JD Vance

 New Republic - onald Trump has been desperate lately to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s radical plan to remake the federal government under his presidency. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he said in early July about the plan, which would replace thousands of federal workers with partisan loyalists, ban abortion, and disband the Department of Education. A couple of weeks later, he said of the people behind Project 2025, “They are extreme, they’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it.”But between those two denials, on July 15, Trump made a decision that undercuts his claim to have no knowledge of Project 2025: He picked Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025. Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism” and has endorsed elements of Project 2025. Vance is also the author of the foreword to Roberts’s upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, which The New Republic has obtained in full even though the book’s publisher, HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.

The subtitle and cover of Roberts’s book were softened as scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s ties to Project 2025 grew. The book, which is scheduled to be published on September 24, was originally announced with the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and featured a match on the center of its cover. The subtitle is now “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match is nowhere to be seen. Promotional language invoking conservatives on the “warpath” to “burn down … institutions” like the FBI, the Department of Justice, and universities has also been removed or toned down, though it is still present in some sales pages.