Why Project 2025 Leader Suddenly Delayed His Book Release

One of the leaders of the conservative manifesto Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, is delaying a book he wrote until after the 2024 election.

“There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours—and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country,” Roberts told RealClearPolitics. “That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”

The book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, includes an introduction by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and was due to be published in September. The book will now come out on November 12, one week after Election Day.

Vance’s foreword to the book lauds Roberts for criticizing corporations and breaking with the Republican establishment, as well as his strong emphasis on family. Most notably, Vance endorses Roberts’s call for revolution:

As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.

It’s highly likely that Roberts is delaying his book due to the negative publicity that Project 2025 has brought to Republicans and the Trump campaign. It contains plans to dismantle abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, labor rights, and numerous other protections. Trump has tried and failed to distance himself from the project, belying his own past support for the manifesto and Vance’s extensive ties to it.

Trump’s frustration with being tied to Project 2025 has led to one of its leaders stepping down from his role, bad blood between Trump’s campaign staff and the project’s operatives, conflict within MAGA world over the former president’s disavowals, and now a delayed book. But the Heritage Foundation’s massive effort means the project won’t go away, no matter how much Trump wants, and if he’s elected, Project 2025’s architects will put its dangerous ideas into practice.

Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance appeared at a Kamala Harris rally in Phila—oh, it wasn’t a Harris rally? Then why on earth did he bring a massive sign that said “KAMALA”?

Donald Trump’s gaffe-prone running mate appeared at his own rally in Philadelphia Tuesday, where he stood in front of a sign that said, “KAMALA CHAOS”—only it didn’t quite read that way.

Vance had invited several people onstage with him to speak about the ways they’d been negatively affected by the Biden administration’s policies, specifically immigration. However, the small crowd that lurked behind Vance covered the word “CHAOS” on the low-hung banner. Vance appeared to stand in front of a giant sign that just read, “KAMALA.”

Across town, Harris and her newly announced running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz held a rally of their own. The campaign reported that 12,000 people had been in attendance, between the arena and the overflow section. Meanwhile, Vance’s rally drew a crowd of “more than 200 supporters” to a venue with a 1,300-person capacity, according to WHYY.

The ironic image quickly circulated online. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, posted the image on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday.

The account captioned the photograph, “Here’s why you should hire union stagehands and stage designers: (They did not).”

IATSE confirmed Wednesday to The New Republic that Vance’s rally was nonunion. As their post went viral, the union took the opportunity to further criticize Trump.

“In 2004, Trump crossed our picket line as workers on ‘The Apprentice’ spoke up to get paid fairly,” IATSE wrote in another post. “He is dangerously anti-worker and anti-union.”

This should sting extra hard for Vance, who was brought in to appeal to white, working-class voters specifically. Earlier Tuesday, several prominent unions and union leaders had expressed their support for Walz, including the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, and the United Automobile Workers.

Clearly, union support has tangible benefits. Harris’s rally, which was devoid of similar rigging errors, sported a large sign thanking “local union labor” for setting up the event.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s attempts to paint Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as a progressive bogeyman could morph into instant wins for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday night, McCarthy described Walz as an ardent leftist, claiming that the governor’s politics were akin to those of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

“This is the most extreme,” McCarthy said. “I served with Tim. We came into Congress together. He’s known for being the Bernie Sanders of Congress.”

Putting aside the fact that Sanders is literally “the Bernie Sanders of Congress,” that comparison could work wonders for Harris’s fresh campaign, which has energized voters across the political spectrum but has yet to show evidence of capturing the progressives.

Harris chose Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, but the selection is still too recent to indicate whether he has moved the needle on her campaign. Still, his addition has piqued the interest of young voters, who have warmly described the 60-year-old as having “peak Midwestern dad vibes.”

It’s been less than three weeks since she announced her bid for the White House, but Harris’s candidacy has already galvanized the electorate. She’s won the support of Black voters, white college-educated women, and independent women voters, all of whom have shown more than 20-point gains in their levels of support since Harris announced her candidacy.

Republicans have suggested that Walz’s involvement could help to rejigger how they approach chipping away at Harris’s momentum, which so far has amounted to elementary-level ad hominem attacks on Harris’s race and identity that have only angered conservative voters.

“This provides the much-needed reset,” Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy told NBC News on Tuesday.

“If this race does come down to policy, I think it should be a hands-down victory—not just for Trump but for candidates all the way down the ballot,” he continued—adding that the possibility is on the table only “if Republicans keep our eye on the ball.”

Unfortunately for Ramaswamy, Trump doesn’t seem all that interested in only discussing policy.

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance regularly texts infamous far-right troll Charles C. Johnson, a conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier.

The Washington Post reports that Vance received a text message through the encrypted messaging app Signal from Johnson shortly after being elected to the Senate in 2022, and corresponded with the blogger for 20 months, until just weeks before Donald Trump chose Vance as his running mate.

The texting relationship between Vance and Johnson does not reflect well on the Ohio senator. Vance asked Johnson’s opinion on everything from UFOs to aid to Ukraine to the Republican Party’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Vance even appeared to accept advice from Johnson, including a suggestion that the senator should work to restrict foreign ownership of housing.

Johnson has promoted doubts about the Holocaust, created and promoted fake news stories about various politicians, and associated with neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But in their correspondence, Vance didn’t appear to be worried about that, instead expressing concern that Johnson was collecting information about him.

“If you are who you say you are then don’t you have my phone tapped?” Vance wrote to Johnson last fall, possibly alluding to the fact that Johnson has served as a federal informant in the past.

Ever since Vance was named as Trump’s running mate, many of his unfavorable speeches and stances have come to light, from his views on people without children to his association with the conservative manifesto Project 2025. His polling numbers are underwater, and Republicans think Trump shouldn’t have picked him. These latest revelations aren’t likely to help Vance or the Trump ticket, especially since Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz already has a groundswell of support.

Donald Trump got in on the conservative meltdown over Kamala Harris’s decision to pick Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, claiming that she did so because Shapiro is Jewish.

Trump, who shamelessly cavorted with a neo-Nazi, called in to Fox & Friends Wednesday morning, where he claimed Harris’s decision was “very insulting to Jewish people.”

Trump was asked to respond to a Siena College poll that found Trump leading by 1 percent among likely New York Jewish voters, as well as a remark Tuesday from political strategist Van Jones, who claimed that antisemitism had been “marbled into” the Democratic Party through progressive support for Palestine against Israel’s catastrophic military campaign. Jones had questioned how much of Harris’s decision involved “caving in to some of these darker parts in the party.”

Trump responded by claiming that he was “very close” to winning New York, which was why he was surprised Harris had not opted for Shapiro. (It’s worth noting that the last time a Republican presidential candidate won New York state was 1984.)

“I think that any person who votes for a Democrat—or in this case, these people—but who votes for a Democrat should have their head examined,” Trump said, an old attack he’s used repeatedly over the last six months against any Jewish person who has refused to support his presidential bid.

“They are so bad, if you look, they are so bad to Jewish people. What they’ve done, and the way they talk, and their policy and everything else,” Trump said.

Trump claimed that Harris had not chosen Shapiro “because of the fact that he’s Jewish, and they think they’re going to offend somebody else.” He didn’t deign to say whom.

“And you wouldn’t feel very comfortable if you were in Israel right now with this team. This is the worst team ever assembled for a Jewish person or for Israel, either one. The worst team ever assembled. This is a team that will not be there,” he said.

Trump has continued to trot out the same tired lines about how Jewish people should vote in the presidential upcoming election. Trump has previously suggested that any Jewish person who did not vote for him “does not love Israel” and “should be spoken to.” He claimed in March that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

Trump and his fellow Republicans have been desperate to blame antisemitism for Harris’s apparent snub of Shapiro. But when Trump dined with Nick Fuentes, a noted antisemite, conservatives were eerily silent.