Nearly two months after Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation, posted a controversial video responding to the backlash over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, the Wall Street Journal attempted to resurrect the media war on Heritage with renewed intensity, refusing to let the issue fade. Its latest front in the campaign is trade policy, where Heritage’s break with decades of free‑trade orthodoxy has become the Journal’s new obsession.
The latest barrage of Christmas-week attacks directed at Heritage and its beleaguered president has far less to do with allegations of anti-Semitism or Roberts himself than with resurrecting the battle over the ideological fault line running through the American conservative movement. While the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has positioned its attacks as principled objections to Heritage’s direction, the pattern is too consistent, and too conveniently aligned with the Journal’sown economic worldview, to be dismissed as mere disagreement. Rather, the Wall Street Journal’s proxy war on Heritage likely has much more to do with the paper’s unwavering loyalty to free-trade absolutism.
For decades, the Journal has treated free trade not as one tool among many but as a litmus test for acceptable conservatism. Any deviation—whether on tariffs, industrial policy, or strategic decoupling from China—has been met with scorn. Heritage’s willingness under Roberts to overturn the old free‑trade assumptions strikes at the very heart of the Journal’s economic ideology. Roberts made that break unmistakable in March 2025, when he posted on 𝕏 that
Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are a tool of statecraft that can level the playing field… Tragically, trade policies over the last several decades coincided with middling economic growth, stagnating middle‑class wages, a mass exiting of the labor force by young people, the breakup of the American family and decaying communities.
Kevin Roberts’ openness to Trump‑style reciprocal tariffs can be understood through the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which holds that decisions should be made to enable families and local communities to retain real authority over their economic well‑being. In Roberts’ view of trade—a view formed by Catholic teachings on subsidiarity—decades of global trade policy had hollowed out towns, weakened families, and stripped local economies of the ability to sustain dignified work—precisely the kind of imbalance subsidiarity warns against. Supporting targeted tariffs becomes a way of restoring the economic conditions that allow families, workers, and communities to flourish at the most local level.
Roberts’ openness to reciprocal tariffs can be understood through the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which holds that decisions should be made to enable families/local communities to retain authority over their economic well‑being. Tweet ThisTreating unfettered globalization as the nonnegotiable core of conservative economic thought, the Wall Street Journal has defended it even as many on the Right began reassessing its costs to American workers, national security, and industrial capacity. The Heritage Foundation’s willingness under Roberts to challenge that old consensus—by questioning the wisdom of deep economic dependence on China, supporting strategic tariffs, and prioritizing domestic production—directly threatens the Journal’s ideological comfort zone.
And because Roberts couples this economic realism with a long‑standing commitment to parental rights and the viability of the American family and the American worker, his agenda exposes just how narrow the Journal’s definition of conservatism has become. But rather than engaging in this substantive debate, the Journal appears to have chosen to personalize its objections, continuing to attack Roberts, because it cannot admit that the conservative movement has moved beyond the economic assumptions the paper still treats as sacred.
Wall Street Journal deputy editorial writer Matthew Hennessey has been especially critical of what he appears to see as The Heritage Foundation’s heresy on free trade. In Hennessey’s Wall Street Journal op‑ed “Donald Trump’s Two‑Doll Problem, published on May 5, 2025, he claimed that Trump’s supporters have turned him into an economic idol, defending his tariff policies even as they impose real costs on American families. Hennessey argued that Trump’s trade agenda amounts to a form of economic austerity dressed up as populism and that treating Trump as infallible on trade blinds conservatives to the damage his policies can cause.
It is difficult to understand why Hennessey would choose to resurrect the scandal on Christmas Eve by renewing his attacks on The Heritage Foundation’s support for President Trump’s trade agenda and issuing a warning to all conservative or faithful Catholic writers, publishers, or think tank fellows who might support President Trump’s policies on trade. Proclaiming “Let the Heritage Foundation’s implosion be a warning to writers and thinkers: Don’t make an idol out of political power,” Hennessey sounds less like a columnist and more like an enforcer delivering a threat.
It was a familiar move: rather than deal with The Heritage Foundation’s challenge to the Journal’s free-trade orthodoxy, Hennessey recast the dispute as a moral failing within Heritage itself. Yet the Wall Street Journal was silent when former Heritage president Kay Coles James, who led the organization from 2018 to 2021, openly embraced DEI‑aligned language and wrote about what she saw as systemic racism in America.
In a Fox News article, Coles James argued that the death of George Floyd could be a “turning point to make Americans finally end the ugly racism that stains our nation’s history and afflicts us like a cancer of the soul.” This was rhetoric that many conservatives viewed as racially divisive and implicitly accusatory toward ordinary Americans, but the Wall Street Journal never mounted a sustained campaign against her. Their tolerance then—and their hostility now—suggests that the real dividing line is not tone or temperament but Roberts’ refusal to defend the Journal’s free‑trade orthodoxy.
At the same time, the Wall Street Journal has celebrated the migration of several Heritage staff members to Mike Pence’s new think tank, treating their departure as a kind of ideological homecoming. That enthusiasm is no mystery: Pence’s rupture with President Trump makes these moves ideologically convenient for a paper invested in celebrating any retreat from the Trump‑aligned trade policy.
All of this underscores the same point: the Journal reliably celebrates any faction that upholds globalization and its free‑trade creed and punishes any institution, like Heritage under Roberts, that dares to break from it. In the end, the Journal’s campaign says far more about its own ideological purity than about Heritage’s direction. What the Wall Street Journal cannot tolerate is dissent from the economic orthodoxy it has spent decades defending. The irony is unmistakable: the paper that prides itself on intellectual rigor appears to have chosen to wage a proxy war rather than confront the substantive debate it deserves.
I have no comment on the Heritage/Wall Street Journal issue.
I have read that President Trump, in his first administration relied on Heritage for recommendations for judicial appointments, especially for the Supreme Court. While we did get the Dobbs decision, I believe that there has been a great deal of disappointment with many other decisions of Trump’s first term appointments.
Ah, in the 90s when the USA was to become a “Knowledge Society” (a nation of consultants) to the dismissal of smoke stack industries and rejection of blue collars trades, American import taxes were lowered to facilitate production overseas while overseas countries raised their import taxes to preclude exports from the USA to perpetuate progressive globalization as the American middle class was hallowed out. Prior to that in the 70’s beginning with Ping-Pong diplomacy jobs were exported to China to promote economic & political stability, jobs for (restless) young men moving to the cities.