Dawn’s Early Light by Kevin Roberts review – weird vibes and pyromania from Project 2025 chief

“The aim of this book is to confront our present situation, to inspire the New Conservative Movement to rekindle the fire of the American tradition, and to empower real Americans to take back our country,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and chief architect of Project 2025, writes in his new book.

What he means by “real Americans” is easily surmised.

JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-president elect, wrote the foreword to Roberts’ book. Trump denied knowing who was behind Project 2025 – the vast and vastly controversial plan for a second Trump administration, full of hard-right policy and promised federal purges – until a photograph surfaced of him and Roberts on a plane grinning together.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s re-election, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist Steve Bannon enthusiastically embraced the words of Matt Walsh, a conservative political commentator: “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda.” Of the Guardian’s reporting of Roberts’s call in his book to “burn” institutions including the FBI, the New York Times and for some reason the Boy Scouts, Bannon commented simply: “The Hard Way”.

Last June, Roberts told Bannon the US was set for a “second American revolution”, bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. Controversy followed. Roberts’s book was delayed. Now the election is done, it’s here – and Roberts has little reason to worry.

His work for Heritage is about “institutionalizing Trumpism”. Even before Roberts arrived there in 2021, the foundation stoked allegations of election fraud with a dedicated website. Roberts does not believe Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020. “I don’t know the outcome,” he told the New York Times, adding: “I am no conspiracy theorist.”

Of course not.

Some guesses as to Roberts’s favorite records: Burning Down the House, by Talking Heads; Pyromaniac, by Def Leppard. In the 300 pages of Dawn’s Early Light – original subtitle: “Burning Down Washington to Save America” – the word “fire” appears 109 times and “burn” 40. Roberts wants a roaring pyre. He has the matches out for Black Lives Matter and the Bureau of Land Management too. He is amused that they share the same initials. The Federalist Papers, this isn’t.

Roberts vibes weird, a cross between Spartacus and MC 900ft Jesus. He quotes Virgil: “My spirit kindles to fire, and rises in wrath to avenge my dying land.” He doesn’t actually quote the rapper also known as Mark Thomas Griffin – “Everyone has a little secret he keeps / I light the fires while the city sleeps” – but you have to double-check he didn’t. In Roberts’s own words: “You can’t have a blaze without some kind of sacrificial transformation.” OK.

Silent about January 6, Roberts embraces “ordered liberty” as an alternative to the rule of law and personal autonomy. He begrudges contraception and derides dating apps. He is hostile toward abortion.

“Ordered liberty demands that each citizen cultivate within themselves an ethic of responsibility for their own liberty and that of the nation,” Roberts intones.

His ideal government “encourages and promotes virtue” for “upright citizens” but “punishes and corrects vice” that dwells within “criminals and scoundrels”. He advocates legislating morality. Deriding opposition from the right as “wax museum conservatives” – easily melted, presumably – he throws down the gauntlet: “We’re going to bust up the Big Tech companies that have short-circuited our children’s nervous systems, spread Chinese propaganda, and addicted millions of people to porn.”

Good luck with that. Just for starters, Elon Musk, Jeff Yass and Melania Trump might have something to say.

A South China Morning Post headline: “In China, Elon Musk’s rising star raises hopes for US engagement. Musk is well known in China and has been lauded for his investment in the country.”

Tariffs, anyone?

Then there’s Yass and TikTok. “How Jeff Yass Became One of the Most Influential Billionaires in the 2024 Election”, a Bloomberg headline screamed. “The libertarian who turned Susquehanna into one of Wall Street’s most powerful trading firms is enmeshed with TikTok – and betting on Trump.”

Yass bet right. After meeting him, Trump flip-flopped and opposes a TikTok ban. As he now sees it, Facebook is worse.

A pack of prospective Trump treasury secretaries are up to their wazoos in China investments. Trump himself maintained a bank account there.

Meanwhile, Melania has weighed in on abortion: “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.”

Plenty of Trump voters in Florida, Arizona and Missouri agree. Not Roberts.

“All Dobbs [the 2022 supreme court ruling which gutted the federal right to abortion] did was finally return to the pro-life movement the right to fight for the unborn on a level playing field again,” Roberts says. Talk about false modesty. Dobbs shredded a half-century of rulings that shielded personal privacy. Roberts also basks in the Texas abortion law, which enlists citizens to snitch on neighbors.

Then again, Dobbs didn’t just lead swaths of red America to embrace a woman’s choice. It spurred more abortions and higher infant mortality rates. Unintended consequences, so it appears.

“In nearly every state that has banned abortion, the number of women receiving abortions increased between 2020 and the end of 2023, according to the most comprehensive account of all abortions by state since the overturning of Roe v Wade,” the New York Times reported.

Roberts professes himself unbothered.

“It is time to fight fire with fire,” he writes. David Byrne and Talking Heads made that sort of thing sound way more fun.

• Dawn’s Early Light is published in the US by HarperCollins