Ideological purity knows no limits. Donald Trump represents a “dilution” of all the good morally upstanding values, doncha know, because Trump is neither conservative nor libertarian, and is only a Republican as a convenience, as it is almost impossible for even a billionaire to be elected to the Presidency (witness the short trajectory of H.Ross Perot), and the Democrats had already foreclosed any movement that would allow Trump in under THEIR version of the “big tent”.
A little background here. Beginning around 2011, I began going to every conservative “think tank” and funding organization out there to try and get support to turn my book “A Patriot’s History of the United States” into either six TV video segments (a la Milton Friedman’s old “Free to Choose”) or a single D’Souza-type documentary feature. I hit every one. Only Citizens United provided any support.
The answer at Heritage at the time was similar to almost all others: “We don’t do video.” I explained to the administrator-—a veep level guy-—that young people do not read policy papers, nor do they attend lectures and panel discussions, and that like Breitbart said we had to address the culture via video. It fell on deaf ears.
Fast forward to last year. I had reason to re-approach Heritage and the guy I interacted with was much more positive-—but their budget for video was way under what the project would entail. He said DeMint understood the need to shift to video, but it was a slow process.
I think DeMint wanted to get Heritage up to the 21st century on a lot of levels. The notion that it was “non-partisan” was as silly as the notion that Brookings is “non-partisan.” Still, I know there was a lot of resistance from the “pure” scholars who are the types to make a bullet in a factory then claim they had no part in who it killed.