That turned deadly fast. Following the Supreme Court ruling Monday that Donald Trump shall be king, the Heritage Foundation’s president cheered the ruling and told a right-wing audience that the nation is at war, and he’s ready to kill “the left” if they fight back.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, who has led Heritage since 2021, said in an appearance on the far-right news channel Real America’s Voice.
On Wednesday, the Biden campaign reacted to this threat of violence with a statement invoking history. “248 years ago tomorrow America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” the statement said.
“On January 6, they proudly stormed our Capitol to overturn an election Donald Trump lost fair and square—something not seen the Confederacy was able to accomplish—now they are dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America,” it continued. “Joe Biden rejects Donald Trump's revenge, resentment, and retribution.”
In the interview, the Heritage Foundation president claimed that the “radical left” has “taken over our institutions.”
“In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win,” Roberts said. “We’re in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be despairing.”
Roberts and the Heritage Foundation have laid the groundwork for that in Project 2025, their authoritarian, fascist blueprint for a second Trump administration. Roberts has called the plan an effort to “institutionaliz[e] Trumpism.”
It’s not Roberts’ first threat against the left. “People will lose their jobs,” he told The New York Times in January, speaking about federal workers who will be rooted out in favor of Trump loyalists as laid out in Project 2025. “Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that.”
But his latest comments suggest that if progressives fight back, then all bets are off. In fact, the architects of Project 2025 have reportedly been working on a plan for Trump to deploy the military as law enforcement against domestic protesters under the Insurrection Act, which was last updated in 1871. They’ve even drafted executive orders, the Washington Post reported last November.
They also plan to use the law to deploy the military along the southern border, according to Trump’s top immigration adviser, the white nationalist Stephen Miller.
“Bottom line,” he told The New York Times in November, “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”
The threat is real, legal experts argue. "It's really up to the president to decide when to use the armed forces as a domestic police force," Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told NPR earlier this year. "And that is tremendous cause for concern, because an army turned inward can very quickly become an instrument of tyranny."
Roberts and the team behind Project 2025 are creating Trump’s roadmap to tyranny. And Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative majority just gave it the green light.
That makes the disturbing interview Trump gave Time magazine in April even worse. Asked if he thought there’d be political violence if he loses in November, Trump said only, “I think we’re going to win. And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
It depends on us. Help make sure that Project 2025 is never implemented. Your donation of $10 to these candidates can help make sure Democrats sweep in 2024.
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