The American Heritage

It is difficult to report on the US-based Heritage Foundation without describing its work in exaggerated terms. Founded in 1973 and based in Washington, DC, this ultra-right-wing foundation is one of the richest think tanks in the world and has half a million members. It has an enormous influence on the current policies of the Trump administration and occupies a number of key positions in government departments, as well as in the offices of members of the US Congress: an estimated 30 percent of staff are people who were trained at Heritage.

No comparison with Germany

The Heritage Foundation (HF) is not a foundation as we know it in Germany or Europe; a comparison with party-affiliated foundations here, for example, hardly works. Heritage is a power center of the Republican Party, a political machine with enormous resources and influential personnel, and above all, it does not focus on political science analyses of current developments: it aggressively and confidently positions its own campaigns. The implementation and execution of political demands are an integral part of its activities.

Project 2025, the model for the work of the second Trump administration, is only the best known example. Since 2020, Heritage Action, described as a “sister organization,” has been working to influence US Congress policy in a Christian-nationalist direction. Heritage Action acts as a hinge between extra-parliamentary, conservative grassroots initiatives and the members of Congress who are being pressured. Since October 2024, HF's Project Esther has been active, defining pro-Palestinian activism in the US as part of a global Hamas Support Network and attacking it as anti-American and anti-Semitic.

Added to this are the activities we are familiar with here from foundations and think tanks: constant political lobbying at the parliamentary level – including “thousands of meetings with government officials and members of Congress,” candidate briefings, working groups and congressional hearings, political education across society, targeted training of young politicians, and extensive publications.

Project 2025

In a 2023 handbook for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the HF gave members of the Christian conservative Republican right a voice in 920 pages, supported by an advisory board of 100 people and more than 80 influential organizations, and led by Trump confidant Paul Dans. The handbook has since been downloaded more than 5.4 million times from the Heritage website, a record for a think tank publication. “The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 aims to ‘save the country’ from the ‘rule of elites and woke culture warriors’ and replace democracy with Christian-inspired authoritarianism,” according to the US-based Global Project against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), which meticulously tracks these authoritarian efforts.

In its 2024 annual report, the HF wrote: “The much-lauded Project 2025 has achieved the unimaginable: it has united the conservative movement behind a comprehensive package of policy proposals and built a personnel database that now includes tens of thousands of people eager to see these proposals implemented. This will pay off for years to come.” Since President Trump took office in January 2025, large parts of the handbook have been implemented. Thousands of employees considered disloyal have already been dismissed from government agencies and ministries in order to avoid repeating the negative experience of the first Trump administration, which lacked sufficiently well-trained and loyal staff.

Heritage in Europe

The foundation and its staff have repeatedly made it clear that they are no friends of the EU and its “woke” policies. Their sympathies in Europe lie with illiberal autocratic governments such as Viktor Orbán's in Hungary or the Polish right-wing conservatives of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS).

Trumpism, or the MAGA movement, has long since arrived in Europe, and the Heritage Foundation has been involved from the outset. Take Mike Gonzalez, for example. He is a senior fellow at the HF and an expert on international relations. In 2020, he was the first signatory of the Carta de Madrid, the founding manifesto of the Foro Madrid. There, the VOX-affiliated foundation Disenso formulated the far-right claim to a so-called Iberosphere, a common sphere of interest and identity for the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America and Spain in the colonial tradition. Since then, Gonzalez has visited Europe several times. In February 2025, he attended the big “Make Europe Great Again” event in Madrid, organized by VOX and Patriots for Europe (PfE) under Santiago Abascal, together with Heritage President Kevin Roberts. Gonzalez later wrote enthusiastically about the atmosphere there and how “Trumpy” the event had been. The Americans had come as ‘brothers in arms’, he said, and the leaders of PfE, the ‘13 Trumpiest parties in Europe’, had taken turns applauding the Trump effect in front of 2,000 people, describing it as a ‘tornado’, a ‘hurricane’ and a much-needed ‘global upheaval’. This, he said, would create a “global alliance for freedom, or rather a rebel army, to oppose the ‘woke’ empire that dictates how the world should behave.”

Kevin Roberts, who has headed the Heritage Foundation since October 2021, has visited Europe several times, as have Gonzalez and James Carafano. In March, an article on vsquare.org revealed that Carafano, Roberts' most important advisor, had invited participants to an internal workshop in Washington on behalf of the HF. The topic: “The Great Reset,” the major restructuring of European institutions. A paper leaked by vsquare, written by the two European think tanks Ordo Iuris (Poland) and Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC, Hungary), calls for, among other things, the disempowerment of the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. The EU should be transformed into a “European Community of Nations” (ECN). This would fit into the political framework envisaged by Viktor Orbán when he says that the battle must be won together in Brussels, where the “decisive battle” will take place.
Also in May, HF leader Roberts visited Paris to meet with leaders of far-right parties.

Always against reproductive rights

Spain, France, Poland, Hungary: the MAGA movement's points of entry into Europe have long since multiplied, partly thanks to political figures from the Heritage network that Trump has appointed here. One example is Andrew Puzder, the US ambassador to the EU, who previously campaigned against abortion rights as a lawyer in the US. The fight against reproductive rights and sexual self-determination is a constant in Heritage's work. Here, the foundation still has some wishes to fulfill with President Trump, because ending the right to abortion is only the beginning; enforcing the rights of the “unborn” against pregnant women and renaming the Department of Health to the “Department of Life” are top priorities. In late October of this year, Roger Severino, vice president of HF and known as the architect of its anti-abortion campaign, spoke at a conference in Rome attended by the Italian Machiavelli Institute about declining birth rates and the “demographic crisis.”

In Germany, Heritage has so far lacked an obvious ally from the family of “Trumpiest parties.” There are official channels to the CSU and CDU, for example through Armin Petschner-Multari's campaign company The Republic, which also invites representatives of Heritage to its annual conferences in Berlin. James Carafano was a guest in Berlin in 2025, as he has been in previous years. In 2025, Heritage will also be a co-organizer for the first time, together with others, such as the global organization of right-wing parties, the International Democracy Union, which sees itself as a “Global Alliance of the Center Right.” This fits in with Heritage's plan to promote a “nationalist internationalism” of “national conservatism” and, through cooperation with like-minded parties, think tanks, and movements, to bring the momentum of the MAGA movement to a global level—under the leadership of the Trump administration, of course.

This article first appeared as a guest contribution in Antifaschistisches Infoblatt No. 149, 4/2025.

Redaction: Ulli Jentsch