Heritage's collapse is another sign Trump's power is waning

The latest resignations at the far-right Heritage Foundation, the fascism-promoting conservative "think tank" responsible for "Project 2025" and its plan to reshape America by asserting an executive branch ability to break laws with abandon for the sake of greater conservative glory, are a wonderful thing. Everyone involved with Heritage is a horrible person and a willing seditionist, the Project plans carried out by Elon Musk, Russell Vought and others have now been proven to be not only lawbreaking and incompetent, but murderous, and if justice were still a real thing in the world everyone who signed their names to a Heritage Foundation would be headed off to CECOT in a one-for-one trade to get back the random migrants swept up in the administration's white nationalist server.

So yeah, don't feel sorry for any of these people. They helped break the country, but it took their movement and their foundation president's embracing of far-right antisemitic eliminationists like Nick Fuentes before anyone began to get sweaty over the likelihood that the movement was coming for them next.

So now the Heritage offices are emptying out, though don't expect any of the architects of our current national crisis to scuttle very far.

“This weekend, most of our staff, from our legal and economic centers, are departing immediately,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote in a Sunday night email to staff obtained by The Washington Post. “We wish them well, though the manner of their departures speaks volumes.”

Ah, the old wish-em-well into a triple-axel caveat. The man knows his stuff.

The proximate cause of this mass resignation, which follows on the heels of a great many others, is Heritage's unwillingness to condemn antisemitism in conservatism's ranks. It's the same battle that roiled the weekend's post-Kirk Turning Point USA gathering; on one side are Tucker Carlson, Fuentes, and the violence-peddling "groyper" movement of neo-Nazis, wannabe-Nazis, and other white Christian nationalists of the sort now in control of nearly every Trump administration-run social media account. They want to press their current advantage in order to expand the long-awaited crackdowns on immigrants and on Being Not White to include the old-school anti-Jewish purges their conspiracy-predicated movement was founded on.

On the other side, and noticeably outnumbered inside the rancorous MAGA tent, are conservatives who have no problem murdering people on the high seas or fabricating conspiracies to put asylum-seeking migrants in foreign torture prisons, but who still want to draw the line—possibly for family reasons, and possibly because they once read a poem or two—at genocidal antisemitism.

This is what passes for diversity of thought in the Heritage and Turning Point era, and the leadership of both groups are disposed towards the We Can Have A Little Genocidal Antisemitism, As A Treat view of things. As their movement's public popularity falls below that of some venereal diseases, they're willing to welcome partnerships with anyone in order to keep that tent from collapsing completely.

The most interesting tidbit about these newest Heritage resignations, though, is that this wasn't just a vote of no confidence in Heritage's shrinking leadership team. This was an act of war.

It’s unclear how many staffers left the organization over the weekend. Thirteen former employees, including three in leadership posts, were hired at Advancing American Freedom, a competing policy and advocacy group founded by former vice president Mike Pence. The group said it raised more than $10 million to fund the hires.

Pence’s group defines its ideological tenets as free markets, limited government and the rule of law — staking out a claim to ground that the Heritage Foundation once occupied.

So this was a mass exodus not just from something, but to something, with at least 13 Heritagers bolting to a newer conservative think tank founded by the archconservative but Trump-despised Mike Pence.

I know what your instinct is, here. You are probably a too-decent person, and you are probably thinking "good for them, sticking up for their principles" and NO. Don't you dare. The principles of anyone who still stuck with the authoritarianism-promoting Constitution-shredding murder spree-backing Heritage Foundation up until December of 2025 are that they liked all of those things just fine, but only got cold feet when their bosses started playing footsies with groups that consider the Holocaust to have been a good idea.

"Wait, you mean this violent factionalism in service of imaginary national purity might turn around and bite my ass? Well now I am opposed" is not a principle worth your sympathy.

Everyone who was ever anyone told you this was going to happen, deep thinkers of conservatism. You should have panicked long before United States government accounts started posting neo-Nazi catch phrases laced with Nazi-styled symbols and imagery. You should have panicked when your "foundation" released a massive document advocating for bending, breaking, or just ignoring laws in order to target your ideological enemies and nobody involved piped up with a "Hey, do you think this could ever come back to haunt us?"

As for what it means, it means at least one of two things and probably both. To have Heritage's "legal" and "economic" teams jump ship to join, of all places, a Mike Pence joint is a radical development. Mike Pence is among the most hated figures in Trumpism, and he's hated specifically because he balked at the Heritage-boosted theory of using raw partisan power to break the Constitution, capture the government, and send troops to meet any Americans who dared complain.

None of these hard-right think tankers would be looking to Mike Pence to fund the next portion of their careers unless they believed that Trumpism was not going to be dominating conservatism forever and that Trump himself would not be in a position to take meaningful revenge on them for switching sides.

Which is obviously accurate, because Trump is an elderly man with obviously accelerating age-related health problems, ones serious enough to merit shoving an IV into his hand on a regular basis. And that the "legal" and "economic" teams (forgive me, but you aren't going to catch me using either term without scare quotes, because we've all seen the work product these teams produce) seem especially confident Trumpism is closer to its end game than its beginning is also notable.

We've seen how the Trump team has done, in the "legal" and "economic" realms; unadulterated cronyism and corruption inside the Department of Justice, and tariffs and other fetishes producing economic chaos on a global scale.

And that perhaps hints at what else is going on here. Whether it's joining up with Mike Pence or if it's just ducking out of Heritage for its own sake, these departures have a very familiar feel to them. Think tank conservatism has had free rein to try out all its bold important ideas multiple times, in Republican-led government, and each time conservatism gains full enough power to put a new idea into practice, fiat-style, it is soon followed up by the targeted project crashing and burning in such spectacular fashion that everybody who wrote columns supporting the plan have to spend the next decade insisting that actually they had very little to do with it and it was mostly somebody else's fault:

Neoconservatism, the Iraq War and Heritage-boosted "reconstruction."

Banking deregulation, followed speedily by an international banking crisis.

Tax cuts for the wealthy, which have never produced anything other than massive new state and federal debts.

Privatization of [public resource or service], followed nearly invariably by ballooning public costs and worse outcomes because Duh.

"The Federalist Society."

It is a cycle almost as predictable as that of cicadas: Republicans gain new federal or state trifecta; conservative ideas espoused by Heritage and other think tanks are adopted; the think tankers or their immediate allies are brought on to implement the thing; everything goes sideways, cross-ways, or shit-on-a-stick; pundits look sheepishly at a glaring public and announce that well, it would have worked if that other guy over there hadn't done it all wrong.

Then, amidst the infighting, somebody writes a book proposing a "new" version of conservatism that is exactly the same as the old one, and has most of the same actors and the same core beliefs that were just shredded into confetti in the Marketplace Of Actually Doing That, except this time the book proposes their reinvention be called (I kid you not) "Crunchy" or "Compassionate" or some other self-caveating adjective and all the other humiliated thinkers rush to agree and to stamp themselves with this new label that doesn't stink so obviously of their own failure.

I expect we might be seeing the first budding leaves in that part of the conservative grift cycle. A bunch of Christian nationalism-boosting, conspiracy-theory-utilizing, democracy-contemptuous cranks are being met with the real-world results of their white papers and now it's once again time for plausible deniability and a new brand name; as most wealthy conservatives continue to shovel money at Trump in exchange for dropped federal investigations or new merger possibilities, we're also seeing a post-Trump money coalition in its early infancy, one that is no longer afraid to hang out with Mike Pence no matter what the raging White House grandpa might say about it.

Trump doesn't have complete control of conservatism. Of course he doesn't: He's making them look like incompetent crooked freaks. And white supremacy and antisemitism doesn't have complete control of conservatism, because any "big tent" big enough for genocide advocates will by definition not remain a big tent for long. People who insist on mass eradication of their ideological enemies do not do compromise.

If the end is near for the Heritage Foundation, it'd be a poetic one. They found their perfect avatar, they inserted their perfect henchmen into his White House, and everything immediately went to shit in a storm of corruption and criminality. More likely than not, they'll survive, however—there are plenty of wealthy conservative donors who are themselves raging antisemites and won't think twice about repopulating the empty offices with staffers who better "represent" them.

But don't get too giddy about the conservatives who are now, and only now, jumping from that sinking ship. They knew where they were. They wrote what they wrote. They only got cold feet when they realized that the "conservatism" they had signed up for was now feeling assertive enough to think about coming for them.