Tell the listeners, for those who didn't follow it, you know, particularly just the outset of what the fight was about, and why do you think it represents the argument over the post-Trump future right?

So I'll back up just a little bit before the conflagration last year to give a little bit of context.

So Kevin Roberts, who's the head of Heritage, comes in about five years ago.

He was brought in by the board to reestablish Heritage's credentials with the MAGA populist base, and he has that kind of nationalist MAGA leaning himself.

As he came in, he tried to shift Heritage's orientation, and a lot of the factions within Heritage, who are the factions within the right more broadly, you know, people who are more in that nationalist base, people who are more aggressively, uh, interested in a foreign policy agenda abroad, and people who are, say, freedom cons, you know, libertarians with a religious streak.

Um, all of these groups existed within Heritage, just as they do within the conservative coalition, and they were all battling each other constantly.

It was constant friction, an internal inability to come to any kind of position on issues because there was so much internal tension over what that future for the conservative movement should look like and what conservative principles are.

Hmm

So how would you describe the influence that Heritage actually has within the Trump administration?

I think it would help to back up for a moment and just talk about the substance of Project 2025.

So this was a sprawling project.

It's more than 900 pages of policy proposals.

And it wasn't just the Heritage Foundation.

They were sort of a convener of the project.

It brought together more than 100 conservative organizations.

Can you say more about that?

But I'm wondering if you can just tell us what the general overview of that report is and what is being alleged here.

So this is a complicated story, and it's a huge story in the race, and I have no doubt that it's gonna continue to shape the race right up until the end.

ProPublica brought out new information on old allegations, actually, that were in play in 2020 when Susan Collins was running against her Democratic challenger then, Sara Gideon.

The allegations were that a man named Martin Cao, who was the head of this company in Hawaii, Naval Tech, he had started this kind of shell game where he would make political contributions to the Collins campaign and the Collins super PAC, and that in exchange, there would be a wink wink and a nudge nudge.

She would write in line items into appropriations bills that could only really plausibly be line items that would go to Naval Tech, meaning they were so specific that only Naval Tech's research could meet the specifications for whatever contract it was that the Defense Department would pull up.

Naval Tech would get these contracts, and they would build stuff, and ProPublica contends they would build useless stuff, stuff that didn't even appeal to the Navy, which they were theoretically doing research to benefit the Navy.

And then the cycle would repeat itself.

And I- I'm wondering if you can explain in what sense exactly you think Susan Collins is a moderate.

But that wasn't the cultural side of things.

That's right.

They're- they're, um, sort of taking on all of the discontent around higher ed from this different angle, they have different solutions, and they also don't share the analysis of the cultural solutions.

It's sort of like a- an equal and opposite reaction, right? Biden was trying to take this on in a huge way, and Trump is now taking this on in a huge way.

So, I talked to this guy, James Kvaal, who was an undersecretary at the Department of Education under President Biden, but he'd also worked in the Obama administration and the Clinton administration.

He's just a Democrat policy guy through and through.

And he was the person in charge of implementing the structural reforms in the Biden administration.

Mm-hmm.

does that mean?

The compact is this 10-page letter that they sent out, and they basically say, if you agree to not use race in admissions, if you agree to have ideological diversity, institutional neutrality, all of these different things that matter to them, we will give you preferred access to federal funds.

It's the carrot to the carrot and stick, arguably.

And the idea is that they're trying to incentivize universities to sign on to this vision of culturally of what they should be like, the kinds of standards they should uphold in order to get access to the federal funds that they need to be competitive, to do research, to advance scientific agenda.

So there's a lot of conversation happening right now about what these universities are going to do.

There have been strong statements by, for example, organizations that represent professors against signing on to any such compact.

And the concern is that it's basically manipulation, that it's the federal government trying to tell these universities, independent institutions how to pursue truth and pursue knowledge.

After all you're reporting about this, and you've been reporting about this not just for this piece, but for quite a long time, what do you think the endgame of the conservative movement is when it comes to higher education? At what point do they feel mission accomplished?

Are you hopeful after writing this piece about the possibilities or not so much?

You know, as a journalist, I try not to be in the habit of being too much of a doomer or being too much of an optimist because my job is to try to understand the world as it is and tell stories about it.

But, you know, I don't have this sort of kumbaya solution that people sometimes crave.

What I will say is that as an articulation of the problem, I think the loss of public trust in universities as a public good, which is something that Raj Vinakota, who is the head of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, which is one of the main groups of university presidents that are trying to bring in some of these pluralism frameworks to their campuses, you know, that's his formulation.

And that was what I heard as a theme over and over again in my conversations with college presidents is that is the problem they're sitting with.

They realize that the public is not bought into the value of what they're doing.

not just as something that might benefit their kids, their sons and daughters, but as something that has a broader good for the rest of the American society, that there will be scientific advancements that benefit everybody, that we will be training new citizens and leaders who will be important for the formation of America, that what goes on on campuses is worthy of public subsidy and because it's not just a good that accrues to particular people, but rather is this enterprise that helps to underwrite democracy.

Is there any particularly important principle that you would hold up, either of you, to sort of not letting the baby be thrown out with the bathwater?