On page 69, Roberts rails against the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.”
Many of these comments echo anti-choice positions taken by Project 2025 and its partner organizations. The Project 2025 policy book, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, recommends a potential Trump-Vance administration to attack reproductive rights from several angles, including by removing the term “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations, reversing abortion pill approval, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding, and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. Members of the initiative’s advisory board go significantly further, advocating for extreme abortion bans and criticizing IVF.
Trump’s campaign has recently sought to distance itself from Heritage and Project 2025 as the initiative becomes a toxic election issue and polling indicates its extremism is unpopular with voters.
But the former president is closely aligned with Heritage and its initiative: Trump previously gushed over Roberts as “so incredible” during a 2022 speech at The Heritage Foundation, Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, said that Heritage has a “great” relationship with the former president, and he is “very bought in with this,” 31 of the 38 core authors and editors of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership worked in the Trump administration, and Roberts confirmed to The New York Times in April 2023 that “Heritage and its project partners have already briefed Mr. Trump” on Project 2025.
As for Vance, his connections to Roberts, The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, and its partner organizations also run deep — the GOP vice presidential nominee praised Heritage’s president earlier this year as “somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts.” Vance’s foreword to Dawn’s Early Light also celebrates Roberts and calls Heritage “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” and proceeds from the book’s sales will partly benefit the right-wing think tank.
