Kevin Roberts

Struggle to stay in power.

To govern, which isn't to say that the policymakers who are conservatives right now are bad at governing.

It's that –

right now we're struggling as a movement to understand that this moment we have with donald trump in particular as president with a majority in the house albeit narrow but a really competent and and you know virtuous speaker and mike johnson and a senate leader who's actually playing ball with conservatives john thune those are fleeting in modern american history and so what we try to do at heritage to address that fracturing is to say

there's a time and place for those intellectual debates.

Heritage is always going to be part of that, right?

That's one of the chambers of our heart.

But when we're in power, let's be sure that while we continue to have those conversations, perhaps they are less vocal so that we can focus on taking advantage of the political opportunity we have.

I think the reason, Pat, that we say that at Heritage so naturally is because of the people we represent.

We don't represent any elected official.

We represent millions of Americans, several hundred thousand of whom support us.

And we understand that while they may have an interest in these intellectual debates, and I certainly do as a historian, that ultimately they want points on the board.

They want to see real policy change.

But that's a somewhat long-winded way of saying the fractured nature of the movement always concerns us, and we're always at heritage level.

as our co-founder, longtime president Ed Fulner would say famously, to add and multiply.

Let's focus on those things we agree on and those policy issues we disagree on.

Let's talk about this on the side while we help our guys and gals govern.

Yeah, a couple of excellent questions in there, and I'll deal with them in sort of chronological order for me in terms of lessons learned as a leader.

I learned this 25 years ago when I started at K-12 Catholic school, and I went directly from the classroom

having been a history professor, history teacher, debate coach to starting the school, which is a way of saying I didn't really know what I was doing, probably thought I knew more.