How JD Vance could have further entangled the Trump campaign with Project 2025

With less than one month under his belt as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has created another messaging problem for the Trump campaign.

Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio, wrote a foreword to a book written by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, officially known as “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise.” A proposed overhaul of the federal government based on a set of right-wing ideas, the document details intentions to fire civil servants, expand presidential powers, dismantle the Department of Education, and cease sales of the abortion pill, among other things.

Vance’s alarmist foreword to Roberts’ book, Dawn’s Early Light, which was obtained by the New Republic, could weaken a narrative that Trump has sought to maintain since Project 2025 became a major political talking point against him: “I don’t know anything about it.”

Many former Trump advisers were already involved with the creation of Project 2025, but now his own running mate has co-signed the literature produced by the man who has championed it.

With the political stakes in mind for the Trump campaign, the book’s publication date has been postponed from Sept. 24 to until after the November election. “There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours —and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country. That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election,” Roberts wrote in a statement to RealClearPolitics.

But pushing back the publication date hasn’t silenced Trump’s critics who continue to use Vance’s entanglement as evidence of the former president’s allegiance to the conservative manifesto.

In his first speech as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in Philadelphia Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said: “JD Vance literally, literally wrote the foreword for the architect of the Project 2025 agenda.”

Here’s what to know about Vance and Project 2025, and why the Trump campaign has been trying to distance themselves from the whole thing.

Vance did not specifically mention Project 2025 in his foreword, but he wrote that Roberts, who has been the foundation’s president since 2021, is a kindred spirit based on their upbringings in unstable environments with financially struggling families, and the large role their grandparents played in their lives.

He noted their shared Catholic faith and how the two men traveled far from the worlds of their youth to reach the nation’s capital. “And now he works far from where he grew up, just a few steps from my office, in Washington, DC: he is the president of one of Washington’s most influential think tanks, and I’m a US senator,” Vance wrote.

Vance’s connection to Roberts is based on more than identity, though. The senator wrote that Roberts’ book “explores many of the themes I’ve focused on in my own work” and praised the Heritage Foundation for being “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

The senator applauded Roberts’ ability to call out corporations and endorsed Roberts’ family-focused conservatism. Vance himself said in 2021: “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.” And that those without children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the future of the country.

In the foreword, Vance writes that conservatives should listen to young people who say they can’t afford a home or to start a family in order to make it more accessible, but to also encourage them to get married and have children. He states “we should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families.”

Using an analogy where the country, represented by a well-maintained garden with some weeds, has been damaged by a “well-meaning gardener” — meant to represent “modern liberalism”— with a weed-killer, Vance writes that for conservatives to “bring the garden back to health” an entire reset is needed.

“The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems — we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach,” Vance wrote.

He then quotes Roberts: “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

Vance then closes his foreword playing off the same aggressive undertones.

“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” Vance said. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

Vance is Heritage Foundation-approved. Roberts said he and Vance are “good friends” and that the think tank had been privately rooting for Trump to pick Vance as his running mate. Roberts, according to the Associated Press, said that Vance understands “we have a limited time to pursue policy.”

While Vance has not explicitly endorsed Project 2025, he has said “there are some good ideas” in the proposal, though there are others he disagrees with and maintained that the proposals do not represent the Trump campaign.

Vance, in a March story from Politico before he was chosen as Trump’s running mate, expressed his plans for transforming the Republican Party and restructuring some key pillars of the U.S. In the same piece, Roberts said that Vance is “absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.”

The senator also praised Roberts for helping turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism.”

Even so, a Vance spokesperson maintained the Trump campaign’s position on Project 2025.

“The foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to AP. “Senator Vance has previously said that he has no involvement with it and has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for. Only President Trump will set the policy agenda for the next administration.”

On Wednesday in Wisconsin Vance said, “I think what President Trump said is that Project 2025 does not represent the agenda of the Trump campaign, and it doesn’t.”

The Trump campaign has vehemently denied the former president’s association with the project — though there is some overlap between Trump and the Republicans’ platform and the plan. The former president has said it is “seriously extreme” and “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

It’s in the Trump campaign’s best political interest to snip away any possible connections. The project’s extreme views and the role that the former Trump advisers played in leading the plan have already inspired viral anti-Trump monologues by John Oliver and Taraji Henson. The project’s extreme positions on abortion and education in particular provide ample fodder to the Democratic offense.

Before withdrawing from the presidential race, President Joe Biden highlighted Project 2025 on the campaign trail. At a Michigan rally in early July, Biden said the project “is run and paid for by Trump people” and said it would unravel a “nightmare” in the country.

Harris has quickly taken over that messaging since becoming the Democratic nominee, making it a key point in her rally speeches. In one recent instance, Harris said that Project 2025 will “weaken the middle class” during her visit to Wisconsin on Wednesday, which is part of her multi-battleground state tour with Walz.

Harris’ campaign is also training volunteers in battleground states “to highlight the most extreme aspects of Project 2025″ when they talk to voters, according to a memo issued Wednesday, reported by NBC News.

Even after the president of Project 2025 stepped down, the Harris campaign maintains that “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country.”