Kevin D. Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, a powerful think tank at the center of conservative politics. He makes more than $800,000 a year. He manages a budget of $100 million. He has a doctorate in history.
Now, he is trying to escape a gaffe that could derail his career. So he is asking allies to believe something at odds with his sophisticated credentials: He erred out of ignorance, because he does not follow current events.
“I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news,” Mr. Roberts told staff members at the Heritage Foundation last week. “I consume a lot of sports.”
A few days before that, Mr. Roberts had appeared to throw the full weight of the Heritage Foundation onto one side of a bitter conservative family fight over the rise of the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. After the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson conducted a friendly interview with Mr. Fuentes, Mr. Roberts posted a video on social media that defended Mr. Carlson and called his critics “the globalist class” and a “venomous coalition.”
Mr. Roberts, who quickly faced blowback within his own organization, apologized and sought to shift blame. He said the words he read aloud in the video had been written by an aide, who has since resigned.
“I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” he said in the staff meeting, according to a video posted online by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet. “I still don’t.”
That has not satisfied Mr. Roberts’s critics, who wanted him to delete the video and make a more forceful denunciation of Mr. Fuentes’s racist and antisemitic rhetoric. Some of them, in fact, saw Mr. Roberts’s excuse as a new kind of insult — asking them to believe the implausible.
“Who could believe that the head of a think tank doesn’t think?” said Charles Jacobs, the president of the Jewish Leadership Project, which resigned from a Heritage Foundation task force meant to fight antisemitism after Mr. Roberts’s video was released.
“If it’s true, he’s incompetent, and he should leave for that reason,” Mr. Jacobs said. “And if it’s not true, he’s a liar.”
Remaking an Institution
This controversy has thrown a new spotlight on Mr. Roberts, who took over the Heritage Foundation in 2021 and has recently remade the 52-year-old institution in Mr. Trump’s image.
Mr. Roberts has also appeared to remake himself, from the affable leader of a Catholic college into an activist who uses the ominous language of the far right. Last year, for instance, he said in a podcast interview: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Some conservatives have said he has shirked the responsibility that comes with leading a venerable Republican institution.
“Playing these games, refusing to confront radicals, represents an abdication,” wrote Oren Cass, a conservative economist who previously contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint called Project 2025.
In an essay posted on Sunday, Mr. Cass criticized Mr. Roberts for claiming to be like the clueless fictional news anchor Ron Burgundy, who would read anything that came across the teleprompter. “He must have mentally processed the words he was speaking,” Mr. Cass wrote.
Mr. Roberts declined to comment, as did the board of trustees, which ultimately controls Mr. Roberts’s fate. Instead, the foundation provided a statement from its chief advancement officer, Andrew Olivastro.
“Dr. Roberts has long been a target of these attacks because of his unwavering fight to save our Republic,” Mr. Olivastro said. “Under his leadership, Heritage has grown more successful by almost every measure.”
Tax filings show that, under Mr. Roberts, the group’s staff has grown while its revenue has stayed roughly flat. In 2023, the filings show, the foundation ran a $6.7 million deficit after years of large surpluses.
Mr. Roberts, 51, was born in Lafayette, La., an oil town that fell into an economic slump when he was young. In interviews, he has said his parents divorced when he was 4. Mr. Roberts became an outstanding high-school debater, enamored by the conservative ideas of the right-wing figure Pat Buchanan, who was a fierce critic of Israel’s influence on U.S. politics.
Mr. Roberts received a doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin, diving into primary-source documents to write a dissertation on how the composition of enslaved people in Louisiana evolved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
In 2013, he found a job that blended academia and conservative activism, as president of the tiny Wyoming Catholic College. Mr. Roberts built a national media presence off the school’s fiercely independent “Cowboy Catholic” personality. The school drew attention both for its strict morality rules — couples were permitted hand-holding and “an occasional hug” — and for its rejection of federal student aid and the outside oversight that came with it.
“It allows us to practice our Catholic faith without qualifying it,” Mr. Roberts told a New York Times reporter in 2015.
After three years in Wyoming, he joined the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based think tank that helped push the already red state further to the right — calling for lower property taxes, championing charter schools and questioning the science of climate change. Mr. Roberts eventually became the group’s chief executive for about seven months in 2021.
But in a state capital full of big personalities, Mr. Roberts was overshadowed by others, particularly Brooke Rollins, a charismatic activist who had led the organization from 2003 to 2018. Ms. Rollins later joined the first Trump administration, and is now secretary of agriculture.
“I always thought of him as the follow-on,” said James Henson, who leads a project on Texas politics at the University of Texas. “She was the real engine for building T.P.P.F.”
In 2021, Mr. Roberts joined the Heritage Foundation, which had four times the budget of the Texas think tank but was mired in questions about its direction.
Heritage calls itself the country’s “most influential policy organization,” and it had more than 400 staff members dedicated to mapping out conservative ideas and lobbying for their adoption. But it had repeatedly changed to remain in the Republican mainstream, adapting to policy shifts from Reaganism to the Tea Party.
The organization helped staff the first Trump administration, seeking to steer it toward more traditional Republican policies. But it was out of sync with the policies that animated Mr. Trump while he was out of power. And it had competition. Newer pro-Trump think tanks — including one led by Ms. Rollins — were wooing the same donors.
Knowing the Time
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation invited a Trump rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, to address its gala, but not Mr. Trump — considered a public snub by Mr. Trump’s inner circle.
Once Mr. Trump brushed aside Mr. DeSantis and took control of the 2024 Republican primary, the Heritage Foundation scrambled to get itself in line with Mr. Trump’s views. Mr. Roberts spoke about knowing “what time it is in America,” casting Mr. Trump’s ideas as the movement’s future.
He adopted Mr. Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, which have been repeatedly found to be baseless.
“Do you believe that President Biden won the 2020 election?” he was asked by a Times reporter in early 2024.
“No,” Mr. Roberts said. But he conceded that he did not have proof that Mr. Biden’s win was fraudulent. “Is it possible he won? Sure. But can I say definitively that he won? No,” he said.
The culmination of Heritage’s turn toward Trumpism was Project 2025, in which Heritage oversaw and financed the compilation of a nearly 900-page plan for Mr. Trump’s second term. It echoed some of Mr. Trump’s priorities, like the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, the end of the Department of Education and the erosion of the Justice Department’s independence. But it also contained ideas out of step with Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, like a call to outlaw pornography.
After shifting the group’s politics, Mr. Roberts began to change his own public personality. In July 2024, when he made the “remain bloodless” comment, an uproar over the remark provoked a backlash from Mr. Trump and those close to him.
Democrats used Project 2025 to attack Mr. Trump during his 2024 campaign, and Mr. Trump sought to disavow it. Mr. Trump’s aides issued a statement indicating they believed the Heritage Foundation was improperly speaking for Mr. Trump, saying the project’s demise “would be greatly welcomed.”
Heritage responded by firing one of Mr. Roberts’s subordinates: Paul Dans, who had overseen Project 2025’s director. The group told a conservative news outlet that Mr. Dans had been pushed out for “abusive and demeaning behavior” toward colleagues and shared documents showing he had demanded $3.1 million in severance. Mr. Dans felt he was scapegoated.
“The Heritage Foundation continues to trash my good name and professional reputation for their benefit,” Mr. Dans said at the time. He has since announced his candidacy for a Senate seat in South Carolina, and settled his differences with the Heritage Foundation. “Kevin Roberts is a patriot,” he said in an interview last week.
Mr. Roberts survived that controversy, though Heritage seemed to have lost its place as the unquestioned leader of conservative policy thinking. Some rival organizations run by those closer to Mr. Trump zoomed upward, though their budgets are still far smaller than the Heritage Foundation’s.
After Mr. Trump won a second term, he did adopt many of Project 2025’s ideas. Mr. Roberts showcased his connections to the new administration by releasing a book with a foreword written by Vice President JD Vance. (Mr. Vance has not spoken publicly about him since his video defending Mr. Carlson, and declined a request for comment from The Times).
Then, Mr. Roberts jumped into the debate about Mr. Fuentes.
Mr. Fuentes leads a movement of so-called groypers, who oppose diversity and immigration and believe the United States was better off when Christian white men were in charge. On Oct. 27, Mr. Carlson posted an amicable interview he conducted with Mr. Fuentes, who said that “organized Jewry” undermined American cohesion.
The interview has been condemned by Republicans including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
On Oct. 30, Mr. Roberts posted his video jumping to Mr. Carlson’s defense. Jewish Republicans objected not only to his support for Mr. Carlson, but also to the language he used to describe Mr. Carlson’s critics, like “globalist,” which could be seen as a coded reference to Jews.
In his meeting with staff, Mr. Roberts said those remarks had been written by his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus. “When the script was presented to me, I understood from our former colleague that it was approved,” he said.
Mr. Neuhaus was reassigned after Mr. Robert’s video defending Mr. Carlson was posted, and then left the foundation, the organization said. Mr. Neuhaus declined to comment.
In Mr. Roberts’s meeting with Heritage Foundation staff last week, Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow, accused him of a “master class in cowardice” for dodging blame for the video. She used his own words against him.
“Those are not the actions of a man who knows what time it is,” Ms. Swearer said, according to the video. “Frankly, I’m not even sure they’re the actions of a man who knows how to tell time.”
Julie Tate contributed research.
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
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