The debate over the direction of the post-Trump right is underway, and one of the first casualties is the Heritage Foundation. On Monday some of its most important conservative scholars and their policy departments said they are leaving Heritage to join Mike Pence’s policy shop.
Some 15 or more Heritage employees, including the leaders of three prominent policy departments, are jumping to the Advancing American Freedom foundation that the former Vice President established in 2021. The defectors include the leaders of Heritage’s most important policy shops: The Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, the Center for Data Analysis, and the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.
The move by John Malcolm and his colleagues at the Meese Center is especially notable. We’re told it is endorsed by Mr. Meese, the Reagan-era Attorney General who is now 94 years old and has been a fixture at Heritage. The Roe Institute is the think tank’s free-market shop—or it was before Heritage embraced Trumpian industrial policy. One data project stifled at Heritage is to map the district-by-district impact of the Trump tariffs.
“They called us first,” says Mr. Pence about the defectors. “They see us as being a consistent, reliable home for Reagan conservatism.” Or maybe simply conservatism, which Heritage was founded to promote and did for decades. But that changed with the arrival of Kevin Roberts as president, who tried to play the game of populist politics rather than promote the think tank’s traditional principles.
The conference climaxed with an address by Vice President JD Vance, heir apparent to President Donald Trump. Vance audaciously claimed, “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests.”
What? Trump doesn’t run his supporters through purity tests?
Ask Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thom Tillis, Liz Cheney, Brian Kemp, Jeff Flake, Paul D. Ryan, Ben Sasse, Justin Amash, Peter Meijer, Don Bacon, Denver Riggleman, Jaime Herrera Beutler … The entire Trump era is littered with Republican elected officials who disagreed with Trump and found themselves driven out of office. Ask former Cabinet officials like John Bolton, Elaine Chao, H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis, John Kelly or Nikki Haley. Heck, ask his former vice president, Mike Pence! A pro-Trump crowd was ready to hang Pence over his willingness to certify the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. That doesn’t count as a “purity test”?
President Trump’s desire to have his name on everything, preferably in gold, is well-known, and at first we thought the addition of his name to the John F. Kennedy center for the arts in Washington, D.C., was ignorable as familiar Trumpian news. But there is the matter of the law.
Under 20 U.S.C. § 76i(a), Congress in 1964 established the Kennedy Center as “a building to be designated as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” The title of the building isn’t a casual naming of the kind that happens when philanthropists donate to a museum and are honored with a wing named after them. The name is enshrined in statute as a memorial to the assassinated President.
The Kennedy Center’s board of trustees was also created by statute, in 20 U.S.C. § 76 (j), which enumerates the responsibility of the officers, including to present music, opera, drama and dance, to contribute to performing arts education and to provide “facilities for other civic activities.” The board is also tasked with ensuring the facility received “necessary maintenance” and had “safe and convenient access” for pedestrians.
Notably absent from this list is the power to rename the Kennedy Center or augment the name by adding Mr. Trump alongside. Further memorials are explicitly banned by the statute, which instructs the board to “assure that after December 2, 1983, no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.”
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