The Crackup at the Heritage Foundation Is aWarning Sign for MAGA World

By defending a controversial Tucker Carlson interview, think tank president Kevin Roberts unleashed a flood of discontent in the conservative establishment

The Heritage Foundation is no ordinary think tank. Since the days of Ronald Reagan, it has been the conservative movement on the march, delivering ready-made policies and battle-hardened pundits to Republican presidents. Heritage spoke proudly with “one voice,” insisting that its scholars take a unified stand on key issues.

Today, that almost military discipline has collapsed, and many current and former staffers blame Kevin Roberts, who took over as the foundation’s president in 2021. They joke that the group’s operating principle is now more of a “one man” policy, with Roberts moving aggressively to align the think tank with the Make America Great Again movement. As Democrats revel in their electoral success this week, the divisions at Heritage highlight growing fractures facing President Trump’s winning 2024 coalition.

The long-simmering conflict between Roberts and the institute’s old guard spilled into public view in recent days. The immediate cause was a video posted by Roberts late last month defending Tucker Carlson, who drew widespread condemnation for his respectful interview with the rightwing influencer Nick Fuentes, an avowed white supremacist and Holocaust denier.

Roberts’s critics say the video amounted to a reckless invitation to antisemites to join the Republican establishment, which has long sought to keep at bay the party’s most radical fringe. Roberts has acknowledged in recent days that the video was a “mistake,” but it hasn’t quelled unrest at the think tank.

When Trump rose to prominence and upended the conservative movement a decade ago, Heritage was left largely on the sidelines. Roberts’s mission has been to make the group relevant again, according to Heritage employees and others close to the think tank.

By many measures, he has succeeded. He has cultivated relationships with powerful Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, who he sees as the future of the party, according to people familiar with his thinking. Heritage’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, much maligned by Democrats during last year’s political campaign, has become a playbook for the Trump administration. And under Roberts’s leadership, the think tank has broken fundraising records, while hiring pro-Trump staffers who reflect the views of the MAGA faithful.

Roberts is now facing the biggest threat to his leadership in his four years at the helm of Heritage. His handling of the unfolding crisis is a test not just of the MAGA right’s entanglement with antisemitism but of its often hostile relationship to longstanding Republican principles.

“It is a wrestling match for the future of America First, whether it goes back into the clutches of the swamp of the neocons, of the deep state—or whether it gets passed to a new generation of fighters,” said Paul Dans, the former Project 2025

Critics of the Heritage head’s defense of Carlson see it as part of an ideology of ‘no enemies to the right.’

leader who is now mounting a primary challenge against South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. Dans called Roberts a “patriot and very fair leader.”

In a nearly three-minute video posted on social media on Oct. 30, Roberts defended Carlson from the “venomous coalition attacking him” for giving a platform to Fuentes and not asking him tough questions about his positions. “I disagree with, even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either,” Roberts said.

Heritage staff were stunned by the video and confused about why Roberts felt the need to weigh in at all. Multiple Heritage employees have resigned in recent days, along with several volunteer members of the think tank’s task force on antisemitism. Heritage’s Board of Trustees, stacked with Reagan-loving conservatives, has come under pressure to take action against Roberts.

“Heritage historically had a strong voice and, until now, a very principled voice,” said Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to George W. Bush. “A principled reaction would’ve been a straightforward criticism of Nick Fuentes. How they could’ve missed that is beyond my imagination.”

Roberts and a Heritage spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

While Trump himself has been supportive of Israel, a growing antiinterventionist wing in the Republican Party is questioning U.S. support for the country. Some conservative influencers have gone even further, repeating antisemitic tropes about Israel’s influence over the U.S. and falsely suggesting that the country was tied to the killing of activist Charlie Kirk.

In a roughly two-hour long staff meeting on Wednesday, Roberts said he had offered to step down but thought it was his “moral obligation” to clean up the mess, according to a video of the meeting posted by conservative news outlet The Washington Free Beacon. Roberts acknowledged that he should have made clear that not wanting to cancel someone didn’t equate to endorsing everything they’ve said.

His efforts to walk back his earlier remarks come as board members and staff have publicly posted their criticism of him on social media, including a meme that reads, “Nazis are bad.” The backlash from within the organization has angered Roberts’s allies at the think tank.

Called to the ‘Politburo’

Roberts, 51, the former president of a small Catholic college, has the credentials of a think-tank intellectual with a dash of MAGA’s pugnacious branding. He previously served as CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a training ground for some future Trump administration officials. When he was hired, Heritage board members hoped he would be able to walk the line between old and new as Heritage expanded to include more pro-MAGA intellectuals.

One of the ways Roberts has reshaped the group is by changing how Heritage’s long-time “one voice” policy is carried out. Unlike other think tanks, which encourage open debate, Heritage expects scholars to come up with a consensus position for the think tank instead of presenting a set of differing opinions on a particular topic. Former employees say Roberts has used that policy to align Heritage with the MAGA movement, especially in moving away from hawkish foreign-policy views and free-trade principles.

If scholars drift from the think tank’s position, they may get called to Heritage’s 8th floor offices, where Roberts works, for a discussion with one of his deputies, according to people who have worked there. Staff have taken to drawing comparisons with communist regimes, referring to the 8th floor as the “Politburo,” they said.

The outcry from staff over the video caused one Roberts ally to leap into action. After several Heritage staffers spoke out on social media about the Carlson interview, Tom Jones, head of the American Accountability Foundation, which received a grant from Heritage, sent an email to congressional offices advising them against hiring staff who had publicly criticized Roberts. The email listed the staff by name and included screenshots of their social media posts, according to a copy of the document reviewed by the Journal.

Jones stood by the email in an interview and said no one at Heritage asked him to send it. “There’s a principal who runs the organization, and what they say matters,” said Jones, a former Capitol Hill staffer. “If you have a problem with that, you have a process within the organization to bring up those concerns.”

In his video defending Carlson, Roberts described him as a “close friend” of Heritage. Carlson was a keynote speaker at the think tank’s 50th anniversary gala, and Heritage has sponsored some of Carlson’s broadcasts. Until the recent uproar over the Fuentes interview, Heritage also had a donation page on its website that made references to Carlson.

The Heritage staff meeting on Wednesday illustrated a generational divide among conservatives over Carlson. Several veteran staffers expressed concerns. At least one staffer said Gen Z staff at the think tank agreed with the substance of Roberts’s video and expressed support for Carlson.

“That’s the difficulty in the conservative movement right now is trying to figure out how we can all respect each other’s differences of opinions, particularly on the question you raised, and work together,” Roberts said in the meeting.

Critics viewed Roberts’s video as part of an ideology characterized as “no enemies to the right” (a reference to the French Revolution’s concept of “no enemies to the left”), which is gaining ground in the MAGA movement. Proponents argue that infighting undermines the movement’s broader effectiveness, so it should stop.

“Any tent that is big enough for them,” said Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, referring to Fuentes and others with extremist views, “is too big for me.” Goldfeder resigned from Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism in the aftermath of Roberts’s video. Leaders of the task force said in an email Thursday that they would distance themselves from Heritage and continue their work outside of the think tank. Goldfeder said he plans to rejoin. An early indicator of Roberts’s campaign to make far-reaching changes at Heritage came in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began three months after he took over. Heritage, which had previously backed support for Ukraine, initially flew a Ukrainian flag outside its building. But within days, the flag was taken down and, over time, internal communications reflected a policy reversal on Ukraine, according to people familiar with the matter. Employees working on Ukraine policy were asked to watch Carlson’s monologues, which were rife with conspiracy theories about the war, to delete past tweets in support of Ukraine aid and to write papers reflecting the new, more isolationist policy that Roberts had embraced, according to Luke Coffey, the former director of Heritage’s foreign policy center.

“For me, that’s when I knew the ‘one voice’ policy was gone and it was a ‘one man’ policy,” said Coffey, who resigned as a result of the organization’s policy reversal on Ukraine.

By May of 2022, Heritage was lobbying Republicans on Capitol Hill to vote against an aid package for Ukraine. “This proposed Ukraine aid package takes money away from the priorities of the American people and recklessly sends our taxpayer dollars to a foreign nation without any accountability,” the group said in a statement at the time.

The group has also backed away from its long-standing freetrade philosophy to support Trump’s tariff policies.

“The strategy that we’ve really outlined is we want free-er trade and we want fairer trade, and Trump’s strategy may deliver both,” said Stephen Moore, who has served as an economic adviser to Trump and until this week was a visiting fellow at Heritage.

Asked if Heritage’s positions on trade had evolved specifically to align the group with Trump, Moore said, “That’s a good question. I think that obviously we don’t want to antagonize Trump.”

Moore said Thursday in a post on X he was resigning from Heritage to focus on other projects.

Beyond Project 2025

Under Roberts, Heritage brought together other conservative groups to write Project 2025, a 900-pluspage book packed with detailed recommendations for the next administration’s policy agenda. Democrats made the blueprint a focal point in last year’s presidential campaign, portraying it as evidence of Trump’s far-right policies. In response, Trump and his campaign grew frustrated with Heritage. Trump’s then campaign manager Susie Wiles made calls to Heritage officials asking them to lower Project 2025’s profile.

Dans, who led Project 2025 at Heritage, praised Roberts’s leadership and said the point of their initiative was to address the divisions within Heritage and the GOP broadly. “That was the triumph of the whole activity…to bring the right together, to stop the infighting and to make constructive building blocks for the next president to move out Day One on personnel and policy,” he said.

Roberts’s efforts to tie Heritage to Trump initially surprised some who didn’t view him as a diehard Trump supporter. Before it became clear that Trump would win the 2024 Republican primary, Roberts expressed disappointment in some of Trump’s positions, including his reluctance to embrace abortion restrictions, according to people familiar with his comments. In a since-deleted post on X, Roberts also condemned the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Heritage let Florida Governor Ron DeSantis use its building for an event during the 2024 primary and invited him to speak at its 50th anniversary gala. After the GOP primary, Roberts quickly rallied behind Trump.

In February, Heritage’s board received a detailed, anonymous complaint against Roberts’s management style from a staffer. A copy of the letter was reviewed by the Journal at the time. Roberts should be dismissed, the letter said, for destroying Heritage’s “cherished legacy in record time.” It is “no longer a think tank. It is now a public-relations organization that few in Washing --ton respect.” But none of the policy disagreements or complaints about management have generated the kind of response that Roberts’s handling of Carlson did. In interviews, members who resigned from Heritage’s task force to combat antisemitism said they didn’t understand why Roberts chose to wade into the matter and, despite his attempts to clarify his comments, couldn’t continue to be affiliated with him.

Ian Spier, a lawyer who resigned from the task force, said its work as part of Heritage could no longer be principled if members could only call out antisemitism on the left. “Heritage has sent signals through its president that it doesn’t seem to take the problem of antisemitism and its rise in the GOP and conservative movement seriously,” he said.

Some who are supportive of Roberts say they view the latest controversy as a preview of the debates that will take place during the 2028 GOP primary. But one potential top Republican presidential contender called for an end to the intraparty hostility.

Vice President JD Vance tried on Wednesday to rally conservatives around shared priorities, including affordability and immigration. “The infighting,” he wrote on social media, “is stupid.”

“That’s when I knew the ‘one voice’ policy was gone and it was a ‘one man’ policy.”

LUKE COFFEY former Heritage staffer

Heritage president Kevin Roberts came to the defense of Tucker Carlson, far left, for giving a platform to white supremacist Nick Fuentes, above.