J.D. Vance in Serious Trouble After Damning Project 2025 Book Foreword

As Trump desperately tries to separate his campaign from Project 2025, users on X have noted one big problem: J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by the plan’s lead author, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

On the Amazon product page, the promotional material for the book, titled Dawn’s Early Light, highlights Roberts’s role in composing Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation proposal for a conservative overhaul of the federal government.

[The New Republic has obtained J.D. Vance’s full foreword for this book. Read it here.]

The product page also includes a favorable review from Vance. “Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” the review says. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

When the book first became available for preorder on June 19, Vance promoted it on X, writing, “I was thrilled to write the foreword for this incredible book, which contains a bold new vision for the future of conservatism in America.”

On the Amazon page for Dawn’s Early Light, the subtitle reads, “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” but an archived version of the page from June 19 indicates it was initially “Burning Down Washington to Save America.”

Inflammatory language in the blurb has also apparently been tamped down.

A sentence on the archived page that says the book “blazes a warpath for the American people to take back their country” now says it “blazes a promising path.” Another fiery sentence on the archived page read, “Just as a controlled burn preserves the longevity of a forest, conservatives need to burn down these institutions [the FBI, The New York Times, the Department of Education, etc.] if we’re to preserve the American Way of life.” It now says that those institutions “need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.”

These changes, while slight, perhaps indicate a hope to dispel the emerging public perception that Project 2025 would wreak havoc on the country. Trump, undoubtedly aware of the plan’s growing unpopularity, has claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025” and that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

But it will certainly be harder for the Republican ticket to distance itself from the Heritage Foundation manifesto come publication day in September.

Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro likened the mounting excitement around Vice President Kamala Harris to pop star Taylor Swift, but of course, he meant it as an insult.

In an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters Tuesday night, Shapiro took aim at Harris by comparing her to one of the most popular musicians in the world.

“I’ve never seen this much manufactured enthusiasm for anyone, outside of maybe Taylor Swift,” Shapiro said. The Daily Wire co-founder noted that Harris had few qualifications “other than intersectional magic,” a pretty blatantly sexist and racist comment from the noted sexist and racist.

Shapiro’s dig may come back to haunt him, as Harris has demonstrated one important similarity to Swift: her ability to get out the vote.

In the two days following Joe Biden’s endorsement of Harris, Vote.org saw an intense surge of 38,500 new voter sign-ups, according to Politico. Most of the people who reportedly registered were 34 and under.

In October, Swift posted on Instagram for National Voter Registration Day, inspiring more than 35,000 new voters to sign up, a 23 percent increase in new registrations compared to the same day the previous year. As a result, conservatives began to take aim at the pop star as some kind of political lightning rod.

Thus far, there is little to suggest that anything about the vice president’s meteoric rise in popularity was “manufactured” by establishment Democrats.

Harris’s campaign has raised a whopping $126 million since Sunday, with more than 1.4 million grassroots donors contributing, according to a memo from the vice president’s team Wednesday. Nearly 2,000 people had applied to work for the Harris campaign within the first 24 hours of her candidacy, while more than 100,000 signed up to volunteer since Sunday, the team reported.

Donald Trump repeatedly used the n-word in a racist tirade over some car damage, according to a forthcoming memoir from his nephew, Fred C. Trump III.

In All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, Trump III describes a moment in the early 1970s, when he was a preteen at his grandparents’ Queens house one afternoon and his uncle showed up. The Guardian obtained an early copy of the book, due to be released next week.

“Donald was pissed. Boy, was he pissed,” Trump III wrote. Trump showed his nephew his white Cadillac Eldorado convertible with a “giant gash, at least two feet long” in its canvas roof, and “another, shorter gash next to it.”

“‘N—s,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look what the n—s did,’” Trump III quoted his uncle as saying. He added that Trump hadn’t actually seen where the damage to his car came from, but jumped “straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront. Across the racial divide.”

Trump III wrote that Queens was “one of the most diverse places on the planet” but that Jamaica Estates, where the Trumps lived, was affluent and largely white, and prejudice was common.

In Jamaica Estates, “If something bad happened,” Trump III writes, “they were the ones who did it. Almost certainly, it was them.”

Point-blank, Trump III asked in the book, “So, was Donald a racist?”

While “people have been asking for decades,” Trump III wrote, he noted that his uncle used the racial slur back when, he said, “people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things,” adding, “Maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then.”

Trump has been accused of racism long before and since his entry into politics. In the 1970s, he and his father were sued by the federal government for discriminatory housing practices. When he was a casino owner, Black employees were ushered off the floors whenever Trump and his wife paid a visit. In the late 1980s, he sought the death penalty for the Central Park Five (who were found to be innocent), and as president he attacked NFL players kneeling in protest of racial inequality and refused to condemn white supremacists.

Recently, a producer on Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice, recounted a 2004 incident where Trump refused to hire Kwame Jackson, the Black finalist on the series’s first season, asking the show’s producers, “I mean, would America buy a n— winning?”

In the light of his uncle’s history, Trump III’s writings seem plausible. As Trump will likely face a Black woman in Vice President Kamala Harris, we will probably see racially questionable attacks from him and his campaign in the coming days. In fact, they’ve already started.

Elon Musk is denying reports that he plans to donate $45 million per month to support Trump’s candidacy, in more terrible news for the former president.

The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that Musk planned to make the staggering contributions to the pro-Trump political action committee America PAC. In an interview with right-wing influencer Jordan Peterson broadcast on X Tuesday, Musk told Peterson that the report “is simply not true. I’m not donating $45 million a month to Trump.

“Now, what I have done is I have created [the America PAC],” he continued. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that the nascent super PAC, meant to support Trump’s election bid, could be “an avenue for Mr. Musk and his $250 billion fortune to potentially play a significant role in the 2024 presidential race” and has already raked in millions from “a tight-knit network of wealthy tech entrepreneurs,” including those close to Musk.

Later Tuesday evening, Musk further clarified, “I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level,” without providing a specific figure.

Musk, who endorsed Trump following the assassination attempt against him this month, told Peterson he does not subscribe to the “cult of personality” around Trump, but expressed his opinion that “the country would be better off with a Republican administration” due to his concerns about Democratic “censorship” and “DEI.”

Someone ought to break the news to Trump, who earlier this month bragged that he had read Musk “gives me $45 million a month,” adding, “We have to make life good for our smart people.”

Donald Trump is seriously pissed that President Joe Biden plans to address the nation Wednesday night, the first time he has spoken publicly directly since isolating for Covid-19 last week, ending his reelection campaign, and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris over the weekend.

There’s obviously a lot to talk about—but Trump (predictably) wants to talk too, even if he doesn’t have anything new to say.

In response to Biden’s announcement that he would address the country at 8:00 p.m.* on Wednesday to discuss “what lies ahead, and how I will finish the job for the American people,” the Trump campaign’s general counsel David Warrington sent letters to ABC, NBC, and CBS demanding that the former president be granted equal airtime, according to The New York Times.

In the letter, Warrington wrote that because Biden will likely address his endorsement of Harris, it “appears that President Biden’s speech will not be a bona fide news event, but rather, a prime-time campaign commercial.”

Warrington cited the Federal Communications Commission’s “equal time” rule, arguing that Trump should be given equal time for a “campaign speech.”

Under rules installed in the 1970s, news stations are no longer required to give equal time to candidates for “bona fide news events,” such as presidential speeches or news conferences. When that rule was implemented, critics noted that it gave an incumbent president an inherent advantage when it came to news coverage in an election cycle. If they had a problem with that, one can scarcely imagine how disturbed they’d be by how powerful the American president has become.

None of the outlets Trump’s team reached out to had responded by Tuesday night, and it’s unclear if they will. Maybe some of Trump’s meandering 92-minute address at last week’s Republican National Convention can carry over somehow?

All of this goes to show just how scared Trump is of his new opponent. Harris’s apparent edge has sent the former president on several tantrums in just the few days since her candidacy was announced, and scrambling for a way to get out of the next presidential debate.

Warrington also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over Harris’s so-called “heist” of Biden’s campaign’s $91.5 million war chest. But legal experts argue that she’s within her rights to take over the money because, as Biden’s running mate, she was named as a recipient on the principal campaign committee that raised the money.

*This article originally misstated the time of Biden’s speech.