The leader of the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025 reportedly couldn’t be happier that Donald Trump picked Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate Monday.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which penned the lengthy blueprint for a potential far-right Trump takeover and draconian dismantling of the administrative state, was speaking to reporters when the announcement was made.
New York Times reporter Nick Corasaniti described Roberts’s live reaction to hearing that Vance had been tapped. “He reacted to the news ‘with a broad smile on my face’ and said that ‘privately, we were really rooting for him,’” Corasaniti wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
In his own post on X, Roberts congratulated Vance and called him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future.”
“When Americans get to know him, they will appreciate his values and vision as I do,” he wrote.
Roberts recently received widespread backlash for issuing a chilling warning to liberals. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be,” said Roberts, during an appearance on Real America’s Voice earlier this month.
Trump has since attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, even though at least 140 people he worked with were involved in making the plan, according to CNN. Vance, on the other hand, appears to have embraced the policy plan, saying last week there are “some good ideas in there.”
