Whenever Vice President Kamala Harris mentions Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s now-toxic blueprint for the next Republican administration — blood starts throbbing in the temples of certain conservative Heritage veterans. Like think tank leaders across the spectrum, the professionals are cringing at the tone-deaf naivete of an organization that touted such a polarizing document as an election-year gospel without realizing it might blow up on their own side.

“We now have a very good example of what not to do,” said Heritage alum Tim Chapman, who leads Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom nonprofit and is a former chief of staff to Heritage founder Ed Feulner.

“I cannot think of a study that has done more damage,” said Ken Weinstein, a one-time former President Donald Trump appointee and former head of the conservative Hudson Institute. “It’s the exact opposite of the Harris approach of don’t say anything about what you’re doing.”

Not long ago, the current Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, was triumphantly promising a “second American revolution” and darkly declaring that it would be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” Steve Bannon floated him as a possible White House chief of staff.

That was before Project 2025 was turned into a campaign issue by Harris — and disavowed by Trump. Last weekend, the 922-page playbook became quite possibly the first think tank paper in American history to appear in TV spots during NFL games, naturally via a scathing negative ad.

For the Heritage old guard, the bill of complaints against Project 2025 dovetails with broader gripes about Roberts, a culture-war intellectual who has dramatically reoriented the foundation in a populist, pro-Trump direction.

Instead of just sniffing about Roberts’ deviations on trade or foreign affairs, the bitterness these days focuses on a new house style that allegedly enabled the current embarrassment: an elevation of marketing over research; a chest-thumping tendency to assert dominance within the Trump-era right; an inability to distinguish partisan agitation from policy advocacy because “engagement on X, positive feedback from Slack channels or mentions in their news feeds” have become paramount, in the words of one conservative activist who watched Project 2025 take shape.

In this telling, the sequence of events that turned a white paper into a scarlet letter has little to do with the document’s contents. Think tanks across the spectrum propose stuff all the time that a crafty oppo researcher could use to rile up voters. Yet those other organizations somehow manage to avoid becoming millstones around the necks of their favorite pols.

To critics in the old Heritage diaspora, it’s all a byproduct of how the foundation operates under Roberts: While other policy outfits claim to be devoted to an abstract idea, Heritage has increasingly tied its image to a specific person. Roberts told an interviewer earlier this year that the mission was “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Heritage fundraising bragged about the large percentage of the think tank’s previous ideas that were implemented by Trump. Roberts also claimed Project 2025 spoke for the movement, boasting that “never before has the American conservative movement been this unified around a set of possible policy prescriptions.”

This vibe added up to a problem because no politician, especially Trump, enjoys being talked about like a trained monkey for some policy group, no matter how fervent its support.

“For six months before this came out, I knew more than several people who were nervous about the press that was out there,” one former Heritage staffer said, referencing Trump world’s anxieties about Project 2025’s media image. “They were like, ‘They’re not listening to the signals’” telling its sponsors to quit claiming to call the shots. “It’s in their DNA, a real desire to prove you’re at the center of things.”

Anyone who needs to raise money for a think tank, of course, knows that telling people you’re at the center of things is how you get folks to write checks. And it’s particularly important at Heritage, which is proud of not being funded by big corporate donors. When you solicit from the grassroots, you need to keep them excited — by, say, having a leader who makes ferocious statements about impending revolutions, or by larding your policy book with red-meat items that inflame the other side.

For the broader public, meanwhile, those very same imperatives helped turn Project 2025 into a big, fat “kick me” sign.

There was also the matter of timing. Notably, the hugely influential original version of Heritage’s quadrennial Mandate for Leadership, which laid out ideas for Ronald Reagan’s presidency and served as a model for Project 2025’s book of the same name, was published in January 1981 — after Reagan had won the 1980 election but before he’d taken over. That’s a logical timetable if you want to sway policy, but not if you’re trying to swagger around and play election-year kingmaker.

“Putting it out there as they did, as early as they did, is what allowed oppo researchers to create a brand around it as you saw in the DNC,” according to a former Heritage employee.

This is especially true in a year when neither campaign has offered a lot of detail. “It’s not been a policy heavy campaign cycle, to say the least,” said Abigail Ball, the executive director of American Compass, an economic policy organization associated with the populist right. “So I think that the Project 2025 thing filled that hole. Given the fact that there wasn’t a ton else to focus on, this was the thing to pin to the campaign. I don’t blame anyone — it’s just a strange quirk of history.”

A Heritage spokesperson told me that the notoriety around Project 2025 is the work of Democratic strategists.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Heritage and has everything to do with the Democrats and the left creating a bogeyman,” the spokesperson said. “They came up with a plan to lie about the project and say we call for a nationwide abortion ban or ending birthright citizenship, and then they went on to lie and say Trump’s behind it.”

As for the timing, Heritage says they released the blueprint early in order to shape the Republican primary campaign at a time when Trump’s renomination was not at all obvious.

Feulner, who founded Heritage in 1973, didn’t speak with me and hasn’t joined in any dissing of his successors. But his contribution to the public debate this summer was telling: In July, he and Pence co-wrote a Washington Post essay about the importance of defending Taiwan, saying that “we cannot give in to the isolationists.” Opposing China may be a widely shared cause, including within Heritage, but the subtext — an old-fashioned call for American global steadfastness — made for quite the contrast to the Trumpy rhetoric of the current Heritage leadership.

In a way, Heritage has already lost, at least in terms of the one currency Beltway policy shops most crave: influence.

When Trump rolled out his transition team soon after the scary Project 2025 headlines, Roberts and crew were not front and center. So much for Bannon’s chief of staff speculation: The effort will instead be led by Linda McMahon, board chair at the rival America First Policy Institute. Founded by Trump administration veterans, the organization is just as odious to lefties as Heritage — but considerably less of a campaign-season refrain. My colleagues Hailey Fuchs and Meridith McGraw reported last month that America First Policy Institute’s CEO, Brooke Rollins, is working closely on transition plans.

“If you compare and contrast the Project 2025 stuff with what the AFPI has done, you haven’t seen the same level of rhetoric being used against AFPI and Brooke Rollins,” said Avik Roy, the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity think tank and a longtime conservative policy wonk from the non-MAGA right. “Brooke Rollins had much more of a heads-down approach where they didn’t make those kinds of boasts and where they didn’t seek publicity.”

Like denizens of policy organizations right, left and center, Roy was bemused by the irony of the fracas: For any think tank chief, the idea of publishing a paper that three-quarters of likely voters have heard of would seem like a dream come true, not a PR disaster.

“AEI published one for 2020,” said Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, referring to his own think tank’s guide for whoever won that year’s election. A bulwark of non-Trumpy conservatism, the organization was unlikely to emerge as the agenda-setter for either of the candidates. And, in fact, it didn’t: “I don’t think you noticed it,” Levin joked.

But now that one wonky what-to-do compendium has become a campaign-season bludgeon, is he worried that some other think tank might be next? Not so much. “We were trying to persuade the candidates. We weren’t speaking for them,” Levin said. Heritage “always ran this risk, and they were warned of it, of seeming to lead him.”

Indeed, in conversations with think tank graybeards, one theme that emerged across the spectrum was a kind of professional amazement that any serious policy organization could put itself in a position of becoming the story.

“It’s not just that they were thumping their chest, but they were sticking out their chins,” said Patrick Gaspard, who runs the liberal Center for American Progress, an organization that was famously close to the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns — but never a household name that could be bogeymanned to a mass audience.

Gaspard told me he’s not worried about some future CAP project earning similar headlines. “None of us are calling for a second American Revolution at the point of violence,” he said. “We are working squarely in the space of crafting policy proposals, crafting theories of the case for how those policies can be communicated and might be able to take root. … That’s how the vast majority of think tanks work, on both the left and the right. And once upon a time, it’s how the Heritage Foundation used to work.”

In fact, the confounding thing about Project 2025 is that it actually is full of policy ideas about even obscure corners of the federal government. Some of them are shockingly radical, like the idea of replacing thousands of professional public servants with political loyalists, but many of them are familiar conservative boilerplate.

The problem is, the wonkery coexists with an organizational public image — complete with an aggressive stream of not-very-scholarly political-attack tweets and sketchy operative-style output like misleading election-fraud videos — that creates a dynamic more like a GOP political campaign than a conservative policy shop. Throw in the embrace of Trump and it helps create a situation where the candidate gets asked to answer for Heritage’s work.

“The best thing for us to do as conservative policy advocates is to discuss policies, build support and not get involved with any campaigns,” said Chapman.

In the long run, that’s probably good for the campaigns as well as the think tanks.

Mario Cuomo famously said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. But the upshot of Project 2025 was that it managed to tie Trump to 922 pages of often radioactive prose right when the moment called for something lyrical.

“It was like a think tank equivalent of a neutron bomb,” one longtime conservative policy intellectual told me. “It left the campaign standing but it did a huge amount of damage.”

For Tucker Carlson, it has to be the ultimate good-news, bad-news moment: A major publishing house has canceled a prominent political journalist’s upcoming biography of the far-right media figure.

The good news, for Carlson partisans, is that the book in question — Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind, by Jason Zengerle — was likely to be a less-than-fawning look at the former Fox host’s journey from establishmentarian to conspiracy theorist.

The bad news, though, is that the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer. According to several sources in the publishing industry who have followed the project, a combination of delays and the changes in Carlson’s once dominant media presence caused a loss of enthusiasm on the part of a publishing house going through its own internal tumult.

It’s a far cry from the situation in 2021, when Carlson was zooming past Sean Hannity to become cable’s top talker, with a legion of fans on the right and an army of detractors in the center and on the left — and even speculation about a possible presidential bid. That’s when Little, Brown and Co. tapped Zengerle, a New York Times Magazine contributor and one of the leading magazine writers on contemporary politics, to do a book on the political-media titan.

At the time, with Trump-driven fury selling books all over the place, the contract seemed like a no-brainer. For editors interested in enriching readers’ minds, understanding the Carlson phenomenon was seen as key to understanding American politics. For publishers interested in enriching shareholders’ wallets, there was potential gold in a tome on the man blue America loves to hate.

Since then, it’s been a rocky ride for both Carlson and the political-book business.

Carlson was famously bounced from Fox last year, soon after the network spent $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. A racist text message and derision of Donald Trump had been uncovered as part of the discovery process, and he had been expected to testify in court. The spectacle would have riveted the media.

After the shock firing, Carlson quickly reestablished himself on Twitter, now X, finding a devoted audience. But his programming — including a softball interview with Vladimir Putin — has rarely generated the kind of sustained attention or outrage of the closely monitored Fox monologues he did when he was the highest-rated host in history. Like Oprah Winfrey or Howard Stern, becoming his own brand made him less relevant to the broader conversation.

This week, he announced plans for a 15-city arena tour alongside figures like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a classic example of the sort of thing that can draw huge throngs of the devoted but not register on the media radar of a fragmented country. (Janet Jackson and blink-182 are also on arena tours this summer.)

Publishing, meanwhile, saw the political book boom of the Trump years turn into a Biden-era bust. The 46th president and his circle have spawned almost no bestsellers, and neither have their cast of rivals. And to the chagrin of booksellers, the return of the 45th president to electoral contention has not yet brought about another “Trump Bump” of interest in political influencers.

Zengerle, my colleague a decade ago at The New Republic and a former POLITICO Magazine writer, declined comment. So did Carlson. Representatives for Little, Brown and Co. did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But sources at other houses tell me that Zengerle’s agent has been shopping the title to other publishers.

Of course, publishers cancel books all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Many Washington classics, even bestsellers such as Mark Leibovich’s This Town, were marooned by their initial publisher. Writers blow deadlines, and that includes Zengerle, who got an extension to do more reporting after Carlson left Fox, but still missed a subsequent due date. Editors leave for other jobs, and top brass exit in corporate shake-ups — both scenarios that also apply to Zengerle’s book. It’s a fickle business. Little, Brown, which is undergoing a restructuring and layoffs this month, may be particularly tumultuous.

But plenty of projects that face these issues don’t get shelved. The travails of the Carlson book also say something about the publishing and intellectual climate in Washington and in the political world more generally.

I got a peek at a 60,000-word chunk of draft from Zengerle’s reporting, and it presents a nuanced portrait of a generation of conservatives who grew up in the Reagan era, came to Washington in the 1990s, and were pulled in wildly different directions as the Bush administration floundered and the new GOP embraced Trump. That’s fascinating stuff — if not exactly the kind of scathing hate-read whose scandalous allegations will send books flying off shelves in blue-city bookstores.

In a polarized country, fury sells. Beyond attracting readers hungry for outrage, it also snags the attention of the TV bookers and podcast hosts who can put a book on the radar screen. Complexity doesn’t work as well: The lefties who loathe Carlson might not want to spend 400 pages with a three-dimensional version of the guy, and the righties who hero-worship him still won’t want to shell out for something from a non-fan.

There’s a possibly even bigger challenge when chronicling a figure like Carlson — and it’s a challenge that is becoming more common as the worlds of politics and media collide: Many of the biggest outrages happen in plain sight, which makes the investigative biographer’s role feel less crucial.

Shortly before Carlson’s firing, for instance, The New York Times published “American Nationalist,” a sprawling investigation of the TV host’s rise to a leading role in the political right. But few of the three-part, 20,000-word story’s most talked-about details involved digging up dirt. There weren’t jaw-droppers about Carlson secretly mistreating puppies or misbehaving around his Maine home. Rather, the juiciest stuff was gleaned from rewatching 1,100 episodes of his Fox News program — i.e., things that were said in front of millions and millions of witnesses.

For a lot of people, the video clips were the story.

Which brings us to the current challenge, for Carlson as well as those who would attack him. When those video clips are no longer connected to a dominant outfit like Fox, they start to feel a lot less vital. Carlson may have a vast audience on X, but for a lot of casual observers, the formerly most powerful figure in conservative media just looks like another random person streaming angry content into the ether.

That goes for a lot of the professional observers who report on his content, too, and in the process help boost awareness. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple used to write frequently, and scathingly, about Carlson. But he’s scarcely covered Carlson’s X programming.

“I wrote about him when he was at Fox News for the simple reason that Tucker had bosses,” Wemple — a former colleague and longtime close friend — told me. “And those bosses weren’t accountable. They weren’t really journalists, as we discovered in the Dominion suit. But they were sensitive to criticism, and my role as a media critic was to play all this stuff out and seek accountability from Fox and seek explanations from Fox.”

Untethered from larger institutions, a bomb-thrower attracts less attention, even if plenty of people are still influenced by his opinions.

Paying less attention may be sound logic if your business is media criticism, or even the daily news cycle. But it’s a shame if that logic affects book publishing decisions, too.

In fact, a thoughtful look at how the bow-tied CNN preppy became the immigrant-baiting Putin admirer also gets at the biggest question in American politics: What the hell happened to that guy?

Whether we’re talking about a Trump-venerating senator like (onetime John McCain acolyte) Lindsey Graham, an election-denying attorney like (onetime Al Gore lawyer) Kenneth Chesebro or just some random converted MAGA acolyte in the St. Louis suburbs, the journey from comfort in the mainstream to aggrievement on the margins is one of the most fascinating evolutions in today’s society. Carlson still may be the highest-profile example, even without 3.21 million nightly Fox viewers.

In our gridlocked country, there are few people who seem willing to change their mind — and even fewer actual players who ever change their brand. Is the new incarnation real, or just convenient? Were its antecedents always present, hidden beneath the conventions of an earlier day? Did something trigger the evolution? And what has the change done to the person’s relationships? It’s a story I’d like to read, whether or not its subject was a big shot, and whether or not the book was a bestseller.

Rutgers Professor James R. Jones has a PhD in sociology, but his resume contains a line item that’s a lot more common for political scientists, policy wonks and Washington reporters: three years as a congressional intern, spent during his late-2000s undergraduate years at George Washington University.

The stint didn’t lead to a career in government. But it did lead to a fascination with the culture of the Capitol, a doctoral dissertation at Columbia and now, to Jones’ first book, The Last Plantation: Racism and Resistance in the Halls of Congress, published by Princeton University Press.

The book paints a pretty damning picture of the Capitol as a workplace. And though its publication last month came with none of the hype that accompanies a blockbuster Washington tome from a commercial publisher, it’s a study that denizens of the Beltway should take seriously — precisely because it couldn’t be written by political scientists, policy wonks or journalists.

In Jones’ telling, the Capitol was created in an era of white supremacy, and that era is not exactly gone: “When you peer beneath the surface, you see an institution that is far from representative of the nation and that is still guided by unequal processes,” he writes. “Although Congress is more racially diverse than it has ever been, it is still an institution dominated by Whites.”

So far, so normal. The grotesque racial history of a building partially erected by slaves and the ongoing inequities of 21st century America are pretty familiar.

What’s novel in Jones’ research is just what part of the Capitol he’s writing about. Instead of a book about laws and elections and coalitions and lobbying, it’s a book about that favorite Washington subject: the office. In this case, it’s the world of aides and interns and chiefs of staff, the milieu he inhabited during his own time on the Hill.

“My office was majority Black,” Jones says of his stints working for Pennsylvania Democrat Chaka Fattah. “But when I went to other lawmakers, particularly lawmakers who were white, their offices were exclusively white. And so I had this sort of revelation. Congressional staffers are doing all the work, and lawmakers who are disproportionately white, their offices are also disproportionately white. What is that effect on public policy?”

Eighteen years and one doctorate later, Jones, now 36, has his answer: “The unequal racial makeup of congressional staff is one of the most important problems subverting our multiracial democracy,” he writes. In his view, the staff should be front and center in any analysis of Congress, since they typically lay out the options for a lawmaker to choose from, set the parameters of negotiations about bills, and generally determine the range of possibilities for legislation and investigation.

Thanks largely to its staffing, Jones concludes, “Congress operates as an inequality regime.”

“I use this term to describe how race, gender and class shape who gets jobs on Capitol Hill,” Jones says. “This means that diversifying the elected membership of the legislature will not easily solve this problem.” According to his data, only 18 percent of top staff are people of color, compared to 40 percent of the national population, and less even than Congress as a whole.

Without diverse staff in the congressional workplace, the congressional work product is likely to give short shrift to the already underrepresented — no matter who voters actually elect.

That’s a framing that is likely to discomfit a lot of sitting members of Congress, and not just the ones who disagree with Jones’ left-leaning policy views. In the typical elected official’s self-conception, the elected pol is master of his or her destiny, and the unelected staff are mere appendages. (Years ago, when I worked in Philadelphia, an electrician-turned-city-councilmember from a blue-collar part of town called me “college boy” and explained it like this: People in my neighborhood don’t want to vote for someone like you. They want to vote for someone like me, and have me hire someone like you.)

In an interview, Jones made a pretty compelling case for devoting more energy to watching the worker bees — a case that seems pretty compelling whether or not your main interest is, like his, in racial equity.

“We can think about how lawmakers are casting their votes for decisive legislation,” Jones told me. “But we need to think about all the moments that lead up to that point. How did we get to this final bill? What compromises were made? How did we go down this road, one policy option versus another? And staff are instrumental in shaping this entire process.”

Unfortunately, most of the folks who write about Congress find that their professional tool kits are ill-suited to capturing this dynamic. Reporters are rarely able to quote staff — and pretty much never able to quote them taking credit for their boss’ vote. Other researchers find themselves flummoxed by the lack of data, as Congress doesn’t have the sort of employment opportunity data that large private-sector corporations are required by law to gather.

Here’s where some of the conventions of sociology come in handy: Jones’ research is built on interviews with dozens of staffers, most of them Black, all of them referred to only by first names and rough job titles, in keeping with the academic discipline’s style. And rather than holding forth on newsy events — how a certain bill went down — they often talk about the micro-level behaviors and dynamics that shape their experience in the Capitol complex’s offices, corridors and elevators.

What emerges is a place that’s almost designed to resist change, with an opaque hiring system, 535 bosses who can’t be fired by HR, relatively low entry-level pay and a fuzzy array of social networks that play an outsize role in shaping both long-term careers and day-to-day satisfaction. Even without any individual malice, it’s a setup that makes it hard for people from outside the system to break in, or stick around.

Despite the subtitle, the book doesn’t show a lot of racism in the sense of people explicitly setting out to stick it to some despised demographic. But it lays out a lot of underrepresentation — and details how it can have a similar effect.

The most interesting chapter in the book just might be the one focusing on “the nod” shared even on the Hill between Black people encountering each other — a convention that’s meant to highlight the day-to-day experience of Black staffers. “That same old-fashioned kind of nod is still done up here,” he quotes a senior GOP staffer as saying. “You don’t really think about it, you just kind of do it. And it’s very subtle, ‘I see you.’”

“I was like, I'm being seen, and I'm seeing others who look like me,” Jones told me, recounting his first experience with the Capitol’s version of the nod, back in his intern days, a form of pushback against the feeling of invisibility. “What I've tried to do in the book is to correct this narrative to show that Black staffers can be important actors in the political system, whether you see them or not. They are working sometimes behind the stage to make things happen. I want to show in some small ways how they resist and how they can impact policy.”

Jones ends his book with some practical suggestions. Some seem like no-brainers: Congress really ought to assemble data on the identities of its staff. Others seem like they might be more useful in some districts than others: He thinks voters and media (and rivals) should press incumbents on their office hiring practices during election season.

And others, I suspect, would be politically dead on arrival: In the name of retaining more staff who don’t come from money, he thinks Hill staffers should get a raise. And in the name of keeping pace with the population, he thinks Congress should hire a lot more of them: The size of the workforce has barely budged since the 1980s, even as the nation has grown by 100 million. Given the public standing of Congress, it’s hard to imagine popular opinion supporting the idea of giving the legislators more aides, or giving those aides more money.

But that very dynamic is also what makes the book worth pondering for people in Washington, assuming you can make your way through its occasionally abstruse academic jargon.

What Jones wants, in the name of fairness, is a congressional staff that’s managed in a more professional way, including diversity and civil-service-like hiring practices. He makes a strong argument for why that’s important — noting that today’s staffers have a way of becoming tomorrow’s electeds, and that wonky expertise is especially key in the face of a burgeoning lobbying industry.

Yet America has long been uncomfortable with the idea of a permanent elite Washington staff, even one whose ethnic mix looks like America. That discomfort will feed some of the clashes that will happen if former President Donald Trump wins and tries to carry out some of his plans to attack the civil service, something that has been governed by law for a century. It would even more surely fuel an argument against a new strengthening of Hill staffing.

To Jones, that kind of thinking — the idea that we ought to think of the Capitol Hill workplace as just a collection of small businesses run by citizen legislators — feels awfully naive. “Congress isn’t a small business,” he told me. “It is the government. … Yes, they need to have a staff that they trust. But at the same time, who lawmakers hire have these long-term consequences. Whether or not they stay with their lawmaker, they are going to be a part of this political system. And they are probably going to have a lot of influence over the course of their life.”