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The Heritage Foundation is on a roll. Donald Trump is carrying out large pieces of its Project 2025. But the far-right organization is being roiled by the question: What happens after Trump? The Heritage's president, Kevin Roberts, told a reporter: "But the point is that, moving forward, on the evening of Jan. 20, 2029, President Trump will have left the stage. We as conservatives have to answer the question, Where is this movement going? And what it can't do—what it must not do— is go back to 20 years ago." In other words, he is ruling out having the Party go back to being the party of John McCain, the Bushes, and Ronald Reagan.
In earlier Republican administrations, Heritage was a pipeline feeding candidates for myriad jobs to the administration. When Trump took over, he pushed Heritage away and wasn't interested in getting suggestions from it. The leadership tried to get into Trump's good graces by forgetting all about conservatism. Not all conservatives liked this. Last October, Roberts posted a video to eX-Twitter in support of Tucker Carlson, who invited antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast. Condemnations flooded in. Roberts took a lot of flak for that but said conservatives should not buckle to the globalist class.
Many people at Heritage made it clear that people like Carlson and Fuentes are not welcome in their coalition. They said they talk to congressional offices, courts, foreign embassies and other institutions all the time and don't want to be associated with bigots like Fuentes. Staff members departed, donors balked, and people began calling it the "Heritage Hunger Games." Employees began using encrypted Signal calls on burner phones for communication. Some people even said the chaos was intentional, with the goal of driving all the Reaganauts out of the organization. It was a coup.
The younger generation doesn't care about conservatism, they care about power, and that means being Trump's lackeys. One former staff member said: "It looked like central Pennsyltucky had invaded a country club." Older analysts who favored free trade were confronted by younger ones who supported Trump's tariffs. Andrew Hale, a senior trade analyst, said he was willing to debate policy, but he was not willing to "sit here and discuss whether the Holocaust happened or not." Debates about World War II became common, with arguments about who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.
There were also problems in other areas. Scott Yenor, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, has argued that women's suffrage was a mistake and a healthy society requires a patriarchy. He also argued that the tax code should support a multi-trillion dollar transfer of wealth from single people to married couples with children. He and his team are also against birth control, even for married couples. Old-style conservatives were appalled.
Now everyone at Heritage and beyond is wrestling with a dilemma. They have abandoned all principles in order to get in Donald Trump's good graces. But again, what do they do when Donald Trump isn't there anymore? Also, traditionally conservatives want to conserve things. The under-30s at Heritage want to burn it all down. Roberts seems to have bought into that. In a recent book, he wrote: "Fire transforms rot and deadwood into new soil, clears the ground for new life to take root. Conservatives must plant new trees—that is, found new institutions. None of this will matter, however, if conservatives remain unwilling to take the crucial third step: to destroy the institutions that can't be saved." So the far right has joined the far left. Project 2029 is "burn it all down." Now all they have to figure out is what kind of new trees to plant.
In short, a once-respected conservative institution that gave Republican presidents a long series of Supreme Court justices has been reduced to another whiny group of conspiracy theorists begging for some attention from Trump. (V)