Good evening. The election may be over, but our coverage isn’t. So we’re slowing down. Just a little.
From here on out, we’re going to send On Politics three times a week, instead of daily. We’ll catch you up on what’s happening in Washington, and we’ll also be your guide to the way the political landscape — and the country itself — is changing. This is a moment of great uncertainty, and we’re going to make sense of it together.
Let’s kick things off with my colleague Charles Homans, who last night watched in real time as a Project 2025 leader’s brief exile seemed to come to an end. We’re also covering the shock in Washington over President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general. — Jess Bidgood
By Charles Homans
In the 31st-floor penthouse lounge of the Kimberly Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, as waiters refreshed cocktails and jazz piano wafted from the speakers, a hotel employee slid the glass roof closed against the chilly night air. It was official: Kevin Roberts was coming in from the cold.
For a period this summer, Roberts and the think tank he leads, the Heritage Foundation, had found themselves unexpectedly thrown out of the orbit of President-elect Donald Trump, whose last administration had been staffed heavily by Heritage. The source of the trouble was Project 2025, a policy agenda that a consortium of conservative organizations, led by Heritage under Roberts’s direction, had crafted early in the 2024 campaign cycle.
As Democrats laid into the policy agenda, turning it into one of their key lines of attack against Trump, the former president insisted he knew nothing about it, had “no idea” who was behind it and called Roberts’s work “ridiculous and abysmal.”
But last night, as roughly 80 people gathered for a party to celebrate the release of a new book by Roberts, one of the shortest and least convincing exiles in recent memory appeared to be very much over.
