'No place for violent rhetoric': Ousted Project 2025 chief tells his former boss to 'tone it down'

16 October 2024

Earlier this year, Project 2025 director Paul Dans was forced out — after months of former President Donald Trump playing defense about the controversial far-right policy document. Now, Dans is speaking out against his former employer.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Dans is condemning Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who has led the organization since 2021, specifically over his increasingly hostile tone as the election approaches. It marks a visible rift in the far-right think tank, which is one of the most well-funded and influential conservative policy shops in Washington, D.C.

"If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well," Dans told the Post. "There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts."

Roberts made headlines earlier this year after an interview in which he bragged that he was at the vanguard of a "second American revolution." He then said that this revolution would be "bloodless, if the left allows it to be," suggesting that his side was not ruling out political violence as a means of achieving its ends. Dans told the paper that his former boss' caustic words were negatively impacting the stature of Heritage as a vaunted conservative institution.

"There’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august think tank,” Dans said. “And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”

According to a report by People magazine earlier this year, Project 2025 is a "far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president's authority over independent agencies." Democrats equated Trump's "Agenda 47" policy platform with Project 2025, and Trump's campaign was reportedly the driving force behind Dans being forced out in July.

“Project 2025 is radioactive to the Trump-Vance transition,” said billionaire Howard Lutnick, who is co-chair of Trump's transition team. “Zero. Total ban. Radioactive. Any of those words, feel free to pick them.”

After the former president publicly distanced himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail and called it "extreme," Dans told the Post that he wished Trump's team expressed their frustrations privately. But he noted that Roberts seemed to become even louder despite Trump's signals.

"We took the instruction, as we had before, to lay low,” Dans said. “But in the case of Kevin, he didn’t.”

Despite Trump's public shows of coldness to Project 2025, his administration was virtually tied at the hip with Heritage from the time he entered the White House in 2017. The group's website and fundraising documents have repeatedly boasted about their close ties to Trump, and noted that during his first year in office, he implemented roughly two-thirds of their policy recommendations. And Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) even wrote the foreword to Roberts' forthcoming book.

Click here to read the Post's report in full (subscription required).

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