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........