Democrats focused their messaging upon the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 program in recent weeks, with mentions of the over 900-page uber-conservative policy document tripling since the beginning of June, according to an analysis by the Washington Post.
That push has some Republicans distancing themselves from the project, including their 2024 nominee former President Donald Trump. But despite Trump’s attempts to back away from the policy proposal, he may have a hard time pretending his ticket doesn’t endorse it. His vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to a book by the architect of the agenda, which is coming out in September.
An Amazon presale page for "Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America” has been circulating online, tagging Vance as the man behind the foreword.
The "Dawn's Early Light" sales copy explicitly references Project 2025.
"Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 head Kevin Roberts outlines a peaceful 'Second American Revolution' for voters looking to shift the power back into the hands of the people," it reads.
Vance, prior to his selection as Trump's vice presidential pick, tweeted about his eagerness to endorse the book.
Roberts, who is the president of the Heritage Foundation, said at the beginning of July that the project was part of a “Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Vance's own words in his blurb for the book are a nod to violent revolution.
“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism ... 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,” Vance wrote.
But its stark vision shocked those on the left and is being used to galvanize Democrats.
“It is really important that voters understand that Donald Trump in a second term would be far worse, far more dangerous and far more extreme than he was even in his first term,” TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser to the then-Biden campaign, told the Post in the first week of July. “That is a core argument that we are making and must continue to make to voters, and Project 2025 is one of the most effective ways we can make that point.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, has also made Project 2025 an early focus in her campaign, evoking the threat of it at a rally at the Indiana Convention Center on Wednesday.
“We must also recognize there are those who are trying to take us backward," Harris said in her speech. "Can you believe they put that in writing? This represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future. These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back."
The Daily Dot has not reviewed the full text of the book’s foreword by Vance but has reached out to HarperCollins.
Trump made opposition to the plan part of his campaign speech over the brewing public backlash.
At the beginning of July, Trump posted on Truth Social saying that he “know[s] nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
“They read some of the things, and they are extreme,” Trump said about the project during his speech at his first rally with Vance in Georgia this week. “They’re seriously extreme.”
“But I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said standing in front of a Trump-Vance 2024 podium. “I don’t want to know anything about it.”
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