Since the 1960s, think tanks and advocacy groups have been key influencers of presidential policymaking. For decades, Democrat and Republican presidents have relied on think tanks for research and policy ideas. Most recently, think tank roles have shifted from advisory to actual policy formulation and implementation, whereby the President is the marionette controlled by the think tank puppeteers.
Research is replete with the fact that seven conservative organizations have had, in just 285 days of Trump 2.0 – hundreds of their recommendations implemented. If, since Jan. 20, your mind has been spinning around after witnessing a rapidly reshaped federal government and change in international diplomacy and social norms, you may wonder who is pulling Trump’s strings.
Let’s examine the seven think tank puppeteers who have controlled President Trump since Jan. 20 and will continue to change the USA until Jan. 2029. This should help you better understand what’s going on at the White House.
Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025
Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in mid-2024 “I know nothing about Project 2025” despite an April 2022 speech at a Heritage Foundation event where he endorsed or acknowledged the project’s efforts (Salon, July 11, 2024).
Project 2025, a 922-page blueprint, contained 735 detailed policy proposals across for Trump to implement across 20 federal agencies (CBS News). Interestingly, only 31% of Republicans are aware of Project 2025 (Navigator Research) and of those who are knowledgeable, only 7% view the blueprint favorably (NBC News).
Data from the Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact’s Oct. 15 report reveals the Trump 2.0 administration has already implemented 251 domestic policies written by the Heritage Foundation. Sixty-four of Project 2025’s foreign affairs and international economic policy proposals have also been implemented since Trump’s inauguration.
Together, this means 315 of Project 2025’s policy proposals (42.8%) have been implemented by Mr. Trump (The Hill). Additionally, about 70% of Trump’s cabinet and over 50 senior officials had prior roles with Heritage or its Project 2025 partner groups (DeSmog).
Here’s just nine high-profile recommendations Mr. Trump implemented: 1) disbanding U.S. Agency for International Development, 2) prohibiting transgender individuals from serving in the military, 3) allocating funds for 100,000 ICE detention beds, 4) laying off thousands of IRS employees and eliminating new funding for tax enforcement, 5) deploying Secret Service and other federal officers as law enforcement in Washington, D.C., 6) canceling federal contracts supporting diversity, equity and inclusion, 7) defunding NPR, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 8) withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement and 9) expanding tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico and China. (The Hill and BBC)
America First Policy
America First Policy Institute (AFPI) prepared nearly 300 executive orders ready for Trump’s signature immediately after his Jan. 20 inauguration. AFPI dominates Trump’s “America First” economic nationalism, immigration restrictions and deregulation task forces personnel and their co-founder Linda McMahon is now Secretary of Education (NPR).
Center for Renewing America
The Center for Renewing America, founded by Russel Vought -- top Project 2025 architect and Director, Office of Management and Budget -- has been instrumental in shaping policies around Schedule F (civil service reclassification), Christian nationalist faith-based governance and federal budget restructuring (Politico).
Claremont Institute
The Claremont Institute has contributed ideological frameworks promoting “national conservatism,” advancing “constitutional conservatism,” state-level resistance to the federal bureaucracy, DEI reforms and climate-related executive orders (DeSmog).
Hillsdale College
Hillsdale College-trained figures have taken education posts across Trump’s agencies, promoting the nationalization of curriculum and the rollback of federal education standards (NCSL).
America First Legal
Stephen Miller’s organization, America First Legal, advises Mr. Trump on litigation and executive acts aimed at neutralizing federal civil rights enforcement, immigration enforcement, Department of Justice strategies and border governance (Politico).
Council for National Policy
The Council for National Policy is the hub for political appointments and helps integrate religious nationalist proposals into agencies’ missions, including Health and Human Services and Education (DeSmog).
285-day assessment of Trump 2.0
Mr. Trump has followed the playbooks presented to him by seven self-serving organizations. Already in play are 251 policies that span from federal agency restrictions to immigration crackdowns, rollback of environmental civil rights protections, and significant centralization of the executive branch.
Internationally, 64 policies created by think tanks are in force and have enabled Mr. Trump to take a sharp pivot toward isolationism, trade protectionism and militarized deterrence that is consistent with the “America First” concept (The Fulcrum).
But, hold your hat. The Project 2025 Tracker and other independent observers note that another 309 objectives of the marionette masters remain “in progress” (www.project2025.observer/en). Reformation of America has only just begun as we’ve still got 1,176 days of Trump 2.0 to go.
As the late Paul Harvey would say at the closure of his historic ABC News radio broadcasts, “and now you know the rest of the story. Good day.”
Steve Corbin is Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.