The radical conservative
Heritage Foundation has spent 40 years trying to gut the federal budget. Now
Trump is proving to be the perfect tool.
by Theo Anderson
The mood was jubilant two days
after the November 2016 election at a Washington, D.C., panel co-hosted by two
powerhouse conservative thinktanks—the American Enterprise Institute and the
Heritage Foundation.
In his opening remarks,
Heritage president Jim DeMint rejoiced that Donald Trump’s election had
“preserved our constitutional republic.” Panelist John Yoo, a Berkeley law
professor best known as the architect
of George W. Bush’s justification for torture, drew laughs with feigned
surprise at the audience size. “I thought everyone at Heritage was working over
at transition head quarters,” Yoo quipped. “I asked the taxi cab driver to take
me to Trump transition headquarters, and he dropped me off here.”
Indeed, Politico
reported in November that Heritage, based in D.C., had become “a crucial
conduit between Trump’s orbit and the once-skeptical conservative leaders who
ultimately helped get him elected.” By Heritage’s own account, “several dozen”
of its staff members worked on the transition team, and Trump used its
recommendations for his list of potential Supreme Court picks.
Vice President Mike Pence, the
head of that transition team, has deep ties to the foundation. In 2006,
Heritage co-founder Paul Weyrich, a mentor of Pence’s, said of him, “Nobody is
perfect, but he comes pretty close.” In early December, Pence gave the keynote
speech at a Heritage event (held at Trump’s D.C. hotel) to honor its biggest
donors. He promised that the Trump administration “is now and will continue to
draw on” the institution’s work.
Heritage defines its mission
as creating “an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil
society flourish.” It has an annual budget of about $100 million and a staff of
about 90 “experts” who hold such pseudo-academic titles as “research fellow’
and “policy analyst.” One example is libertarian
economist Stephen Moore, a Trump advisor and a Heritage “distinguished
visiting fellow.”
Heritage’s ties to the
administration have received relatively little press. With its academic gloss,
it may seem benign set against the extremism and zaniness that dominate the
headlines: a press secretary only marginally less bizarre than the Saturday
Night Live spoof of him; a key advisor who embraces
the role of Darth Vader; cabinet picks who have promised to abolish the
institutions they lead; executive orders that stigmatize Muslims and violate
the Constitution; attacks on the press as “the enemy of the American people”;
and on and on.
Yet a grim reality underlies
the White House circus. Trump’s election is the culmination of a radical
right-wing movement that began with the founding of Heritage in 1973. “We are
different from previous generations of conservatives,” Weyrich said in the
early 1980s. “We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure
of this country.”
Trump is that movement’s best
hope yet for achieving its great dream of gutting
government. Heritage isn’t an appendage of the Trump administration’s
radicalism. It’s the heart of it. Trump is just a tool.
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