In the 31st-floor penthouse lounge of the Kimberly Hotel in midtown Manhattan, as waiters refreshed cocktails and jazz piano wafted from the speakers, a hotel employee slid the glass roof closed against the chilly night air. It was official: Kevin Roberts was coming in from the cold.

For a period this summer, Roberts and the think tank he leads, the Heritage Foundation, had found themselves unexpectedly thrown out of the orbit of President-elect Donald Trump, whose last administration had been staffed heavily by Heritage. The source of the trouble was Project 2025, a policy agenda that a consortium of conservative organizations, led by Heritage under Roberts’ direction, had crafted early in the 2024 campaign cycle.

As Democrats laid into the policy agenda, turning it into one of their key lines of attack against Trump, the former president insisted he knew nothing about it, had “no idea” who was behind it and called Roberts’ work “ridiculous and abysmal.”

But Tuesday night, as roughly 80 people gathered for a party to celebrate the release of a new book by Roberts, one of the shortest and least convincing exiles in recent memory appeared to be very much over.

“I anticipate speaking with him pretty soon,” Roberts said of Trump.

Roberts’ new book, “Dawn’s Early Light,” has a foreword written by the author’s friend, Vice President-elect JD Vance. Its release was delayed from September to November after the Heritage Foundation — and Roberts himself — turned into an apparent liability for Republicans over the summer.

By Tuesday evening, though, that particular episode seemed all but forgotten. The crowd — mostly a mix of journalists, many from liberal outlets, and young conservative activists and operatives — chatted amicably over fast-refilled platters of crabcakes and baby lamb chops.

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“We’re very optimistic about working with the administration,” Roberts said during an interview at the party.

Heritage had advertised Project 2025 as a blueprint for an incoming Republican president. In a blitz of campaign messaging this summer, Democrats argued that it was exactly that, foraging through its heap of white papers for the most right-wing policy provisions — excluding abortion from health care, disbanding federal agencies, killing climate change programs — and presenting them as a second Trump presidency’s plans for America. Onstage at the Democratic National Convention, “Saturday Night Live” comedian Kenan Thompson hefted an oversized hardcover copy of “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” Project 2025’s 922-page marquee publication, and remarked: “You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”

If none of this was particularly surprising, Trump’s reaction to it was. In July, as the Democrats’ attacks began gaining traction, he took to Truth Social to insist that “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” (He had, in fact, sat next to Roberts on a 45-minute private flight to a 2022 Heritage conference, where Trump had given a speech praising the organization’s work “to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”)

The disavowal put Heritage in a bind, and the organization scrambled to batten down the hatches. The think tank quickly fired Paul Dans, Project 2025’s director. In addition to delaying the release of the book, Roberts’ publisher, Broadside Books, scrapped its original subtitle (“Burning Down Washington to Save America”) and cover art (which featured a charred match).

Some Trump-skeptical conservatives cast the episode as a morality tale of sorts for Heritage, a pillar of Reagan-era conservatism that eagerly embraced Trump’s first presidency and a mission of, as Roberts put it, “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

The episode seemed to boil down to the internal politics of Trumpworld, where Heritage faced new rivals in the contest for influence in staffing a future administration and complaints from campaign strategists about the high profile of such efforts. And if any doubts about Heritage’s standing had lingered after Election Day, they have been dispelled by Trump’s early administration picks. Thomas Homan, whom he named “border czar,” and John Ratcliffe, his choice for CIA director, were both Project 2025 contributors.

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“If you look at these appointments, I mean, 100% of them are friends of Heritage,” Roberts said during the interview.

That wasn’t to say he had no regrets. In retrospect, he said, Heritage should’ve pushed back louder and earlier after Democrats took aim at the project. “We let them get away with that for six weeks,” he said.

But he was quick to note there were no hard feelings toward Trump. “Project 2025, just as a brand, had become a political liability,” he said. “I always understood, and I understand to this day, why they didn’t want to be associated with that.”

Roberts excused himself to pose for pictures with well-wishers and talk to a long line of journalists. One of them, a Guardian writer, later reported that he was told to “go to hell” by Roberts and escorted out of the party by security.

By the door were stacks of “Dawn’s Early Light,” wrapped in a new, match-free dust jacket bearing a toned-down subtitle: “Taking Back Washington to Save America.” The contents of the book, however, were unchanged, including its denunciations of the “uniparty” destroying the American way of life and its list of institutions that “need to be burned” to restore America: the FBI, “every Ivy League college” and The New York Times.

Sometimes, a second act doesn’t require changing much at all.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Charles Homans/Amir Hamja
c. 2024 The New York Times Company