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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and thanks to Kousha and Matt for filling in in recent days. This is my first show since Tim Walz was chosen to be Vice President Harris's running mate. I want to start by playing an excerpt from a speech of his as governor of Minnesota that someone sent me that is a little different from the straight-up political analysis that's been going around. I had the time in the last few days to listen to some extended clips.

We always have the luxury of time on this show compared to the newscasts, so I want to play about a three-minute clip. The context is that as governor of Minnesota, he's giving a speech to something called the 2024 Esri User Conference. Now, Esri is a company that makes what they call geographic information system or GIS software. Remember those initials, GIS, because they come up in the clip. The company says GIS promotes problem-solving from a geographic approach.

Remember, Tim Walz was a high-school geography teacher for a long time before going into politics. At this conference earlier this year before the Biden debate changed the election year, before Walz was being considered to run for vice president, therefore, he gave this talk. He described working on a farm early in his life where there wasn't much to do during his breaks, but there was a pile of old National Geographic magazines that wound up sparking his interest in the people and places of the outside world. He went to school for geography to become a geography teacher.

We pick this up as he tells a story of being a geography teacher in 1993 using the GIS software for a class project. On what? On predicting where the next genocide might take place in the world. Now, as background, he describes getting interested in the subject of genocide, or more interested in it, when he was invited to be a teacher representative from Minnesota to an important conference at an important moment. This speech excerpt runs a little under three minutes. Again, you'll hear him refer to that political geography software known as GIS.

Governor Tim Walz: I got a chance to be a Balfour fellow to the not-yet-opened US Holocaust Museum. Abysmal state of Holocaust education and genocide studies had that Holocaust museum pick a teacher from each state. I was lucky enough. I think geographic, affirmative action. Nobody else from Nebraska applied and I got it, so they sent me there. Now, I had two things. I had what I considered a tool after I learned the GIS.

I said to my colleagues, "This is going to change the way we teach and change the world." 25 years after Jack figured that out, that it was going to, I at least figured that out. I said, "I think it could be applied in ways we hadn't been thinking about." I took that GIS, taught it to my students. They taught me in a lot of cases and used the work we had done around Holocaust education.

Look, my students could tell you when the Holocaust happened. For them, it was a historical anomaly in time. They could write it off to monstrous people. That was about where it went. The idea that you were reactive to every situation and that we could not be proactive as a people to address really difficult issues like the killing of thousands or millions of fellow citizens or climate change or anything else.

Those students got to work and they started layering GIS. They started looking at food insecurity, potential drought, just like the UN was doing around Famine Early Warning. Then they started laying over colonialism and they started overlaying all these things. The capstone project, this is 1993 for my seniors, was to come up and publish looking at a global world map with all the layers they put in GIS. Where do you think the next genocide is going to be? They came up with Rwanda.

12 months later, the world witnessed the horrific genocide in Rwanda. Very traumatic for those kids. I will say, though, many work for NGOs now. Many work globally on trying to make differences. Many join different organizations that many of you are a part of to be part of that. It was profound, the impact that you could make. Many of them became cynical about the ability. Why didn't anybody listen? How could a bunch of students in Western Nebraska and Alliance use a computer program and some past historical knowledge to come up with this? Why was nobody doing anything about that?

Well, a few months after that, I got a package in the mail. It was a book and it came from the author, Frank McCourt of Angela's Ashes fame. It was Frank McCourt's book that he wrote about teaching public school in New York City called Teacher Man. Inside that was an inscription that said, "You, Mr. Walz, our teacher man, Frank McCourt." It was one of my proudest moments.

Brian Lehrer: Governor Tim Walz speaking earlier this year to the Esri Users Conference. Again, Esri makes the GIS geography-based problem-solving software he referred to in the excerpt. Again, I played that as a little deeper background into the kind of thinker Tim Walz is. Something a little outside the head-on political campaign content we're mostly hearing.

Then there's the other vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, who made the Sunday morning talk show rounds yesterday discussing some of his policy ideas or, in one notable case, something he seems to have promoted as a policy idea in the past that he is now trying to say was not one. This is why it's newsworthy. It's in keeping with his "childless cat lady" slur about Democratic politicians who don't have kids.

He gave a speech in 2021 to a group called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute promoting the idea that in elections, parents' votes should count more than the votes of adults without kids, that parents' votes should count more than the votes of adults without kids. He framed it as a response to proposals by some Democrats that the voting age be lowered in some cases from 18 years of age to 16-year-olds, giving 16-year-olds the vote. JD Vance said no to that, but he said, "Let's give their parents more than the usual "one person, one vote." Here's a 30-second excerpt from that speech.

JD Vance: Let's give votes to all children in this country, but let's give control over those votes to the parents of those children.

[applause]

JD Vance: When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don't have kids. Let's face the consequences and the reality. If you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that was pretty direct. Apparently, that's not good politics for right now because here's an exchange about that clip on ABC this week yesterday with the host Jonathan Karl and JD Vance. Jonathan Karl speaks first.

Jonathan Karl: You said, "When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in a democratic republic than the people who don't have kids." You are directly saying that people with kids should have more of a voice in our democracy. Thought experiment or not about how that is done, but that is the principle. I could read on, but you are expressing a principle here.

JD Vance: Again, John, it's a thought experiment. I've been a senator for two years. Have I proposed any legislation to that effect? Of course not. Sometimes people make remarks in response to something that somebody else has said. If it was a policy proposal, I would have made the policy proposal in my two years in the United States Senate.

Brian Lehrer: JD Vance on ABC yesterday walking away from the idea he proposed in that 2021 speech clip. Why do we play this? Because this seems to be part of a pattern with Vance right now, having to walk away from or soften things he has said or written that might be taken as too extreme for this campaign. Another big example right now that you may not have heard about is that as Donald Trump tries to distance himself from the Project 2025 conservative policy blueprint that was written to influence him, JD Vance, we now learn, wrote the foreword to a new book written by the man considered the architect of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts of The Heritage Foundation.

Trump's vice presidential pick and Project 2025 mastermind Kevin Roberts are very much linked. We'll talk about some of the particular content. Apparently, now, the book's release date has been postponed and the title of the book has been softened. We'll tell you the specific. Some of the language in it also softened to be less, well, violent. This comes to us from Alex Shephard, senior editor of The New Republic magazine, who got hold of a copy of the book, including Vance's foreword before they could pull it back. Alex Shephard from The New Republic joins us now. Alex, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Alex Shephard: It's great to be with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You published Vance's foreword under the headline, Read JD Vance's Violent Foreword to Project 2025 Leader's New Book. Why did you include the word "violent"?

Alex Shephard: Well, there's a lot of rhetoric in this that is pretty familiar if you've been following JD Vance since his political career began a few years ago. The book itself, which I think Vance is largely, wholeheartedly endorsing in his foreword, is about using or harnessing the power of the federal government to reclaim the country. In the book as well, there are a lot of metaphors of taking up arms as second American Revolution of a great fire, a controlled fire, in Roberts' words, that will envelop America and replace it with something better. Vance, in his foreword to it, endorses this. He says, "Essentially, it's time to hear the call of the bugle and pick up your musket and get in line."

Brian Lehrer: He wrote those words, "Pick up your musket," right?

Alex Shephard: He did. That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: Remind people, who may not be obsessed with learning about Project 2025, a little more about who Kevin Roberts is and what his relationship to Project 2025 is.

Alex Shephard: I don't know why anyone wouldn't want to read a 900-page set of conservative policy proposals. Kevin Roberts, he's been the president of The Heritage Foundation, the furthest right of the mainstream Republican think tanks since 2021. He came there from running a small Catholic college in Wyoming. The Heritage Foundation has supplied these kinds of blueprints for generations now.

They probably most famously cemented their role as an influential think tank by creating the policy blueprint that Ronald Reagan would use to deregulate large swaths of American business life in the early part of his administration in the '80s. Like many right-wing and conservative groups, in 2016, they were caught a bit flat-footed by Trump's rise. They had initially discounted him. By the time it became clear that he was going to be the new power broker in Republican politics, they were quite late to the party.

Project 2025 is the culmination of a year-long effort for them to worm their way back in and they've done it really successfully. What they do here over the course of 900 pages is create, essentially, a big blueprint to remake the federal government. This is not the small government of Ronald Reagan. This is harnessing the power of big government to fulfill Republican aims. There are a few ways that they do that.

The biggest handful are one that they would essentially reclassify a huge swath of the federal workforce to replace career public servants with party-appointed loyalists. They would essentially use a variety of aims to ban abortion nationwide. They would abolish several departments, including the Department of Education. I think that this is partly an effort to take the kinds of vague things and approach to politics that Donald Trump has levied over the last eight years and translate them into policy.

Initially, at least, I think Donald Trump welcomed this in part because it showed just how dominant a force he was in Republican politics. Even The Heritage Foundation was now bending to his will. Over the last six weeks or so, two months really, this has become arguably-- until the appointment of JD Vance, this was his biggest weakness as a presidential candidate because voters really don't like a lot of this stuff. What you're seeing now over the last month or so has been a really desperate effort to cut all ties with both Project 2025 and The Heritage Foundation as well.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Before we even talk more about what's in Kevin Roberts' book or JD Vance's foreword to Kevin Roberts' book on this issue that you're raising of Trump's relationship to Project 25 and that blueprint for remaking the federal government and really the country in its image that Trump is trying to distance himself from it, but here's an excerpt that you picked up on or just a reference really from Vance's foreword to the book by Kevin Roberts.

He writes that The Heritage Foundation, again, which Roberts runs and which produced Project 2025, is now, "the de facto institutional home of Trumpism." JD Vance wrote that The Heritage Foundation, run by Kevin Roberts, is the de facto institutional home of Trumpism. I guess that would be pretty direct evidence of Trump's connection to Project 2025 as written in print by Trump's own running mate, huh?

Alex Shephard: Yes, it's exactly right. They were very quick and successful. I did reporting back in 2017 that I think I ran a headline back then that said something like how The Heritage Foundation is running the Trump government or something like that. What we saw, though, is that when Trump won, he didn't think he was going to win, right? Most people in the Republican Party and institutional conservative politics weren't ready for it. That government, when it came into office in 2017, had to be staffed up aggressively. Not only that, Trumpism itself doesn't really exist. There are a few vague pillars, right? There's-

Brian Lehrer: -mass deportation?

Alex Shephard: Mass deportation being one, yes, that you would remove the United States from all of its major alliances and probably ally itself with various authoritarian countries. With that, you would also have tariffs, right? Those are pretty big and disturbing pillars. Beyond that, he wasn't really interested in running the government as we quickly learned, at least large areas of it, things like education policy. That's where The Heritage Foundation came in.

If you remember the types of figures who were hanging around the early days of that administration, people like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, these are longstanding members of the Republican elite. I think what you're seeing with Project 2025 is an attempt by The Heritage Foundation that was welcomed by Trump to come up with what an actual Trumpist government looks like, one that is actually harnessing the power of the federal government to go to war against the liberal elites, liberal society that it so despises.

Trump's success as a political figure has largely been due to his vagueness. He doesn't do a lot of policy goals. Whenever the policy comes out, people recoil. Because as you mentioned with the mass deportations, it's often despotic and horrifying. I think that one of the reasons why Project 2025 has become such a debacle is just that it lays all this stuff out on a minute level. This is what a second Trump administration would look like. Even though they've actively worked to suppress this book and to cut their ties with Project 2025, there's still no sense of what that-- the Trump administration hasn't put out its own blueprint. It hasn't put out its own blueprint because this is still the blueprint.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to get back to how the book is being suppressed and how even the subtitle was changed apparently to make it more acceptable during the election campaign. Since mass deportation has come up and people recoiling from it and Trump either needing to double down on positions that a lot of people find extreme or try to walk away from it, here's JD Vance trying to walk that line again on ABC this week with Jonathan Karl yesterday when he was asked if he supports Trump's goal of deporting 18 million immigrants.

JD Vance: You start with what's achievable. You do that and then you go on to what's achievable from there. I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and, frankly, if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem. Look, President Trump is absolutely right. You cannot have a border unless you're willing to deport some people. I think it's interesting that people focus on, "Well, how do you deport 18 million people?" Let's start with one million. That's where Kamala Harris has failed and then we can go from there.

Brian Lehrer: Not how do you deport 18 million people, let's start with one million. To my ear, Alex, tell me how you heard it. It's another example of trying to embrace the radical while walking away from it. If Trump is talking about deporting 18 million people and Vance says, "Oh, well, let's start with only one million people," then it sounds like, "Oh, that's not so much," or it's intended to. If they started from, "We're going to deport a million people," then it would sound like a radical big deal.

Alex Shephard: Yes, I think that that's right, although what also strikes me is just how difficult it is to make any of these policies seem mainstream. When you dig into the details of how they plan on doing this, setting aside the horrific moral questions of who these people actually would be because they wouldn't just be MS-13 members or whatever, there's also this idea that it would involve deploying the military in many cases, or National Guard members. I'm sure we'll talk about Tim Walz's service later. Those are the kinds of questions that they're evading here.

I think that that's largely the kind of mess that they're in at the moment. They have set out or Donald Trump has set out a series of radical signposts for guiding the way that a second administration would work, but any attempt to fill those in only makes them seem crazier and more extreme. I think that they recognize this, particularly after Joe Biden announced that he wasn't going to seek a second term and, in fact, that any effort to clarify what precisely the often confusing or at least not precisely worded things that Donald Trump says on the campaign trail creates huge problems for them.

They're trying to soften them whenever possible, but there is no other way to get around this, right? This is deploying the American military to deport huge numbers of people. I think that you see this again and again, both in the book and in Project 2025, is that these are precise policy goals. They're trying to figure out ways to do them. Trump himself may not talk about the specifics, but there are specifics here.

I think that Vance's ties to these groups only makes the effort to clean this up more difficult. I think that's especially true because Donald Trump has been way less active as a campaigner this cycle than he was certainly in 2016, but even in 2020 as well. He's now the point person here, but he has far more ties to extreme organizations like The Heritage Foundation than Donald Trump does.

Brian Lehrer: One other thing that struck me in that clip and we didn't play Jonathan Karl's question, which was something to the effect of, "Well, what are you going to do? Send the military door to door, knocking on people's door?" JD Vance gave the answer that we just played, which sounded relatively normal in terms of the history of American immigration enforcement in recent times. He said, "First, we're going to deport violent criminals and we're going to make it hard for employers to hire people who are here illegally." Well, that was Obama's policy, right?

Didn't he get tagged by immigration advocates, "the deporter-in-chief," because they were being aggressive about deporting people who had criminal convictions? Even in sanctuary cities like New York, if you're convicted of most violent crimes, they will not protect you from immigration officials and deportation proceedings. He wasn't willing to say on television, I guess, because he thought it would sound too radical. Yet, another example of JD Vance walking something back that he's been associated with. That's the pattern that we're reporting on here, something that was different from what's been said by him or Donald Trump in the past.

Alex Shephard: Yes, and I think that gets to another issue as well, which is that it doesn't address, of course, that Joe Biden is deporting people at roughly the same rate that Donald Trump was. Joe Biden just signed what is probably the most conservative border bill in half a century or more. I think that there's a question of what actually differentiates the Republican immigration policy of militarized border, or at least a closed border, to the one that's being implemented by Biden.

You also have footage of Kamala Harris as vice president at the border literally saying, "Do not come." I think that that gets to another issue here, which is that so much of the policy that Vance talks about and that Roberts talks about as well is built on this kind of fantasy, right? The fantasy is of a liberal society. They call it the uniparty. It's the Democratic Party and centrist, I guess, or moderate Republicans, whoever those are working together to open the borders, to flood the country with illegal immigrants, that they're forcing young women to go on birth control so they don't have children.

That's, I think, where some of this gets tied together as well, which is some of the other stuff that Vance has walked back involves his numerous pronatalist comments or his policy goals of growing the American family, I guess you would say it, or incentivizing people to have more children. These things are all tied together because Kevin Roberts and JD Vance know that if they actually enact their immigration policies, they would destroy the American economy.

You can't just lose 10 million people overnight. They're trying to come up with this fantasy of replacing them by essentially forcing people to have more children and to make up for the difference here. For one thing, you're deporting people over the course of four years. You're certainly not going to replace a workforce in that time. I think that the bigger conclusion to draw from that is just the extent to which this is based on this fever-swamp fantasy of what life in America actually looks like.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some reactions to these Tim Walz or JD Vance speech clips that we played near the top of the segment. I realized some of you weren't in yet. That was 25 minutes ago. I wanted to get through this much material at the beginning of the segment to play those clips, to hear Walz riffing on how he uses data. We're going to play another one from the same speech tomorrow on how he uses data to establish climate policy as governor of Minnesota.

That'll be part of our Climate Story of the Week, which we do on Tuesdays on the show. Your reactions to these Tim Walz or JD Vance past speech clips as you're getting to know them as vice presidential nominees or other Monday morning politics for our guest, Alec Shephard from The New Republic, who got to see Vance's foreword to the book by the Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts before the publisher pulled it back. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Alex, here's a text that's come in that's an interesting question. The way the listener puts it is, "Did The Heritage Foundation dictate Vance as Trump's running mate?" I would reframe that a little bit because I'm sure they didn't have the power to dictate, but do you have any reporting that suggests The Heritage Foundation promoted Vance as Trump's potential running mate?

Alex Shephard: I don't think that we could accurately say that The Heritage Foundation played an important role there, but I do think that there is a different way of looking at this that makes its selection more interesting to me, which is to go back to the point that we were talking about earlier, about the fact that when Trump took over the Republican Party essentially in 2016, there were no beachheads. He didn't have any institutional allies at first.

I think what you've seen over the last eight years has been this slow but extremely effective takeover of institutions. He's used the term "purge" repeatedly. He wants to remove anyone who is deemed disloyal. Even the governor of Georgia, who he has insulted repeatedly. The governor has said that he's going to vote for him in the fall. He didn't try to overturn the election, so he's got to go too. That's been an issue here.

I think one of the things that Trump came up against as he was selecting his vice president was that he wanted someone that was proof that he had taken over the party the last time he selected Mike Pence. That was a kind of compromise move. It was meant to reassure evangelicals and mainline conservatives that he wasn't ultimately going to be that different. Vance, as opposed to someone like Doug Burgum or more notably someone like Marco Rubio, although he was a Trump critic, he has been one of his most dogmatic and slavish loyalists over the last few years. He's young too.

I think that the selection of Vance wasn't necessarily a thank you to The Heritage Foundation so much as a reminder to Republican institutions that this is his party now. It was almost meant as a flex that he didn't have to listen to anybody else because all of the institutions were built around him now. Even The Heritage Foundation, the group that was the architect of the success of mainstream conservatism from 1980 onward, that's now a Trumpist organization.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Lisa in Flushing on the Vance speech clip from 2021 that we played, suggesting the idea of giving parents more votes than adults without kids. Lisa in Flushing, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Lisa: Okay. Yes, hi. Thank you, Brian. Okay, so what I want to say is this guy, Vance, he has a lot of chutzpah because I believe 25% of the population is single. As singles, we pay more in taxes, far more. We pay for the schools. We pay, pay, pay. That is my point. We are paying. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. One apparently childless listener who, not surprisingly, takes offense at that particular idea, floated as at least a thought experiment, maybe a policy proposal by JD Vance. Adam in Brooklyn wants to respond to the mass deportation suggested by Trump and Vance, including in that Vance clip from yesterday. Adam, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Adam: Hi. I'm wondering if the guest has any information about the selection process for who gets deported because I am old enough to remember the false positives in the voter purge in Florida during the 2000 election and how the names didn't match and a lot of people who were registered voters got purged. I could think of the same thing happening where if there is some sort of tech bro algorithm used to find any supposedly undocumented immigrants, real citizens could get swept up in this as well if their names or addresses kind of match to people who they think are undocumented. We could have a lot of false positives. I'm wondering if there's been any research or speculation into that.

Brian Lehrer: Are you on that part of the story, Alex?

Alex Shephard: Yes, some. I think the issue with this is that the specifics are only slightly fleshed out here. Immigration is not one of the big subjects in the Roberts book. It is in The Heritage Foundation document. I think that part of the problem here is that because it's built on this elaborate fantasy, which is essentially that every single undocumented immigrant in this country is a violent criminal essentially and that deporting them immediately is a must, but how they would actually determine this is not clear.

Again, the actual means of doing it, I think, largely involved literally building concentration camps or large-scale camps to displace people. It's not clear where those would be or what labor would be used to produce it. There's been a lot of talk about, "You'd be shrinking the American footprint overseas as part of the larger Donald Trump project." Soldiers would be redeployed to those kinds of places.

I think, in general, to the listener's point, given the lack of clarity about the policy here, but also, I think, the general lack of confidence that we saw displayed in the Trump administration before, it would be highly likely that any large-scale deportation thing, whether it's the 10 million to 18 million number that's been thrown around by some or even the one million number that was thrown around by Vance, is a compromise that both would probably swallow up. Large groups of people either shouldn't be deported or even the people that might be cheering on these kinds of proposals, I think, would recoil at seeing deported.

Brian Lehrer: I'll give you two stories that back up that idea that it would be, unfortunately, too easy, AI or not. Maybe AI would help, I don't know, or maybe it would sweep up the wrong people because AI hallucinates sometimes, to use the software jargon. There was a large deportation in the Eisenhower administration that we did a history segment on recently that was supposed to be of people who were here illegally.

They did realize later and acknowledge that they deported a fair number of actual US citizens, never mind people who had legal residency status as immigrants. Actual US citizens got kicked out of the country before they could figure that out, or maybe they did it on purpose, but let's assume it was a mistake before they could figure it out. Also, on a smaller scale, I was recently helping somebody through a hospital stay.

I noticed that the person kept being asked by the doctor, each new doctor or nurse, who would see them, "What's your name? What's your date of birth?" and a little other identifying information. The question came up, "Why does everybody keep asking my name and date of birth? You know who I am by now." The answer was, "You'd be surprised how many people come in with the same name. We don't want to mix people up." You can imagine where that goes. "We took out the wrong person's gallbladder," or whatever it is. Imagine how easy that would be to do in the scenario of mass deportation, right?

Alex Shephard: Yes, I think especially too because you have to remember that this would also be occurring in a climate in which law enforcement at every level, but maybe particularly immigration law enforcement, would be given mass impunity. This is also a core tenet of Trumpism. A big part of Project 2025 is to remove the "shackles" that have been put on law enforcement, particularly after the unrest that we saw in the summer of 2020.

I think that the idea that this would magically work perfectly, it's just not supported by any historical evidence. It's not supported by any evidence from, more or less, anything that the Trump administration did between 2017 and 2021. In general, I think it's part of this larger idea, which is that when Trump was running the government the last time, he had to deal with the deep state.

There were bad actors in the government who were out to undermine him at every turn. At this time, the goal is to not do that. It's to be completely unfettered and to be surrounded by loyalists on every level. Those loyalists, to your listener's point, will also be empowered. When they are empowered, they will almost certainly go much further than even Trump is suggesting they will.

Brian Lehrer: We're almost out of time with Alex Shephard, senior editor at The New Republic. We've gone down so many spurs, Alex, that I lost the thread a little bit of your article about this book that was written by the architect of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, and JD Vance's foreword to it. The news that you reported was that the publisher, HarperCollins' Broadside, has delayed the book's release date from its original schedule apparently because of the campaign. What's the story there?

Alex Shephard: Yes, so the story here is essentially that in mid-July-- this book was originally scheduled to come out in September. It is written. I have a copy of it because I had downloaded a copy of it from NetGalley, which gives early copies of books to reviewers and journalists. Before Vance's selection and Vance gets selected, Joe Biden announces he's not running. All of a sudden, Project 2025 is this huge liability.

It probably was going to be a liability even if Biden was still in the race, but it's a huge liability now that this is a tight race. All of a sudden, lots of people are rightfully focusing on Vance's ties to Roberts and the fact that he literally wrote the foreword to this book. The Trump campaign freaks out. They are trying at every avenue. There's a period at the end of last month that was like the sequence in The Godfather when Michael Corleone is getting rid of all his loose ends. The Trump campaign went and they cut all ties with Project 2025.

Trump falsely claimed he never met Roberts. They made essentially Paul Dans, the actual architect of Heritage, step down. Kevin Roberts is ostensibly in charge of it. Project 2025, as it existed before the Republican convention, is dead. This book was the last loose end. It was supposed to come out in September. My understanding is that the campaign saw it as an enormous distraction. Again, it also may be the clearest evidence of a deep personal connection between one member of the ticket and this plan. There's a lot of pressure to move until after the election.

That was happening while we published the book or we published the foreword to the book. A few days after we published it, HarperCollins announced that they were pushing it back. Now, the ostensible reason there is that Robert said that the focus on this book would be a distraction and that he wanted to just devote all of his energy to re-electing Donald Trump. The demands of the campaign trail mean that he can't adequately promote the book. That, I don't think, is very credible. I don't think, frankly, we're going to see Roberts on the campaign trail very much either.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I was just going to say, even the idea out of Robert's own mouth that he's delaying publication of the book because he wants to devote all his energies to helping Trump get re-elected at the same time that Trump is trying to distance himself from Kevin Roberts' Project 2025. What?

Alex Shephard: Yes, it doesn't make any sense. The real reason is or is very clearly, I would say, and that my reporting indicates, is just that the book became a hot potato for the campaign. Roberts really didn't want to or couldn't promote it adequately because he would just be getting questions about this all the time. It would be a distraction. It's been moved away.

I think that's a huge problem in part because the book itself-- Project 2025 is not mentioned in the book, but it is tied very closely to it because it's a distillation of Roberts's own worldview. It's separated into a number of policy sections on issues like China and, particularly, the American family. It helps understand his thinking. He will be one of the most powerful and influential people in this administration.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, if Trump is elected.

Alex Shephard: Yes. [chuckles] We have now this bizarre situation in which the campaign is denying any connection to this and it's all been buried, and yet its influence will be very real if Trump is--

Brian Lehrer: Just one last thing about the book, apparently, and this is even more relevant after the assassination attempt on Trump and people talking about violent rhetoric, an apparently violent subtitle to the book is now being changed. Can you tell our listeners what that was and what that will now be?

Alex Shephard: Yes, so the book was originally announced with the subtitle, Burning Down Washington to Save America. That rhetoric was all over the book. It was all over the material surrounding the book, the description of it, the idea that to remake Washington, it has to be destroyed. Obviously, that is a reference to the destruction of Washington, DC, in 1812. It's also this idea that they're going to destroy the existing institutions and replace them.

Now, the book has a new subtitle. This, I think, happened as an attempt to placate everybody as pressure to pull up was growing. Now, the book is called Taking Back Washington to Save America. Now, that, I think, is notable for one reason, which is just that that's a kind of ordinary policy book. There are hundreds of these books that are published every year. That's not what this book is. This book is not the standard election yearbook. It is a new book about this "revolution" that figures like Roberts, Trump, and Vance all think that they're leading.

Brian Lehrer: Burning down Washington to save America or whatever it's called now, the book obtained before the publisher pulled it back, including the foreword by JD Vance that referred to getting out your muskets. Senior editor of The New Republic magazine, Alex Shephard, got hold of a copy of the book, including Vance's foreword. His article in The New Republic was titled-- Sorry, I lost it. Here, I have it. The headline in The New Republic was titled, Read JD Vance's Violent Foreword to Project 2025 Leader's New Book. Thanks for walking through all this with us, Alex. I really appreciate it.

Alex Shephard: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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