The most under-covered question in American politics is which “normal” public policy initiatives Donald Trump and the Republican Party will undertake if they win the election in 2024. I’m not saying that’s the only important question or that Trump’s more outlandish ideas don’t matter. But the volume of coverage on the boring policy stakes has been extremely low, and they really do matter!
Trump, unfortunately, doesn’t have much to say about this kind of thing.
But we do have the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which is a good guide to how the ascendant wing of the conservative movement is thinking about policy questions. There are, obviously, a number of right-of-center think tanks, but Heritage plays a uniquely important role, running the operation to identify Trump-aligned staffers for a new administration. Heritage also saw its Russia-hawk foreign policy staffers purged to maximize ideological alignment with Trump. That’s bad for intellectual integrity, but it underscores Heritage’s centrality as a bellwether — it’s not just a well-connected right-of-center think tank, it’s a well-connected right-of-center think tank that’s determined to move with the prevailing conservative winds.
And unfortunately, on housing policy, the winds are blowing in a bad direction.