This story originally appeared in NYT Apr. 3, 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/opinion/leonard-leo-heritage-trump-2025.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.hk0.fVnv.E-jUP9wCGYJr&utm_source=pocket_saves

Opinion
Guest Essay

Trump’s Backers Are Determined Not to Blow It This Time Around

April 3, 2024

By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

In a rare display of unity, more than 100 conservative tax-exempt organizations have joined forces in support of Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda, forming a $2 billion-plus political machine.

Together, these organizations are constructing a detailed postelection agenda, lining up prospective appointees and backing Trump in his legal battles.

Most of the work performed by these nonprofit groups is conducted behind closed doors. Unlike traditional political organizations, these groups do not disclose their donors and must reveal only minimal information on expenditures. In many cases, even this minimal information will not be available until after the 2024 election.

Nonprofits like these are able to maintain a cloak of secrecy by positioning themselves as charitable organizations under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code or as social welfare organizations under section 501(c)(4).

Not only are these tax-exempt organizations attractive to large contributors who want to keep their roles secret; 501(c)(3) groups have an added benefit: Donors can deduct their gifts from their taxable incomes.

The benefits don’t end there. The minimal reporting requirements imposed on political nonprofits lend themselves to self-dealing, particularly the payment of high salaries and consulting fees, and the award of contracts to for-profit companies owned by executives of the charitable groups.

“The growth of these groups is largely flying under the radar,” Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, wrote by email in response to my inquiry. “This level of coordination is unprecedented.”

Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, replying by email to my inquiry, wrote, “These are detailed plans to take full control of various federal departments and agencies from the very start and to use every power available to implement radical ethnonationalist regulations and action plans.”

This activity, Skocpol continued, amounts to a “full prep for an authoritarian takeover, buttressed by the control Trump and Trumpists now have over the G.O.P. and its apparatuses.”

In this drive by the right to shape policy, should Trump win, there are basically three power centers.

The first is made up of groups pieced together by Leonard Leo, a co-chairman of the Federalist Society, renowned for his role in the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court and of many key posts in the federal and state judiciaries.

If cash is the measure, Leo is the heavyweight champion. Two years ago, my Times colleagues Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher disclosed that a little-known Chicago billionaire, Barre Seid, who made his fortune manufacturing electronic equipment, turned $1.6 billion over to the Marble Freedom Trust, a tax-exempt organization created by Leo in 2021, helping to turn it into a powerhouse.

The second nexus of right-wing tax-exempt groups is the alliance clustered on Capitol Hill around the intersection of Third Street Southeast and Independence Avenue — offices and townhouses that fashion themselves as Patriots’ Row.

Former Trump campaign aides, lawyers and executive appointees, including Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, Edward Corrigan and Cleta Mitchell, run these organizations. After Trump was defeated in 2020, the cash flow to these groups surged.

The third center is coordinated by the Heritage Foundation, which, under the leadership of Kevin D. Roberts, who assumed its presidency in 2021, has become a committed ally of the MAGA movement.

Heritage, in turn, has created Project 2025 in preparation for a potential Trump victory in November. In a statement of purpose, the project declared:

It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day 1 of the next conservative administration.

There are more than 100 members of Project 2025, and they include not only most of the Patriots’ Row groups but also much of the Christian right and the anti-abortion movement.

In the view of Lawrence Rosenthal, the chairman and founder of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, the convergence of so many conservative organizations leading up to the 2024 election marks a reconciliation, albeit partial, between the two major wings of the Republican Party: the more traditional market fundamentalists and the populist nationalists.

“In 2024,” Rosenthal wrote by email,

the free-market fundamentalists are making their peace on a more basic level than simply tax cuts. Their historic long-term goal — rolling back the federal government to pre-New Deal levels — corresponds to the nationalists’ goal of “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

This is what the likes of the now thoroughly MAGA-fied Heritage Foundation is putting together. Recasting the administrative state as the “deep state,” a veritable launchpad for conspiracy-mongering innuendo, easily brings the populists along for the ride despite a “What’s the Matter With Kansas”-like abandonment of their own economic interests on the part of a sector of the population particularly dependent on the range of targets like Social Security and Medicare that the administrative-state deconstructors have in their sights.

In return the populists are seeing avatars of Christian nationalism in unprecedented roles of political power — to wit, the current speaker of the House.

The populist-nationalist wing has an agenda that “goes beyond what the free-market fundamentalists have had in mind,” Rosenthal continued:

The model here is by now explicitly Orbanism in Hungary — what Viktor Orban personally dubbed “illiberal democracy.” By now, MAGA at all levels — CPAC, media, Congress, Trump himself — has explicitly embraced Orban. Illiberal regimes claim legitimacy through elections but systematically curtail civil liberties and checks and balances, structurally recasting political institutions so as to make their being voted out of office almost unrealizable.

The centerpiece of Leo’s empire of right-wing groups is the Marble Freedom Trust. The trust described its mission in a 2022 report to the I.R.S.: “To maintain and expand human freedom consistent with the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.”

In 2016, according to an April 2023 I.R.S. complaint against Leo filed by the Campaign for Accountability, a liberal reform advocacy group, Leo created a consulting company, BH Group, and in 2020 acquired a major ownership interest in CRC Advisors. Both are for-profit entities based in Virginia.

The Campaign for Accountability’s complaint alleges that “Leo-affiliated nonprofits” paid BH Group and CRC Advisors a total of $50.3 million from 2016 to 2020. During this period, according to the complaint, Leo’s lifestyle changed:

In August 2018, he paid off the 30-year mortgage on the McLean, Va., home, most of which was still outstanding on the payoff date. Later that same year, Leonard Leo bought a $3.3 million summer home with 11 bedrooms in Mount Desert, an affluent seaside village on the coast of Maine, using, in part, a 20-year mortgage of $2,310,000. Leonard Leo paid off the entire balance of that mortgage just one year later in July 2019. In September 2021, Leonard Leo bought a second home in Mount Desert for $1.65 million.

The complaint was based partly on a March 2023 Politico story by Heidi Przybyla. She wrote that her “investigation, based on dozens of financial, property and public records dating from 2000 to 2021, found that Leo’s lifestyle took a lavish turn beginning in 2016,” citing Leo’s purchases of the Maine properties, along with “four new cars, private school tuition for his children, hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Catholic causes and a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse.”

In October 2023, Przybyla disclosed (also in Politico) that Leo was refusing to cooperate with an investigation by Brian Schwalb, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, “for potentially misusing nonprofit tax laws for personal enrichment.”

In a study covering more recent data, Accountable US, another liberal reform group, reported that from 2020, when Leo acquired a share of CRC Advisors, to 2022, seven “groups with immediate ties to Leo’s network have made payments totaling at least $69.77 million to CRC Advisors.”

Those figures were confirmed by Bloomberg’s Emily Birnbaum, who reported that “the sums paid to CRC Advisors by seven nonprofit groups have doubled since Leo came aboard as co-owner and chairman in 2020.”

Leo defended the payments, telling Bloomberg that criticism of the money flowing to CRC Advisors is “baseless” and that CRC performs high-quality work. “CRC Advisors employs nearly 100 best-in-class professionals that put its clients’ money to work,” he told Bloomberg.

In the drive to set the stage for a future Trump administration, the second conservative power center is dominated by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which coordinates its own pro-Trump network.

From 2018 to 2020, the Conservative Partnership was a minor player in Washington’s right-wing community. In that period, according to its 990 report to the I.R.S., its revenues totaled $16.9 million. In the next two years, donations shot up to $80.7 million.

Seven executives at the partnership in 2022 made in excess of $300,000 a year, topped by Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, whose annual compensation at the Conservative Partnership totaled $889,687 in 2022.

The Conservative Partnership and allied groups do not disclose donors, and none of the data on how much they raised and spent in 2023 and 2024 — or the identities of grant recipients — will be available before Nov. 5, 2024, Election Day.

The Conservative Partnership, like many of its sister groups, filed its 990 reports to the I.R.S. for 2020, 2021 and 2022 on Nov. 15 of each following year. If that pattern continues, its reports covering 2023 and 2024 will not be filed until Nov. 15 of the next year.

The partnership lists its address as 300 Independence Avenue Southeast in Washington, a three-story office building on Patriots’ Row that was originally the German-American Building Association.

Groups using the same mailing address include the Center for Renewing America (“God, country and community are at the heart of this agenda”), the Election Integrity Network (“Conservative leaders, organizations, public officials and citizens dedicated to securing the legality of every American vote”), Compass Legal Group, American Creative Network (“We will redefine the future of media-related conservative collaboration”), the American Accountability Foundation (“Exposing the truth behind the people and policies of the Biden administration that threaten the freedoms of the American people”), America First Legal (“Fighting back against lawless executive actions and the radical left”), Citizens for Renewing America and Citizens for Sanity (“To defeat ‘wokeism’ and anti-critical-thinking ideologies that have permeated every sector of our country”).

Since it was formed in 2020, Stephen Miller’s America First Legal foundation has been a case study in rapid growth. In its first year, it raised $6.4 million. In 2021 this rose to $44.4 million and to $50.8 million in 2022.

America First lawyers wrote two of the amicus briefs arguing to the Supreme Court that Trump should be restored to Colorado’s ballot. In one of the briefs, America First defended Trump’s actions and language on Jan. 6, 2021:

President Trump did not “engage in” insurrection. To engage in something is to take an active, personal role in it. Comparisons in modern language abound. When news emerges that nations have “engaged in military exercises,” one expects to read that “ships and planes” have been deployed, not tweets or press releases. Similarly, if someone has been described as “engaging in violence,” one expects that the person being spoken about has himself used force on another — not that he has issued some taunt about force undertaken by a third party. Engaging in a matter and remarking publicly about it are not the same, even with matters as weighty as wars or insurrections.

While the Heritage Foundation had relatively modest revenues of $95.1 million in 2022, according to its I.R.S. filing, its Project 2025 has become an anchor of the MAGA movement.

Trump has said he does not feel bound to accept all of the Project 2025 proposals, but the weight of institutional support from the right and Trump’s lack of interest in detailed planning suggest that those proposals may well shape much of the agenda in the event of a Trump victory.

The authors of Project 2025 want to avoid a repetition of 2017, when Trump took office with scant planning and little notion of who should be appointed to key positions.

Spencer Chretien, an associate director of Project 2025, put this concern delicately in a January 2023 essay published by The American Conservative, pointedly avoiding any criticism of Trump:

In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration, after our political appointees had finally figured out the policies and process of different agencies, and after the right personnel were finally in place.

One function of the project is to put as much ideological muscle as possible behind Trump to ensure that if he wins the White House again, he does not wander afield.

From the vantage point of the right, that muscle is impressive, ranging from Oren Cass’s populist American Compass to Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, from the tradition-minded American Conservative to the Independent Women’s Forum.

In the foreword to the project’s nearly 1,000-page description of its 2025 agenda, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” Roberts, the president of Heritage, wrote:

This book is the work of the entire conservative movement. As such, the authors express consensus recommendations already forged, especially along four broad fronts that will decide America’s future:
1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls “the blessings of liberty.”

Perhaps the most impressive part of Project 2025 is the detailed and ideologically infused discussion of virtually every federal department and agency, all guided by the goal of instituting conservative policies.

Take the 53-page chapter, including 87 footnotes, focused on the Department of Health and Human Services, written by Roger Severino, the vice president for domestic policy at Heritage. The top priority of the department in January 2025, he wrote, must be “protecting life, conscience and bodily integrity.” The secretary “must ensure that all H.H.S. programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from Day 1 until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.”

Going deeper, Severino contended that the department must flatly reject “harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of ‘gender identity’ and bases a person’s worth on his or her race, sex or other identities. This destructive dogma, under the guise of ‘equity,’ threatens American’s fundamental liberties as well as the health and well-being of children and adults alike.”

Severino did not stop there. In his view, the department must be in the business of “promoting stable and flourishing married families” because “in the overwhelming number of cases, fathers insulate children from physical and sexual abuse, financial difficulty or poverty, incarceration, teen pregnancy, poor educational outcomes, high school failure and a host of behavioral and psychological problems.”

Regarding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Severino’s analysis:

By statute or regulation, C.D.C. guidance must be prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character. For example, never again should C.D.C. officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that schoolchildren “should be” masked or vaccinated or prohibited from learning in a school building. Such decisions should be left to parents and medical providers.

At the start of the book, Paul Dans, the executive director of Project 2025, pointedly wrote that “it’s not 1980,” when Heritage produced the first “Mandate for Leadership” to guide the incoming administration of Ronald Reagan. Instead, Dans argued, the United States in 2024 is at an apocalyptic moment:

The game has changed. The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have one chance to get it right.

This time, the conservative movement plans to exercise maximum surveillance over an incoming Trump administration. In other words, there will be no kidding around.

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.