Project 2025 ex-director condemns Heritage president’s ‘violent rhetoric’

The former director of the right-wing policy and personnel blueprint known as Project 2025 is condemning what he sees as “violent rhetoric” from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and calling on Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance to retract the foreword he wrote for Roberts’s book.

“If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well,” Paul Dans, who led Project 2025 until July, said in an interview. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.”

Roberts, who took over Washington’s preeminent conservative think tank in 2021, declared a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be,” during an appearance on a pro-Trump podcast in July, before a gunman attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. That same month, Roberts started marketing his book, whose cover proposed “Burning Down Washington” and featured an image of a match.

Roberts declined to be interviewed. Heritage spokesman Noah Weinrich said Roberts’s remark on the podcast was meant to warn of left-wing violence. “Any attempt to mischaracterize Dr. Roberts’s comments as supportive of violence is grotesque and completely contrary to the observation he was making,” he said.

Roberts used similar language in online promotional materials for his book. In early versions of the text reviewed by The Washington Post, Roberts called for “a political revolution” to “overthrow today’s incarnation of the ruling class,” argued that the nation “must be destroyed and replaced,” and supported the elimination of institutions including the Ivy League, the FBI, Fairfax County Public Schools and the Boy Scouts.

Dans and Roberts disagreed over the direction of Project 2025, a collaboration among more than 100 right-wing groups that was convened by Heritage and run by Dans. Dans blames Roberts for much of the backlash that the effort has received. He said he warned Roberts against provocative media interviews and hyperbolic language, especially after the Trump campaign repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 and warned participants to stop talking to reporters about plans for a second Trump administration. Over the summer, Democrats turned Project 2025 into a byword for Trump’s second-term agenda and argued that voters should oppose it.

“There’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august think tank,” Dans said. “And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”

A lawyer representing Heritage dismissed Dans’s criticisms and suggested he is motivated by a dispute with his former employer. Dans declined to comment on the circumstances of his departure.

After a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, wounding the former president and killing one attendee, the promotional text for Roberts’s book was revised to soften some of the most inflammatory phrases. Gone was a reference to overthrowing the ruling class; the revolution was specified as “peaceful”; and Fairfax County schools and the Boy Scouts were spared. The subtitle changed from “Burning Down Washington” to “Taking Back Washington,” and the match disappeared from the cover.

In August, Roberts said he would delay the book’s publication, originally scheduled for September, until after the election.

“Dr. Roberts initially was using a rhetorical turn of phrase to emphasize the need for certain aspects of the federal government to be restored to a citizen-centered balance, rather than being the captive of a small minority from the Left,” Weinrich said of the changes. “However, following the slanderous media coverage of Project 2025, Dr. Roberts did not want to allow the same voices to attribute false allegations of violence to his book as well.”

Roberts’s book includes a foreword by Vance, whom Roberts has described as a friend. Dans said Vance should distance himself from Roberts by withdrawing his foreword for the book. A spokesman for Vance declined to comment.

The notoriety surrounding Project 2025 has been a fundraising boon for Heritage, helping the foundation collect a record $150 million in 2023, according to the group’s public disclosures. Although Heritage publicly promoted Project 2025 as a $22 million initiative, its actual budget was less than $2 million, according to people familiar with the figures. Weinrich said $22 million reflected the annual spending across all Heritage departments and events to support the project, not only the budget for the project’s dedicated staff, and only 1.1 percent of the foundation’s 2023 fundraising was specifically directed to Project 2025.

“Project 2025 was and is an all-of-Heritage effort,” he said.

Trump has repeatedly expressed frustration with Heritage and other think tanks, such as the America First Policy Institute and the Center for Renewing America, that he viewed as raising money off him. Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation especially drew the wrath of Trump and his advisers because of their ongoing self-promotion amid intensifying Democratic attacks.

“Project 2025 is radioactive to the Trump-Vance transition,” said Howard Lutnick, a billionaire investor who is co-chair of the official transition. “Zero. Total ban. Radioactive. Any of those words, feel free to pick them.”

Dans reiterated that Trump was never involved in Project 2025. He called it ironic that the project has become a political liability for him, because Roberts initially supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s rival in the GOP nominating contest. The Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025’s 900-page book of policy proposals at a 2023 conference that featured DeSantis as the marquee speaker. Trump was not invited to that event. He has participated in other Heritage Foundation gatherings and took a private flight with Roberts to a summit in 2022.

In August 2023, Roberts attended the DeSantis campaign’s after-party at the first Republican presidential debate. He contributed $1,246.97 to DeSantis’s campaign. (Roberts and his wife have also donated to Trump.) Several Heritage staffers, including Roberts’s personal press secretary, left to work for DeSantis. Once the Florida governor dropped out of the race in January, Roberts quickly shifted emphasis, presenting Heritage’s work as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

Weinrich stressed Heritage’s nonprofit status, which restricts partisan activities, to deny that the foundation favored candidates or coordinated with campaigns. “Heritage did not raise money in the name of staffing a second Trump administration,” he said.

Roberts’s ties to DeSantis were part of the reason that Trump’s campaign rebuked Project 2025 in public statements in November and December. Dans said he wished Trump’s advisers had weighed in privately. But he insisted he never heard from them, disputing previous reporting that said Trump co-campaign manager Susie Wiles complained to him and other Heritage leaders. The public admonitions served to draw more attention to the controversy, he said, and invite further Democratic attacks.

“We took the instruction, as we had before, to lay low,” Dans said. “But in the case of Kevin, he didn’t.”

Roberts’s continuing publicity efforts gave Democrats an opportunity to tie Project 2025, and by extension Trump, to more controversial positions supported by some Heritage employees but not by the Project 2025 policy book or the Trump campaign. Some articles and social media posts from Heritage have advocated stricter abortion bans than Trump has and cuts to Social Security. Dans said he warned others at Heritage to remove statements that were contrary to Trump’s position and would embolden Democrats to claim Trump would cut Social Security.

Roberts’s book also departed from Trump’s positions by criticizing in vitro fertilization and contraception, according to an advance copy obtained by the liberal group Media Matters.

“Heritage cannot and does not take direction from any political campaign,” Weinrich said. “Dr. Roberts was not seeking publicity: We were speaking regularly to other conservative leaders and supporters who desperately wanted — and still want — a plan for governance.”

Roberts has showed no sign of changing course because of the blowback.

“We allowed the radical left to define the brand Project 2025,” Roberts said at the New York Times Climate Forward conference on Sept. 25. “We should have — figuratively speaking — punched back. Lesson learned.”

Tyler Pager contributed to this report.