A JD Vance-introduced book by a leader of Project 2025, the vast and controversial hardline rightwing plan for a second Trump administration, will be delayed until after the 2024 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,” the book’s author, Kevin Roberts, told RealClearPolitics, which first reported the news.
“That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”
Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation, a hard-right Washington thinktank. His book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, was due to be published in September. It will now come out on 12 November, a week after Donald Trump and Kamala Harris square off on election day.
As Project 2025 has attracted sustained fire from Democrats, over its 900-plus pages of plans for far-reaching government reform including attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, labor rights and other progressive priorities, so Roberts’s book quickly became a magnet for controversy of its own.
Trump and his campaign have sought to distance themselves from Project 2025 – efforts undermined when it became known Vance, the hardline populist Ohio senator Trump picked as his running mate, had written an introduction to Roberts’s book.
Last week, the New Republic obtained Vance’s introduction, in which he called Roberts’s ideas “an essential weapon” for “the fights that lay [sic] ahead”.
He also wrote: “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
News of such violent imagery in Vance’s writing followed news that Roberts’s book was initially called Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, and featured a match on the cover.
Vance also wrote that Roberts provided a “fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics”, comparing Roberts’s upbringing in Louisiana to his own in Ohio, the subject of Hillbilly Elegy, the bestselling book that made his name.
Vance also used his introduction to advocate for the kind of policies on family issues that have stoked controversy of his own, particularly in calling leading Democrats “childless cat ladies”.
“We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids,” Vance wrote. “We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred – and to the extent possible, lifelong – union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families.”
Last week, amid controversy over Roberts’s book and Project 2025, the project’s director, Paul Dans, said he was quitting as some parts of Project 2025 wound down.
Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said: “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.
“Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real – in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”
At the same time, Vance told RealClearPolitics Project 2025’s 900 pages contained “some ideas I like and lot of ideas I dislike”.
But in his introduction to Roberts’s book, Vance called the Heritage Foundation “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump”.
