The Trump family may keep the name, and the Project 2025 network may control much of the machinery needed to exercise presidential power.
What none of them automatically inherits is Trump’s ability to make incompatible people believe they’re all part of the same movement.
Heritage wanted something even more difficult: the authority to define what Trumpism means once Trump is no longer there to define it personally. Roberts would take Trump’s impulses, impose some order on them and leave behind a governing philosophy capable of outliving the man who created it.
Instead, Heritage discovered that inviting a movement built on contempt for gatekeepers inside an institution can destroy the gatekeeper’s authority without giving it any real control over the people entering.
Which brings us back to the constitutional guide.
The scholarship inside hadn’t changed. The Constitution hadn’t changed. The paper, ink and arguments were exactly what they had been before Roberts recorded his video. What had changed was the meaning of the Heritage name, and that was enough to make nearly 100 contributors unwilling to sit down and sign their own work.
It had taken four years and more than 150 people to make those books. It took a few minutes to drain away the trust that made people willing to stand beside them.
Kevin Roberts set out to teach Trumpism how to live inside an institution. He may instead have demonstrated what happens when the movement gets to the institution first.
Bibliography
1. • Josh Blackman, “My Resignation From the Heritage Foundation,” The Volokh Conspiracy , Reason , December 21, 2025. Blackman’s first-person account documents the four-year constitutional-guide project, its more than 150 contributors, the nearly 1,500 copies prepared for the Federalist Society convention and the cancellation of the signing.
2. • Isaac Arnsdorf and Jacob Bogage, “Heritage Staff in Open Revolt Over Leader’s Defense of Tucker Carlson,” The Washington Post , November 6, 2025. Documents Roberts’s original video, the internal rebellion, his apology and his statement that some members of Fuentes’s audience might be converted to mainstream conservatism.
3. • J. Oliver Conroy, “White Nationalist Nick Fuentes Is Exposing a Civil War Among US Republicans: ‘We Look Like Clowns,’” The Guardian , November 20, 2025. Provides the detailed account of the Heritage staff meeting, its generational divisions and Fuentes’s reaction to the controversy.
4. • The Heritage Foundation, “Research Independence and Integrity.” Heritage’s own statement describing the rigor, depth, quality and independence on which it says its authority depends.
5. • Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism,’” The New York Times Magazine , January 21, 2024. The original source for Roberts’s description of Heritage’s mission and the broader ambition behind Project 2025.
6. • Jonathan J. Cooper and Sejal Govindarao, “Vance Refuses to Set Red Lines Over Bigotry as Conservatives Feud at Turning Point,” Associated Press, December 21, 2025. Covers Vance’s refusal to provide a list of people to denounce and Carlson’s remarks about control of the movement’s machinery after Trump.
7. • Andrew Hay, “US Heritage Foundation Think Tank Staff Quit Amid Antisemitism Controversy,” Reuters, December 22, 2025; and Advancing American Freedom, “Advancing American Freedom Hires Former Heritage Foundation Legal, Economic and Data Directors,” December 22, 2025. Documents the departure of Heritage’s legal, economic and data leaders and the financing assembled to move their operations to the Pence organization.
8. • “What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right,” The New York Times Magazine , July 2026. Describes the consolidation of Heritage under Roberts and quotes his response to the departure of lawyers and economists associated with the foundation’s earlier model.
9. • Alec Dent, “Heritage President Toasted Editor of Controversial Right-Wing Magazine,” The Washington Post , April 12, 2026. Reports Roberts’s praise for Paul Gottfried and Chronicles , his rejection of conservative gatekeeping and his promise to help the magazine expand its reach.