WASHINGTON — The president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group behind Project 2025, told CNN that Donald Trump’s notorious interactions with porn stars do not disqualify the presumptive Republican nominee from implementing their plan to criminalize all the production and distribution of adult content.
“We understand Our Lord works with imperfect instruments, including us,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told CNN last week. “While on the surface it seems like a contradiction, on the whole, it may make him a more powerful messenger if he embraces it.”
The quote is part of a lengthy report by CNN’s Steve Contorno about Trump’s attitudes to his staunch anti-porn allies and supporters, in the context of the current trial over the source of the funds he allegedly used to hush up his sexual encounter with adult performer Stormy Daniels.
“If some of the former president’s allies get their way,” Contorno wrote, “a second Trump term would put that industry on the ropes – and potentially its actors and producers behind bars.”
The CNN report also quotes second-generation staunch anti-porn crusader Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, who thinks a second Trump administration would be “a very good opportunity” to embrace their agenda.
As XBIZ reported, Schilling has been bragging for years that his group is behind the current Republican-led book-banning movement, and that his goal was to purge what he calls “pornography” from libraries.
Last July, Schilling also took credit for the current slew of age verification laws passed in recent months by several states.
And in September, he told a right-wing site that the ultimate aim of the state age verification laws is to create a private right of action, so that parents could directly sue online companies if their children are able to access adult content. He has admitted the state laws are experiments so that the next Republican U.S. attorney general can prosecute anyone uploading adult content that could be accessed by a minor.
The Heritage Foundation’s Roberts told CNN he hasn’t discussed the topic of a porn ban directly with Trump, “but he has talked to the campaign and said there is alignment among those who have policy influence, including Ben Carson, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development.”
Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk, the article notes, “has also made curbing pornography a recurring focus of his popular podcast.”
“Without being presumptuous of the president’s will, there will at least be conversations” about a porn ban “being a priority we can tackle,” Roberts added.
A Trump campaign spokesperson tried to downplay to CNN the role of Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 and American Principle Projects in a future Trump administration by quoting a past statement from its top advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.
“Let us be very specific here: unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official,” LaCivita and Wiles said.
Earlier this month, John McEntee, senior advisor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and a former key figure in the first Trump administration, predicted an eventual full ban on pornography, claiming that once it is enacted, “this country will flourish.”
McEntee told a podcaster that pornography is “the elephant in the room, which is a stain on not only society but the entire dating culture as well”
“Whenever America bans that, which will be happening at some point, everyone will be much better off,” the Project 2025 senior advisor proclaimed.
The introduction to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint document declares that pornography “has no claim to First Amendment protection” and should be outlawed.
Main Image: President Donald Trump delivers the keynote address at The Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club Meeting, October 2017 (Photo: White House)