In the aftermath of a presidential election campaign in which Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and The Heritage Foundation were constantly in media headlines, Roberts joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss his new book “Dawn’s Early Light.”
In my interview with Roberts, we reflect on the election results and the unorthodox, previously unimaginable coalition that propelled President-elect Donald Trump to victory.
Just because Trump won the election, however, doesn’t mean the fight to secure conservative wins has ended. In fact, the fight has just begun to deliver for the American people, who expressed their desire for a radical departure from the status quo.
Thus the subtitle of Roberts’ book: “Taking Back Washington to Save America.”
Roberts and Heritage played a major role in the lead-up to the 2024 election because of Kamala Harris’ campaign attacks against Project 2025, a compilation of policy proposals from across the conservative movement spearheaded by the leading conservative think tank.
In some ways, “Dawn’s Early Light” may be seen as a companion read with Project 2025’s policy proposals. Roberts’ book explains many of the project’s animating principles—self-governance, consent, public virtue, government accountability—and the particular problems that the nation faces today—among them family collapse, rising costs, poor education outcomes, and overextension abroad.
Roberts says he settled on the title “Dawn’s Early Light,” long before the election results, even though polls showed Trump and Harris running neck and neck down the stretch.
“I’ve been confident about the satisfactory outcome of the election for weeks, if not months,” Roberts told me. “But I still thought even if [Harris] wins, we’re sticking with the title because it’s still America. And even if we’re going down, we’re going to go down fighting in the same way that Francis Scott Key, when he’s peering through that fog in 1814 and pens this phrase, actually didn’t expect to see the American flag.”
“He expected to see the Union Jack, because that’s really what rational thought would have taught him,” Roberts said of Key. “But as it turns out, God’s given us another chance. And the other sort of nuance in ‘Dawn’s Early Light’ is we’re not saying, ‘Oh, this is it. It’s done. We’ve totally won.’ … [Now] the hard work really begins, just as it began after winning the War of 1812.”
The stakes of delivering for the American people couldn’t be higher, given the problems mentioned above. Roberts personally understands these challenges.
“My dad had an addiction problem. He’s a recovering alcoholic to this day. I’m very proud of him and love him,” Roberts said, opening up about his childhood. “But when I was 8 and 9 and 10, it was awful. It was awful for anyone around him.”
“And my parents got divorced at a very early age, as many Americans have experienced, and it got very ugly. … And it ultimately was a contributing factor to my brother, when he was 15, committing suicide. I was 9.”
The tragedy in Roberts’ childhood became increasingly common as America showed early signs of decline. For Roberts, however, the new coalition that delivered big for conservatives in the 2024 election can start to reverse decades of that decline.
“In a policy sense, the sky’s the limit,” Roberts told me. “And so whether it’s very long-standing, traditional conservative objectives of creating more limited government—in this case, our focus is on dismantling the administrative state, getting Congress, of course, to be more active there—or whether it’s something that really is new for the conservative movement in its political sense.”
“I still, if I had my druthers, want government to be very limited. I want it to largely get out of the way by making sure that there isn’t this terrible collusion between big corporations and big government—in this case Big Pharma,” Roberts added. “That’s actually exceedingly consistent with conservative principles.”
If conservatives can deliver, he said, Trump could very well enter the pantheon of the great men of history.
“This might sound like hyperbole, but I think about Donald Trump being modern America’s version of other brave men who’ve been leaders of their nations,” Roberts said. “Abraham Lincoln, who was known as the bravest man of his generation. Because in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, he was so brave as to stake out a popular position in the North, but very unpopular [elsewhere]. It ultimately, literally cost him his life for stopping the expansion of slavery.”
“Charlemagne, founder of early-modern Western civilization,” Roberts continued, giving another example of a great leader. “You know, I’m an Anglophile. I think often about Alfred the Great, the founder of the modern English state. He was a very sickly man—diminutive, sickly. I say that not to pick on him, but to say you wouldn’t expect him to be this lion-hearted fellow on the battlefield. But he was. You know why? Because he loved his nation.”
“Donald Trump is in that vein,” Roberts said. “What’s interesting is, to tie all of this up, is that when you have those brave men emerge as leaders of nations, the reason the nation says, ‘Yes, we want you to be our leader’ is because they tap into that metanarrative.”
As for Project 2025, Roberts can’t thank the Harris campaign enough.
“We should have anticipated that the Left would have just lost their ever-loving minds as a result [of Project 2025], but ultimately their efforts failed,” Heritage’s president said. “They wasted a bunch of money. And what they did succeed in doing is to double the number of people who are in the [project’s] personnel database from 10,000 to 20,000.”
“And what’s great about that is this personnel database isn’t just about the Trump-Vance administration, or for that matter, federal government,” Roberts said. “It’s also for state and local government. So I’m grateful that a good portion of the billion dollars that Kamala Harris raised actually helped us expand the reach of the project, because it’s actually going to allow us to expand the number of states and places where these great people are going to be involved.”
“So they inspired a lot of Americans to rise up, and I just can’t—I can’t thank them enough.”