This week, we learned that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s team invited Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts to speak to cabinet at a closed-door session for his insight on “Trump’s playbook”. Roberts canceled his own appearance, to the disappointment of our leaders.
I am not sure who thought that this was a good idea. Inviting the fox into the henhouse to explain their strategy for getting into the henhouse seems, at best, daft. It is an inexcusable faux pas for a government that has made a point of effectively defending us against the Trump administration and protecting Canada’s sovereignty.
Inviting a key architect of Trump’s dictatorship to speak with our cabinet would tell Trump’s team a good deal more about Canada’s playbook than it would tell Canada about Trump’s.
It breaks a winning streak by the Prime Minister who has, up until now, been methodically protecting Canada from the dangerous administration south of the border. To have offered this invitation, he must have expected valuable intelligence and insight without having considered the horrendous optics, the legitimacy it lends to the extremist Heritage Foundation, nor again the intelligence coup we would be giving the Americans.
What insight we could expect in exchange is a mystery, given that Roberts and his organisation have published their and the president’s plans with remarkable clarity and detail. If we want to know Donald Trump’s playbook, we need only read the Project 2025 document that Roberts oversaw going into the 2024 Presidential election. There is no need to have him come to the cabinet table to tell us.
Kevin Roberts, unlike US Senator Mitch McConnell, has expressed no remorse, however insincere, for being a key part of installing a dictator in the White House and setting his agenda.
Roberts has openly described the current situation as “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”
To invite him is to lend legitimacy to his movement. It is to recognise that Trump’s takedown of American democracy is legitimate. It is to accept and normalise that an extremist organisation may define a national government’s agenda.
It is to be the left that is allowing that revolution to be bloodless.
If we want to understand Trump’s playbook, he has been more than clear about it in public. It is to take over the judiciary, steal elections, shut down government services, hand over the nation’s wealth to its plutocrats, and plunder whatever he can get his hands on for his own use while avoiding consequences.
The agenda of those around him, including Kevin Roberts, is not any more subtle. The Trump administration is a marriage of convenience between big business and big religion.
On the business side, we see decisions like this week’s reversal of the Biden-era requirement for airlines to be held accountable for flight delays. The Transportation Secretary is Sean Duffy, who had been a key lobbyist for the three main airlines in the United States between his time in Congress and his time in this administration.
There was also the bizarre spectacle of Trump’s dinner with a who’s-who of high tech personalities at the White House. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, seated next to Trump, announced that he would be investing $600 billion over the next three years in the United States — then leaned over to Trump and said, in a hot mic moment, “sorry, I wasn't ready …I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with.”
And that’s just this week.
On the other side of the aisle at the wedding venue is the Heritage Foundation, with their president Kevin Roberts wearing the white dress. Three years ago, he aired an episode of his podcast entitled “The Case for Nationalism and a Religious Revival” while the Heritage Foundation that he presides refers to “Christian nationalism” as a “dogwhistle.”
This offspring of this relationship is a corporate-controlled Christo-fascist autocracy intent on making the rich richer and everyone else subjects of the religious right who, it should be reminded, rose as a white supremacist movement built to protect segregation while subjugating women.
Ultimately, though, Trump’s own playbook is far simpler. It is to systematically shut down democracy and make himself King. Rather than inviting Kevin Roberts to bring his extreme ideas to the Cabinet table, the Prime Minister need only listen to 96 seconds of Bill Maher to understand that playbook at its most fundamental level:
The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 have their eyes set on Canada. Trump’s constant bluster about making us the 51st state did not come from either of his own brain cells. We should not do anything that would suggest we are in any way interested in their ideas or their vision of our democratic future.
If anything, we should be telling the Heritage Foundation that their playbook and their leaders are not welcome on our land.