I’m so grateful that you wrote the foreword.”
The acknowledgments page isn’t the only part of the book made public on Tuesday. The New Republic published Vance’s foreword, which quotes John Travolta’s “Pulp Fiction” character, compares American politics to weeding gardens, and praises the book for “articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.” Vance praises the Heritage Foundation for being “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
But the meat of what Vance endorsed in Roberts’s book — which one commentator called “the popular narrative version” of Project 2025 — remains under wraps.
It has been a rough few days for the conservative braintrust behind Project 2025, as organizations that helped draft the document have quietly backed away. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who served as Project 2025’s director, stepped down. The Trump campaign wasted no time in putting out a jubilantly sinister statement on X.
“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you,” reads the statement.
Roberts released a more upbeat statement praising Dans’s leadership and suggesting Project 2025 will “continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local.”
Roberts hasn’t commented on the status of his book, which vanished last week from NetGalley, a website publishers use to share advance copies with book reviewers. The Intercept requested a NetGalley copy on July 25; within hours, the request function for that title had been disabled on the website. The book no longer shows up in search results on that platform.
Publishing giant HarperCollins and its Broadside Books imprint, which “specializes in conservative nonfiction,” did not respond to questions about the book’s status or why review copies were taken offline.
The book “identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save,” according to HarperCollins. Roberts’s list includes federal agencies like the FBI and Department of Education, both targets of Project 2025, plus an array of cultural institutions like the Ivy League and the Gates Foundation, “to name a few.”
In recent weeks, the book’s title and cover were subdued to remove literal inflammatory language. The book jacket previously featured a matchstick and the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” according to archived pages on Amazon and the HarperCollins website. “Just as a controlled burn preserves the longevity of a forest, conservatives need to burn down these institutions if we’re to preserve the American Way of life,” read a sentence from the book description which has been nixed.
At the same time, HarperCollins leaned into the controversy surrounding Project 2025. At some point, the Amazon page was updated to note that Roberts is the “Project 2025 head” and allude to his controversial comments about a “Second American Revolution.”
HarperCollins did not respond to questions about when these changes were made and why.
In the uncorrected proof of the book’s acknowledgments section reviewed by The Intercept, Roberts thanks “friends” like Tucker Carlson and Newt Gingrich for “reviewing the draft and for writing some excellent blurbs,” which are also on the current Amazon page.
Roberts praises one of Trump’s former national security advisors, K.T. McFarland, who also wrote a blurb on the book’s Amazon page.
The acknowledgments thank Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, for writing a blurb, but hers has not been published on the site.
On Tuesday, Hemingway blasted the Trump campaign’s dig at Project 2025. “Trumpworld bows down to left-wing media lies, and keeps signaling he doesn’t want his most loyal foot soldiers — who kept with him even when very few others did — or their conservative ideas in his next administration,” she wrote on X. “Interesting.”
Along with Vance, Roberts expresses gratitude to several other conservative politicians. “A few elected officials were vital to this book,” Roberts writes in the acknowledgments, singling out two more by name: his “friends Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. Mike Lee, with whom I’ve had long and esoteric discussions about conservatism.”
Roberts and the Heritage Foundation did not immediately return requests for comment.
The post Project 2025’s Mastermind Personally Thanked J.D. Vance in His New Book appeared first on The Intercept.
