The Heritage Foundation might be the biggest winner of 2016. The conservative think tank bet big on Donald Trump by biting their tongue and overlooking many of his conservative heresies. While others turned their nose up at Trump, they were the ones reading the electorate.
With Heritage staffers on Trump’s transition team, the group is sure to grow in influence. But those winnings aren’t without additional risk. They’re in danger of being sucked further into Trump’s populist orbit while trying to fill the Republican’s policy vacuum.
Heritage leadership is hoping for a Reagan rerun, when they won cabinet positions and influenced the administration in the 1980’s. The group moved in on the California governor early, pushing their Mandate for Leadership. Today they like to boast that 60 percent of the policies in the Reagan Revolution came from that pamphlet.
Now, with former Heritage founder Ed Feulner serving as Trump’s principal domestic policy adviser, they’re poised to do it again. That’s “the happy task of conservatives,” Heritage President Jim DeMint crowed in a recent op-ed, “is to ensure those ideas lead the way.” That hinges on a simple strategy.
In the absence of a White House plan, their thinking seems to go, Heritage’s plan becomes the president’s de-facto plan. When Trump was stumping, that was a pretty good theory.
Eager to wrap up conservative support, the celebrity candidate copied and pasted five of Heritage’s 11 nominee suggestions for the Supreme Court.
“If you really like Donald Trump, that’s great, but if you don’t, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why?” the candidate crooned. “Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges.”
“You have no choice,” Trump continued. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. You have no choice.”
Whether Trump sticks to his word to appoint a conservative is anyone’s guess. Once in the Oval Office, the president-elect will be free to go his own way. It’s not clear how aggressively Heritage will or can police the 45th president.
But then consider that the group’s political arm, Heritage Action, regularly goes after Republican members of Congress who don’t live up to their standards. They keep a meticulous legislative scorecard, tracking nearly every floor vote and broadcasting the results to a grassroots army across the country.
No one can debate that Heritage certainly stoked the populist flames to rail against the establishment in Washington. More than once, the perfect became the enemy of the good.
But for Trump, there wasn’t a litmus test. Even as they firebombed establishment offices on Capitol Hill, they reserved judgment on the nominee. Even during the primary, when the foul-mouther populist vanquished conservative candidates, the group stayed silent.
In the end, Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul’s near perfect scores on the Heritage score card didn’t help their presidential aspirations. But that doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no standard issue conservative headed to the White House, just a populist question mark.
Next year, Heritage will find out if their power of persuasion will succeed. DeMint seems confident it will. “Every new administration needs to be reminded of its purpose,” he recently wrote, “held to its promises, and kept on the right track.”
One way or the other, though, something’s got to give.
Trump could pick up Heritage’s policy agenda and usher in four years of conservative reforms. Or he could try to use Heritage for his own purposes, perhaps affecting the organization as much as or more than it affects him. Hopefully, it’s the former.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
