U.S. politics has its visible temples — the Capitol, the White House, Mount Rushmore, the stages where the verbal war is waged every night in prime time — and it also has its crypts, those places where the ideas that will later become laws, decrees, and slogans are brewed. The Heritage Foundation was born in 1973 as one of those respectable ideological springs: a think tank conservative and traditionalist that aimed to cohesively bind the right’s stances and ideas in the United States. And it operated as such for decades, like a laboratory where the Republican Party sought (and found) arguments, legitimacies, compasses. But something changed. Or perhaps the country itself changed too much, and Heritage decided to follow it toward its more opaque side.
Because, today, that foundation is no longer (nor does it represent) the traditional conservatism that spoke of free markets and traditional families. Now it is something else: a machine for indoctrination of the most radical Trumpism, a center for ideological training that has understood that power is not only fought at the ballot box, but in the way that those who will later occupy state offices think. For, under Kevin Roberts’s leadership, the institution has become something more than a foundation, a kind of narrative barracks: there the tone of the culture war is designed, the justification for the concentration of presidential power is determined, and above all, how the bureaucracy that once sustained institutional balance should be dismantled, as The New York Times Magazine explains in the article “What the Crack-up of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right”.
Set up in this way, Heritage not only accompanies Trump: it precedes him, shapes him and also translates him. In its halls the manuals of the new conservative order are drafted, the figures who could occupy federal agencies are selected, the reforms rehearsed to reduce the state’s autonomy to hand power to the president are tested. More concretely, the famous Project 2025 (which is not a law nor an official proposal, but a manual for remaking the state; the article in The New York Times Magazine defines it as the backbone of Trumpism 2.0) is not a technical document; it more closely resembles a catechism. And, like any doctrine, this one seeks believers. The foundation has become a school for cadres for a Trumpism that no longer has time to improvise; it serves a movement that learned that institutional revolution requires architects and ideologists, not merely agitators.
“The foundation has become a school of cadres for a Trumpism that no longer has time to improvise”
Yet this phenomenon, this transformation, comes with a price. The Republican Party, which for decades coexisted with Heritage, as one coexists with a respectable old professor, now regards that organization with suspicion. It turns out that traditional conservatives — those who still believe in the separation of powers and the constitutional compact — now see the foundation as a threat: they view it as an attempt to turn the party into an instrument of a single voice, that of Donald Trump. At the same time, other voices within the party celebrate the shift: they believe the party’s future should unapologetically aim toward total cultural warfare, they think half measures have no place in current political projects and, in short, embrace radicalism as a method rather than a reaction.
Heritage, Voices and Faces of a Silent Player in the November Midterms
As the November midterm elections approach, tensions are at their peak in the states, as well as in local committees and in every petty internal debate. And the foundation is very much present in the political climate that is shaping the second Trump Administration.
Could Heritage push the party into an institutional abyss? Perhaps, according to the more traditionalists, but not for the new radical voices, such as Georgia’s former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has cited the foundation as a “guide to reconstruct” conservatism and has publicly defended Project 2025. She is undoubtedly one of the faces of the most extremist Trumpism. And in that dispute — the one between the conservatism that was and the Trumpism that aspires to be — much of the future of American politics is at stake.
Now, what role does this play in the midterms? In the run-up to the midterm elections scheduled for November 3, Heritage could be a silent but decisive actor. It does not run directly on the ballots, nor does it have a public face, but it does present itself in the ideas, in the ideologies of Republican candidates. In this game, the GOP faces its own mirror: decide whether it wants to remain a genuine party, an institution, or become the intellectual extension of a movement, of a political phenomenon that no longer settles for winning at the polls, but now seeks to rewrite and remake the State from its foundations.
“Heritage competes directly on the ballots, has no own face, but is present in the ideas, in the ideology of Republican candidates”
Taylor Greene enters the midterm cycle as she always has: screaming. She was one of the loudest voices of Trumpism in the House, turning each session into a stage for cultural warfare, even though she has since stepped away from the New Yorker. The piece in The New York Times Magazine cites her as an example of how the foundation ceased to be a think tank and became a manual of combat. Her speech promises not policies, but vengeance.
Also present is Matt Gaetz, the Florida ex-congressman. A crafty, young, and media-savvy figure who knows how to turn conflicts into spectacle (something highly valued—and electorally profitable—in American politics). He has defended Project 2025 and Heritage, as Greene has, as a roadmap to remake the state. Gaetz does not speak of governing: he speaks of “reclaiming the country,” of “draining Washington,” exactly with the same tone and the same political script as the president.
Then there is Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman from New York. She is another creature: the elegant radicalization. About a decade ago, she was a moderate Republican, a young technocrat who spoke of public policy. Today she is one of Trump’s principal allies in Congress and a vocal defender of Heritage. Perhaps she wasn’t born Trumpist, but she has learned to be one.
Lastly, Byron Donalds, the Republican congressman from Florida. He is one of the promises of Trumpism’s Black wing, a figure on the far-right that shows that conservatism is not only white and rural. For him, or rather for his political script, Heritage serves as a legitimizing element for the “necessity” to “reform” (control) the federal agencies. He does not simply repeat slogans; he turns them into a personal ascent story, the tale of the man who came to Washington to bring down Washington.
In this way we see that the intellectual, discursive, and cultural war that unfolds in the voices of the candidates is also measured, shaped, born in the hidden bastions of power. This foundation is key to understanding the modus operandi of a party that, just like the Democratic Party, has begun to display its deepest fissures in this, the second Trump term. It is thus evident that the American political map, ahead of the midterms, is not merely bipartisan, but that within the institutions there are factions signaling winds of change. Winds, by the way, radical and unprecedented in the contemporary history of the United States.
