Overview

Background

Roberts was born on June 24, 1974, in Lafayette, Louisiana. He received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1996, a master's degree in history from Virginia Tech in 1999, and a doctorate in American history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. His doctoral work focused on African American family structures during slavery — an academic background that stands in some contrast to the culture-war politics he now champions.

From 2003 to 2005, Roberts taught college-level history courses. In 2006, he founded the John Paul the Great Academy, a private Catholic school in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he served as president and headmaster until 2013. From 2013 to 2016, Roberts served as president of Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming. Under his leadership there, the college adopted a policy of refusing to accept federal student loans and grants, lest it be forced to violate Catholic tenets — a stance that foreshadowed the anti-administrative-state philosophy he would later champion at Heritage.

Roberts left Wyoming Catholic College in 2016 to become executive vice president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which elevated him to chief executive officer in 2018 and where he remained until being named president of Heritage in October 2021. He assumed office at Heritage on December 1, 2021, succeeding Kay Coles James.

Public Role in the Second Trump Administration

Project 2025 and the Policy Blueprint

Roberts's most consequential contribution to the second Trump administration was his stewardship of Project 2025, the sweeping transition planning effort that Heritage organized in advance of a potential Republican presidency. Billed by Heritage as a blueprint for a future Republican administration to restructure many parts of the U.S. government, Project 2025 launched in April 2022. Roberts wrote the foreword to the document and his organization published the anthology.

The project became a major flashpoint during the 2024 campaign. Trump called the program "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal" as the then-Biden campaign zeroed in, pointing to the 900-page conservative plan to steer voters away from a second Trump administration. Despite Trump's public disavowals, the overlap between the document's recommendations and the administration's early actions was widely noted. In Trump's first 100 days, he signed dozens of executive orders, aggressively implemented tariffs, carried out deportations, erased diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and created the government-slashing DOGE — a playbook that appeared similar to what was laid out in Project 2025. Roberts himself acknowledged Heritage's role without overclaiming it, telling NPR: "If the Heritage Foundation … has a tiny role in providing some ideas and some of the people to help that happen … then we're very happy about that."

Institutionalizing the New Right at Heritage

Beyond Project 2025, Roberts has used the Heritage presidency to reorient the institution toward a more populist and nationalist brand of conservatism. Since taking the helm in 2021, Roberts led Heritage through a period described internally as bold renewal — launching initiatives including the Oversight Project, the Border Security and Immigration Center, and transformational election projects, while growing annual revenue by 27 percent to more than $100 million. He reasserted Heritage's voice in the national conversation by calling out global elites at Davos, labeling Big Tech the "enemy of the people," demanding accountability for foreign aid, and identifying the Chinese Communist Party as America's foremost adversary.

Roberts has described his broader ambition in expansive terms. According to the New York Times, Roberts told the paper that he views Heritage's role today as "institutionalizing Trumpism," and that the lesson of Trump's first term was that "the Trump administration simply got a slow start" — a mistake he and Heritage's allies in Project 2025 believed must never be repeated.

The "Second American Revolution" Controversy

In July 2024, Roberts ignited a significant controversy with remarks made on a conservative media program. On July 2, Roberts told the program, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." The Heritage Foundation and Roberts faced widespread blowback, though both stood by the comment, dismissing criticism as being in bad faith. The episode prompted Trump to further distance himself publicly from Project 2025, though without directly naming Roberts.

The comments were not an aberration. Heritage leadership directed employees to read Roberts' 2024 book, which agitates for a "Second American Revolution," and to leave if they could not agree with the positions therein. The book, Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, carried a foreword by then-vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. Vance called Roberts's ideas "an essential weapon" in the "fights that lay ahead" and described Roberts as "somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice."

Recent Developments

By early 2026, Heritage was experiencing significant institutional turbulence that Roberts's confrontational leadership style had helped produce. The proximate cause of an ongoing staff exodus was a video Roberts recorded in October defending Tucker Carlson's decision to amplify the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. Scores of board members, employees, and visiting fellows departed, variously citing antisemitism, misogyny, retaliation against employees who dared to speak up, and an institutional pivot away from free market principles. According to Reason, which reported on the upheaval, the turmoil had been building well before the Fuentes episode.

The departures reflected a broader tension within the American right between the Heritage of old — a free-market, Reaganite institution with a reputation for rigorous policy research — and the populist, nationalist direction Roberts has charted. The Heritage Foundation, once described as a staid think tank, has since Roberts's arrival in 2021 leaned into the culture wars with gusto. Whether the institution can sustain its fundraising base and policy influence while weathering the internal fractures remains an open question as of mid-2026.

Outlook

Roberts remains a central figure in the architecture of Trump-era conservatism, even as the relationship between Heritage and the White House has occasionally been complicated by the political liability Project 2025 created during the 2024 campaign. His ability to consolidate financial resources — Heritage crossed the $100 million annual revenue threshold under his leadership — gives him a durable institutional platform regardless of short-term political friction.

The internal revolt at Heritage, if it continues, could constrain Roberts's influence by weakening the foundation's credibility with traditional conservative donors, policy scholars, and Capitol Hill allies who valued the organization's pre-Trump reputation. At the same time, the populist coalition he has cultivated has shown little sign of abandoning him. Roberts has made clear that his vision extends well beyond a single administration: he predicted that his "second revolution" would be complete by 2050, coinciding with what he described as a new "great awakening" bringing America back to its religious foundations. Whether that long-horizon ambition survives the immediate pressures on his institution is among the more significant open questions in the American conservative movement heading into the latter half of the decade.