President of The Heritage Foundation looks ahead to the future of the GOP : NPR

Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, talks about the organization’s priorities and hopes for the future of the Republican Party and its policies.

Transcript

ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:

After the midterms this week, Republicans are asking, where do we go from here? The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation has long provided answers to that question ever since it wrote the mandate for leadership for President Reagan in 1981. The foundation has informed many of the Trump administration’s priorities through the policy blueprint known as Project 2025.

Kevin Roberts is a political strategist and was a key architect of Project 2025. He’s led The Heritage Foundation as its president since 2021. He joins us now to talk about the path forward for Republicans. Welcome.

KEVIN ROBERTS: Thanks, Rob, for having me. It’s a pleasure.

SCHMITZ: So before we get to the midterm results, we had news yesterday. Susie Wiles is out as President Trump’s chief of staff. Stephen Miller is in. What does this tell us about the path forward for the Trump administration?

ROBERTS: Well, it’s a great promotion of a great patriot, Stephen Miller, because what it signals to not just the radical-left majority coming into Congress, but for all of us on the political right, is that President Trump and his administration are not rolling over. I know that people who are on the political left disagree maybe with Stephen Miller with everything. They probably disagree with me and Heritage with everything. He’s an extremely competent, politically conservative, very intellectual policymaker, and for those of us on the political right who are charting the way forward after this week’s major defeat, I think Stephen’s a perfect choice.

SCHMITZ: Why the change?

ROBERTS: I think what the president is signaling is that it is a new era, and he needs Stephen’s acumen, particularly his ability to be on offense even with a large Democrat majority in the House and Senate.

SCHMITZ: So I think it’s safe to say here that the midterms did not go the way that the president hoped. How do these results shape the plans that you and The Heritage Foundation are making for Republicans going forward?

ROBERTS: Yeah, even for people who were more pessimistic than I am, I actually thought the midterms would be OK. Obviously, I was wrong about that. But the people who were more pessimistic did not think that it would be a defeat on the scale. And so the first thing that we have to do is just to read reality truthfully. You acknowledge that, at least in terms of messaging, the message from the political right, from the administration, was insufficient.

I happen to think that the Iran war was a major problem even though I’m supportive of the Iran war, I’ve been saying since April and May that the administration needs to find a way to declare victory because the economic consequences that have aggravated existing inflationary concerns that Trump inherited were a real problem.

And so moving forward, what the administration needs to do is not just handle some of the lawfare and what I’m sure will be some nonsense coming from the Democrat majorities, but articulate a policy vision that gets back to that domestic policy, especially kitchen-table economics issues.

SCHMITZ: So on election night – you know, talking about Iran here – you told my colleague Mary Louise Kelly that larger-scale Republican defeats are not a wholesale rejection of President Trump’s agenda but instead a, quote, “complaint by voters about the economic consequences of the Iran conflict.” You just mentioned that. What needs to change when it comes to the U.S. war in Iran?

ROBERTS: Well, I’ve been saying since May or June, along with my colleagues – national security colleagues at Heritage, that No. 1, we’re supportive of the war. No. 2, the president could have declared victory given the military achievements as early as May or June. And had he done that, I think we would have been able to see the diminished economic disadvantages that have come from the war in time to affect – in a positive way, from our vantage point – the election. It’s really important that the president and the administration make that declaration soon because it will take, according to my economist colleagues at Heritage, several months for the inflationary pressure brought on by energy prices, energy inflation to come down.

I think that what you do – to cut to the chase here, Rob – is you obviously leave some naval and air superiority in Iran, maybe not to the extent of the deployment now. And when the Iranians misbehave, you can zing them with cruise missile attacks, and you also pair that with what has been a really good economic strangulation campaign by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

SCHMITZ: The election’s been largely understood as a referendum on the economy and the cost of living for average Americans. Gas prices – because of the war with Iran and also because of President Trump’s tariffs, which you were initially against before you embraced them – have been a problem. Would you embrace a pivot away from tariffs at this point?

ROBERTS: No, I’m very supportive. We at Heritage are very supportive of a true reciprocal tariff regime. And, you know, if we were building the tariff policy – and we said this going back to the so-called Liberation Day – that we would focus on the 5 to 10 worst transgressors of, quote-unquote, “free trade.” And had the administration focused on that, I think the American people, maybe even a bipartisan way, would have really embraced that. I think there’s still a future for that policy, but it’s going to have to be, you know, more circumscribed than it’s been.

SCHMITZ: You know, when we’re talking about the economy and the problems of the economy right now, you have sort of boiled it down to Iran. Are there any other problems in the economy that you see?

ROBERTS: Oh, yeah. The point about Iran – so thanks for the opportunity to follow up on that – is not that it, in and of itself, has caused all of our economic difficulties or worries. It’s that it’s aggravated some long-standing existing problems. It’s just objectively true, to put respective politics off to the side, that the Trump administration inherited very high inflation from the previous administration, and all of those economic measures were improving the week before the war in Iran. In fact, our chief economist at Heritage, Dr. E.J. Antoni, has predicted that there would have been a Trump economic boom had he not started the war in Iran. The point is that Iran, especially by increasing energy prices, aggravated those inflationary pressures.

SCHMITZ: You know, another question I have for you has to do with corruption. You know, corruption was also at the top of voters’ concerns going into these midterm I was in Hungary earlier this year, where corruption also played a big part in Viktor Orbán’s routing there. People see the president and his family benefiting from cryptocurrency, other investments. You know, what is your reaction to how this has damaged Republicans at the polls?

ROBERTS: Well, just looking at the exit polls, it’s – American voters are saying, obviously, this is a concern, and you draw a very accurate parallel, Rob, with Hungary. I think, as you know, the Orbán government’s policies were very good, but, you know, they had been in power for 16 years, and there clearly was corruption that was a problem.

And so it’s really important moving forward – not just for the administration, not just for Republican allies in Congress, but also for the incoming Democrat majority in the House and Senate – to remember that this has been a very anti-power election. The American people are saying, we’re tired of this. It isn’t just a problem on the right. It isn’t just a problem on the left. Thank goodness, Americans are paying attention, and they want leaders who are not engaged.

SCHMITZ: The agenda for the right used to be really clear – you know, smaller government, lower taxes, free trade. Project 2025 was a huge effort to define this new post-Reagan conservative movement. But you’ve had challenges, I think, keeping everyone aligned. It seems there’s, like, sort of a generational civil war happening in the party with influencers and other right-wing think tanks all trying to define the party. Looking ahead to 2028, what is Heritage’s core vision? How do you see regaining voter trust here?

ROBERTS: Yeah, you’re definitely right about tensions on the right. And to state the obvious, President Trump will be leaving the stage in early 2029, and so all of us who are conservative policy leaders are trying to articulate a vision for the future. For us at Heritage, Rob, we want to do two things. No. 1, we want to focus on those economic matters. We want to actually provide the policy solutions for Americans’ legitimate worries about affordability.

And secondly, we are gratified that still a slight majority of Americans think that socialist policies are bad. But we’re worried that somewhere between 40- and 45% of Americans are willing to try those policies. We have to go explain why those policies of socialists – legitimate socialists – are problematic rather than just, as has been customary of conservative elected officials this cycle, pointing to socialists, pointing to neo-Marxists and just labeling them as that. The American people actually want answers.

And so that’s a way of saying, to give you the bottom line here, that at Heritage, we’re trying to keep things simple. We’re trying to address the kitchen-table issues. We will continue to preach for a more restrained national security posture, which, until the Iran War, this Trump administration has done a very good job of.

SCHMITZ: So are you going to put a stake in the ground here and say whether you’ll support Marco Rubio or JD Vance for 2028?

ROBERTS: (Laughter) Nice try, but that’s not something we do or can do at Heritage. We don’t get into endorsements. What we can say is, if – whoever the conservative standard bearer is in 2028, whoever the conservative officials are running for office in 2028, we want them to be talking about these issues that address these affordability and economic concerns.

SCHMITZ: That is Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. Thank you.

ROBERTS: Thank you.

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