Inside the lobby of the Kimberly Hotel there is a massive aquarium, and it glows a sickly blue. Whoever designed the tank had wanted it to look so much like an ocean they’d shot past the mark into eldritch territory. I was briefly transfixed, but I was on my way to the penthouse floor, some 30 stories up, where the man behind Project 2025 would be fêted a week after Donald Trump won reelection.
The occasion wasn’t a victory party, but rather a book launch for Dr. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. Roberts joined Heritage in 2021, as the conservative think tank waited out the Biden years and incubated what would become the infamous proposed blueprint for a second Trump administration. On Tuesday night, the crowd skewed young and white, dressed in business casual, and their mood was more relaxed than gleeful: A win for Trump is a win for Heritage, too. Still, the topic of Project 2025 remained so sensitive that Roberts and emcee Brian Kilmeade of Fox News spoke for 20 minutes without directly mentioning it once.
“Without any hubris on behalf of Heritage, we thought we have something to say about the American Dream,” Roberts told Kilmeade, adding that Americans “want to wake up in a normal country again.” A “uniparty” Establishment stands in the way, but it can be broken “by electing courageous men and women to office,” he said, before taking a detour to condemn China and its Communist government. “Of course we should impose tariffs on them,” he said. “Of course there will be economic repercussions on the United States, but a great leader or a great generation of leaders will be able to articulate to Americans that those trade-offs are worth it. Why? Because of self-governance.”
The interview didn’t go into much detail on Roberts’s book Dawn’s Early Light, but in it he obsesses over abortion, fertility, and contraception. In one passage, he attacks a Washington, D.C., park that is part playground, part dog park. The playground is “caged-in,” he claims, “so that the canine ‘progeny’ of childless ‘dog parents’ can run about,” which in his view “perfectly sums up the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.” J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to the book, and Roberts shares the future vice-president-elect’s fixation on childlessness.
“It’s true that contraceptives give families more control over when they have children,” he writes. “But the creators of the technologies wanted to go much further than controlling a natural process; they wanted everyone in our culture, regardless of their beliefs or choices about contraceptives, to believe that having kids is an optional individual choice instead of a social expectation or a transcendent gift.”
Roberts doesn’t call outright for restrictions on “chemical contraceptives,” as he terms them, but his view is clear enough. Of IVF, he writes that while it “seems to assist fertility,” it “has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.” He goes on to claim that “infertility specialists say that increased commercial emphasis on IVF and other invasive (and profitable) treatments is creating a generation of doctors who actually don’t know how to perform older, noninvasive, but quite successful methods of restoring fertility.”
Later in the book, Roberts calls for universal school choice, which is about as unpopular as the abortion restrictions he supports. Trump may have won, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Heritage has a mandate to do as it pleases; most Americans support the Roe v. Wade standard for abortion rights and don’t want vouchers for private schools, many of which are religious. (Roberts founded a Catholic school in Louisiana.) Nevertheless, attendees were hopeful when I talked to them.
“Honestly, the conservative movement has been in the wilderness since Reagan, and I think this is part of the first time we’re having real conversations about the direction of the movement and who’s included,” said one grad student who gave only his first name, Peter. “I think Trump has given us an opportunity to think about what we do going forward.”
I asked him what he’d like to see from Trump once he takes office next year. “I think there will be reforms to the bureaucracy,” he said. The president could take one of two routes, he speculated, by either “skimming the bureaucracy down and trying to fire more civil servants” or getting “more partisans in and try to remake the bureaucracy.” He added, “I’m just excited to see what wins the day.” Nobody had mentioned Project 2025 at the event, so I asked him about that, too. Liberal attacks didn’t hit because the link to Trump was just too tenuous, he thought. “They made it sound like a conspiracy theory. Very silly,” he said.
Another partygoer, Jackson Paul, said that while he appreciated Roberts’s talk, he wasn’t convinced about tariffs. “How do we have tariffs help strengthen Americans, help strengthen the American economy, help the American worker, help the American working families while still countering the influence of these nations?” he asked. His drinking companion, a woman who would give her name only as Kylie, chimed in to say the book would be her Christmas gift to herself. “I would like to get to know more about the author,” she added. “He mentioned he had a very similar upbringing compared to J.D. Vance.”
Bethlehem Hadgu, a violist and the founder of a conservative chamber-music ensemble, was clutching a free copy of the Roberts book. She said she had great ambitions for Trump’s next term and listed them all: “I would say his revival of the nuclear family; the whole transgender ideology, for that to be disbarred; to drain the swamp of the bureaucracy of the government; to get as many people as fired as possible” that “are reducing the power of the executive” branch. She said she thought Trump would lower grocery prices and inflation and make “America as independent as possible,” an echo of Roberts’s earlier comments about tariffs. She was even more animated when she talked about the organization she founded. “We have the best musicians,” she explained. “Our whole organization is founded on tradition, beauty, truth, and goodness. And so it’s like a community of like-minded people and musicians and philanthropists and patrons, edifying conservative values through concerts.”
With that, I noticed that Roberts had left, and there was no reason to linger. Before Roberts spoke, the party had been polite, almost nerdy, but as drunkenness set in, and it had become almost impossible to hear anyone over the din. The alcohol had unleashed some pent-up energy and, with it, the malevolent truth of the night. On my way out of the hotel, I had to pass the aquarium again, still lit in that blue. One fish broke away from the pack and sped up toward the surface and the air, but there was no ocean and no escape.
