‘Dawn’s Early Light’: Kevin Roberts’ vision for America is a dark rejection of pluralism
It is not often that a volume of policy recommendations makes national news. Yet this is what happened during the 2024 election cycle in the United States, when the innocuously named Project 2025, a set of ultra-right-wing proposals assembled by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank, and roughly a dozen like-minded groups, became the topic of conversation on the internet, and in barber shops, beauty salons, churches, synagogues and mosques across the land. The brainchild of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, Project 2025 outlines a series of measures that conservative groups felt the second Trump administration should implement to restructure the federal government and consolidate executive power.
Since the dossier’s release in 2022, Democrats have cited its key points to argue that a second Trump administration would be an unmitigated disaster for most Americans. In the face of backlash, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, distanced themselves from the manifesto on the campaign trail. Following Trump’s victory, several Project 2025 contributors are slated to join the Trump administration. Roberts crowed that Trump’s initial rejection of Project 2025 was within expectation.
“Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” (the original subtitle read “Burning Down”) was published just days after Trump’s reelection. It is Roberts’ first book and Vice President Vance wrote the foreword. In light of Trump’s victory, Roberts’ book could be read as both a valedictory statement and treatise describing the future that we may soon come to inhabit. In addition, since this book was authored by a self-styled intellectual leader of the ascendant MAGA movement, one would be justified in expecting a book that describes the philosophical underpinnings of Project 2025’s expansive rejection of the status quo.
