Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Kevin Roberts

The Trump coalition is showing signs of strain. It’s not surprising. The coalition contains a number of factions with different ideas about what to do with their 2024 electoral victory. The leader of the coalition, Donald Trump, has shown clearly that he prioritizes his power and enrichment. He has empowered others, like Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk, to pursue their goals as well.

Trump’s abilities are clearly declining, and the others’ projects are hitting snags in the form of judicial rulings and public resistance. Additionally, there is an explicitly pro-Nazi faction that some of the others would prefer to keep underground.

In the past few weeks, however, Tucker Carlson interviewed open antisemite  and admirer of Hitler Nick Fuentes on his podcast. This generated some criticism, but Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Carlson and excoriated liberals in colorful language. This, in turn, caused criticism and resignations withinn the Heritage Foundation.

The other side’s splits may seem boring, but it’s useful to understand them. Essential for Democratic strategists. The Washington Post worked through some of the details at Heritage.

The issues at Heritage echo other battles at right-wing institutions and in the conservative movement that have been aggravated by Trump’s embrace of people and views once relegated to the fringes of Republican politics.

A Bluesky thread argues that this is the beginning of the succession fight to control the Republican Party. Trump’s personalization of the party and refusal to develop a successor, along with his evident decline, will make this an ugly fight.

From the Washington Post article:

Legal fellow Amy Swearer during [an internal Heritage Foundation] meetingcalled Roberts’s handling of the controversy “a master class in cowardice that ran cover for the most unhinged dregs of the far right” and described a loss of confidence in his leadership. Asked later in the meeting about his use of the term “globalists” — a common dog whistle for a conspiratorial view of world “Jewry” — Roberts said he didn’t mean to imply criticism of anyone of any particular faith.

Some staffers defended Roberts and pushed back against his critics. One wanted to know what would happen to those who agreed with Roberts and Carlson, and another likened employees talking to reporters to “Judas.” Roberts’s speechwriter, Evan Myers, suggested that Heritage’s attempts to address accusations of antisemitism would eventually mean he would be required to attend a Shabbat dinner, which he said would conflict with his faith.

Another Heritage executive shot back, “I’m deeply sorry that you could not see that as a generous offer but rather a personal attack on you.”

Wednesday’s revolt reflected longer-running tensions with Roberts’ four-year-old tenure atop the $335 million foundation. During the 2024 campaign, he antagonized Trump’s team by initially favoring his top primary rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and then by promoting Heritage’s “Project 2025” as a Trump-aligned initiative, fueling Democratic attacks. Roberts stunned traditional conservatives with policy positions that spurned long-standing orthodoxies, such as his opposing aid to Ukraine in its defense against Russian incursion. And he is facing complaints from female staffers that they face demeaning treatment.

“This was the final straw for me. It’s just the last one, but there are many that have come before it,” researcher Rachel Greszler told Roberts at the staff meeting Wednesday. “… You have always been kind to me, but I do not believe that you are the right person to lead the Heritage Foundation.”

One of the potential splits is over Project 2025. Those splits have been there since the campaign.

“Project 2025 was a huge public relations misstep,” said a former AFPI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their job doesn’t permit them to speak with reporters. “It really put the presidential campaign on the defensive.”

The conflict escalated as Democrats made Project 2025 central to their campaign messaging, highlighting (and sometimes misrepresenting) unpopular proposals and tying them to Trump. Trump aides announced that Heritage employees would be unwelcome in the next Trump administration, and Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, left Heritage in a messy dispute with Roberts.

The Trump administration includes no Heritage Foundation staffers.

Accusations of sexism are coming out.

One of Roberts’s executive vice presidents and new chief of staff, Derrick Morgan, said in an all-staff meeting that he encouraged summer interns to “make yourselves marriageable and go out and seek marriage,” according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Post.

Weeks later, an attorney advising executives on labor law specifically warned that those kinds of remarks created significant legal liability for Heritage, according to two people present at the meeting.

Republicans in disarray! This is only the beginning. There are a number of possible fissures. The Trumpian use of accusations of antisemitism against universities sits uneasily alongside the structures of antisemitism task forces in organizations like Heritage and explicit antisemitism from Fuentes and Carlson..

Then there are the fights for power. The Washington Post chooses not to frame the article in that way – it’s long been felt by the media and others that speaking explicitly about power is slightly gauche. The kind of thing to look for in Heritage and similar organizations is the desire to be a kingmaker. Heritage has been squeezed out of the administration and would undoubltedly like to get back into the power chain. That is part of the calls for Roberts to step down. I don’t know the players well enough to go into more detail.

These are unpleasant people pushing unpleasant ideas, so it’s easy to look away. But there’s a lot more to come.