Project 2025 architect: “President Trump, of all people, would agree" that Project 2025 is "in service to the American people”
Kevin Roberts: “On November 6th, the page will turn to policy making season and not being arrogant here, that's our season.”
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From an October 21, 2024, stream by Tim Young:
TIM YOUNG: One of the things that happened and why I want to sit down and talk to you and talk about Project 2025 is because when the left went crazy about it and then Trump said, I had nothing to do with it, all of a sudden the people in the right then were like, we need to hate that. Because, you know, Trump said he had nothing to do with it. But at the end of the day, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2525, you have the top conservative thinkers in the country coming up with policy that can make this country better. And that gets lost in this mudslinging because like, when I, I'm a nerd, it turns out. When I was a nerd who was in journalism, looked for proper information, you know, studies and economists, you come to the Heritage Foundation, you look for that information. That's what went into this. And it was just a massive conglomeration of all of these proposals that, by the way, has been around for, what, 45 years now?
KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION PRESIDENT): We've done this since 1980. This is just what we do and not for our own benefit. Even though we've had plenty of people at Heritage over the years who've gone into presidential administrations and come back, it is what we do in service to the president of the United States, should he choose to use the policies and the people, totally up to him. But even more importantly, and President Trump, of all people, would agree with this, in service to the American people. And that's really the big thing for me to convey to your audience. You know this about, Tim, and that is if you're a regular, ordinary American watching or listening to this conversation, you have no reason to know about Heritage because we work, as I like to say, behind enemy lines in Washington, D.C., but we're not of Washington, D.C. In fact, we are distinctive, if not unique, among conservative think tanks in D.C., where we're not supported by a handful of really wealthy people. We're supported by hundreds of thousands of small donations. And that was the genius of my predecessors at Heritage years ago in saying in order to withstand all of the pressures in D.C. You talked about some of them when you were an intern at Social Security, where you would just become part of the Blob. You become part of the swamp. Our incentive structure is totally the opposite of that. So we're constantly doing what we do to represent the American people. It sounds trite, but I'm just letting you know that is part of the core DNA of what we do. And it's also why, amid all of this nonsense that's come from the left and President Trump's understandable desire in the middle of a political campaign to say, I have nothing to do with that because the left's turned it into a liability, we can just shrug our shoulders and say, on November 6th, the page will turn to policy making season and not being arrogant here, that's our season. Yeah, it's still up to the president. Vice president, if they want to use our policies or our recommendations. That's always been the case. We're going to always do what we do because we have truth on our side.