The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal published a ridiculous hit piece on Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts this week, claiming Heritage has been led astray by Roberts, who has supposedly “steered the venerable think tank away from some of its longtime conservative principles to court Donald Trump, only to be spurned by the temperamental former President he and his institution courted.”

The editors are referring to the Trump campaign’s recent move to distance itself from Heritage’s Project 2025, a hefty document outlining conservative policy recommendations for a potential incoming Republican administration (Heritage has published something like it every four years since 1981). Democrats and the media have been attacking — and brazenly lying about — Project 2025 lately in a desperate attempt to distract from the Biden-Harris administration’s massive policy failures. Unfortunately, the Trump campaign responded to these attacks not by calling out the lies but by disavowing Project 2025.

In fairness, Project 2025 was never formally connected to the Trump campaign. Roberts himself has said it’s meant to be “a stockpile of conservative policy recommendations from which our leaders can pick and choose,” and that of course there will be disagreement and debate, which is a healthy and normal part of the democratic process. 

For the WSJ editorial board, all of this is a cautionary tale about what happens to conservatives who abandon their principles to “court the political flavor of the day.” What an outrageous and lazy smear. Roberts hasn’t abandoned his conservative principles. On the contrary, he’s stuck to them amid attacks from all sides — and in the process helped save the Heritage Foundation from irrelevance.

When Roberts came in as president of the think tank in 2021, Heritage was directionless, leaderless, and losing influence. It had long been out of touch with the concerns and struggles of ordinary Americans, advocating a business-as-usual approach to policymaking at a time when it was clear the old GOP policy consensus had collapsed, and for good reason. 

Roberts’ new direction for Heritage had nothing to do with courting Trump and everything to do with ensuring the think tank advocated for policies that would serve the interests of the American people above all else. To be sure, it was a shift for Heritage, but a necessary one. Detractors like the WSJ editorial board try to dismiss that shift as populist pandering, but to do so they have to ignore just how badly Heritage had lost its way, along with the entire Republican establishment.

In 2016, Trump was instrumental in exposing the rot at the heart of the GOP, which during the Bush and Obama years had become dominated by neoconservatives pushing for endless foreign entanglements, convoluted multilateral trade deals that were bad for American workers, and wide-open borders. On these and other important issues, rank-and-file Republicans had become totally alienated from their party’s leadership, whose priorities had little to do with what their voters actually wanted. Trump was successful back then in part because he was willing to call out these festering problems and talk about the elephant in the room. From the Iraq War to the border to our disastrous trade relationship with China, Trump forced a reckoning that Republican leaders had been trying very hard to avoid.

Any casual observer of American politics knows all this, just as any close observer of Washington knows that before Roberts arrived at Heritage, the once-respected think tank was in bad shape.

What the editors of the WSJ really object to, and why they published a disingenuous hit piece on him and Heritage, is that Roberts isn’t an open-border neocon who is willing to sell out the American people for the military-industrial complex and big business. That’s why neocon hucksters like Marc Thiessen were reveling in WSJ’s smearing of Roberts this week. For these people, anyone who opposes Ukraine funding, or even prioritizes border security over the funding of foreign wars, has to be sidelined and discredited. Because Heritage under Roberts’ leadership dares to question the neocon agenda, WSJ has targeted it. It’s not more complicated than that.

As for accusations that Roberts is chasing clout, if that were the case you’d expect him to change his tune about Project 2025 after getting brushed back by the Trump campaign. But he’s not, and he won’t. Unlike the editors of the WSJ, Roberts understands the sea change underway in American political life. He’s part of the crowd who knows that whether or not Trump wins back the White House in November, the GOP is never going back to being dominated by neoconservative, open-border elites — or putting much stock in what the editors of The Wall Street Journal have to say about it.