As Trump desperately tries to separate his campaign from Project 2025, users on X have noted one big problem: J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by the plan’s lead author, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
On the Amazon product page, the promotional material for the book, titled Dawn’s Early Light, highlights Roberts’s role in composing Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation proposal for a conservative overhaul of the federal government.
The product page also includes a favorable review from Vance. “Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” the review says. “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.”
When the book first became available for pre-order on June 19, Vance promoted it on X, writing, “I was thrilled to write the foreword for this incredible book, which contains a bold new vision for the future of conservatism in America.”
On the Amazon page for Dawn’s Early Light, the subtitle reads, “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” but an archived version of the page from June 19 indicates it was initially “Burning Down Washington to Save America.”
Inflammatory language in the blurb has also apparently been tamped down.
A sentence on the archived page that says the book “blazes a warpath for the American people to take back their country” now says it “blazes a promising path.” Another fiery sentence on the archived page read, “Just as a controlled burn preserves the longevity of a forest, conservatives need to burn down these institutions [the FBI, The New York Times, the Department of Education, etc.] if we’re to preserve the American Way of life.” It now says that those institutions “need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.”
These changes, while slight, perhaps indicate a hope to dispel the emerging public perception that Project 2025 would wreak havoc on the country. Trump, undoubtedly aware of the plan’s growing unpopularity, has claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025” and that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
But it will certainly be harder for the Republican ticket to distance itself from the Heritage Foundation manifesto come publication day in September.
