Heritage Foundation

In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced. His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was. Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats.

It’s Thursday morning as I write. Has The Wall Street Journal weighed in with another attack on Kevin Roberts yet, the besieged president of the Heritage Foundation? No? Be patient. It’s early hours yet. Another fusillade is due any minute.  I have written about that tempest-in-a-teapot myself. I agree that Roberts’s brief video statement defending the Heritage Foundation’s friendship with Tucker Carlson was ill-advised. I say why in that column. I also think that his efforts at damage control have been ineffective. But given the incontinent fury of the response to that two-minute and thirty-nine-second video, I am not sure that anyone could have calmed the storm.

Under Kevin D. Roberts, the Heritage Foundation is unraveling the remarkable legacy Edwin Feulner built. Once known as “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement,” Heritage’s moral and philosophical clarity has yielded to confusion, populism and personality-driven politics. The damage to Heritage’s mission and credibility is becoming irreparable. Much of the recent outcry focuses on Roberts’s decision to maintain Heritage’s partnership with Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s now-infamous interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes.

Trees fall in forests, and forgotten statesmen make speeches. Last Saturday, Joe Biden gave his first post-presidential speech to something called National High School Model United Nations, which seems to be a conference for people who maybe don’t exist and nobody outside the room noticed. The event was, according to Philip Wegmann at RealClearPolitics, closed to the press, with no recording of Biden’s remarks made. It’s spooky. The 46th presidency only ended eight weeks ago and already Biden is a ghost. Donald Trump constantly evokes his name – the worst president ever, a catastrophe for this country etc. etc. – and yet the man himself has evanesced.

President Trump announced Tuesday that his administration is planning to unveil a program that lets foreigners acquire a path to citizenship for a one-time $5 million fee. Unlike the existing EB-5 visa program, which grants green cards to wealthy investors for about one-fifth of the cost, Trump’s “gold card” initiative aims to attract greater capital while using the revenue to help reduce national debt. “We’re going to be selling a gold card,” Trump said from the Oval Office during an Executive Order signing on price transparency in the hospital system.  “You have a green card. This is a gold card.

President-elect Donald Trump is assembling his presidential cabinet in record time, leaving those outside of his orbit scrambling to keep up with the abundance of names flooding their inboxes. In just the past few days, Trump announced Russ Vought will return to the helm of the Office of Management and Budget, president of the America First Policy Institute Brooke Rollins will serve as secretary of the Department of Agriculture, billionaire hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent will lead the Department of the Treasury — plus a smattering of other department heads and health-related appointees.Even if the rapid pace — particularly when compared to the 2016 transition — might be giving some whiplash, the American people are so far on board with the president-elect’s picks.

Vice President Kamala Harris will finally sit down with Fox News this evening after months of pundits justifiably criticizing her campaign for mostly avoiding challenging media. Chief political anchor Bret Baier will conduct the interview, which will air during his show in the 6 p.m. hour. It will be a thirty-minute live-to-tape sit-down and will run in its entirety with no edits and no commercial breaks. Based on recent appearances, this could end quite poorly for Kamala. The Democratic nominee struggled to justify the Biden-Harris immigration policy during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, and the network felt the need to edit out a word salad answer about her relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Last September I was sitting in the crowd at the annual National Conservatism Conference, lamenting the fact that my hotel room had no hot water, when Dr. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, took the stage at Miami’s JW Marriott for his plenary address. Nationalists and populists at the conference were suspicious of Dr. Roberts’s presence. The “New Right” had spent the past few years accusing the right-wing establishment, including the cache of center-right DC-based think tanks like Heritage, of selling out ordinary Americans for profit and influence.

It is an irony of history that the bronze Statue of Freedom which stands tall atop the US Capitol dome was commissioned by the man who would seek to break the nation apart a few years later. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war when the statue was ordered, clashed with Yankee sculptor Thomas Crawford over his original design, which included a liberty cap, the symbol of an emancipated slave, above the statue’s crown. The statue is adorned with a sword, a shield and a wreath of victory. It’s symbolic in other ways as well: struck hundreds of times by lightning, it conducts and dissipates that violent energy into the earth. Freedom makes an excellent lightning rod. Today, critiques of the statue and what it represents arise from different sources.