Nothing to See Here, Just the Project 2025 Mastermind Allegedly Telling People He Killed His Neighbor’s Dog With a Shovel

There are many reasons to be terrified of Project 2025, the 900-page document published by the Heritage Foundation that lays out, in great detail, how the next Republican president should lead and reshape the country. (Donald Trump claims to have nothing to do with the group, which is not believable in the slightest.) The manifesto calls for getting rid of the Department of Education. It calls for giving the president total power over certain government agencies that are supposed to be independent. It provides a roadmap for decimating reproductive rights, and says it wants to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Not surprisingly, it attacks “woke” issues such as “radical gender ideology.” Also, the guy behind it allegedly told people he killed his neighbor’s dog with a shovel.

The Guardian reports that Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts allegedly “told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004,” when he was history professor at New Mexico State University, according to former colleagues who spoke to the outlet. “My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” Kenneth Hammond, who served as chair of the history department at the time, told The Guardian. Two other people told the outlet they remember hearing a similar story “directly from Roberts at a dinner at his home,” and three other people said they heard the same story from coworkers who said they were told about it from Roberts. The Guardian notes that none of these people recall Roberts “ever saying that the dog he allegedly said he killed was actively threatening him or his family.”

Roberts has denied killing the dog, telling The Guardian: “This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence. In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.” According to the outlet, Roberts “did not answer questions about why several people say he told them that he had.” A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told Vanity Fair: “This never happened. The ‘reporting’ is based on 20-year-old hearsay where the dog owner himself admits he doesn’t even know what happened to this dog.” She added: “The story is false. We have witnesses who can attest to its inaccuracy.”

Animal abuse has been a popular subject for MAGA Republicans over the last several months, in that more than one Trump-supporting figure has admitted to either killing an animal or being weirdly obsessed with animal carcasses. In April, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem came under fire for writing in her memoir that she shot and killed her family’s dog, as well as a goat. Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, among other things, admitted to planning to eat the flesh of a road-killed bear cub, and when it turned out he didn’t have time, staged an elaborate bear-murder scene in Central Park. Later, an unearthed 2012 Town & Country interview with his daughter revealed he once beheaded a whale, for which he is now under investigation. (At a Trump rally this month, Kennedy told the audience he got a letter “saying they were investigating me for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago.”)

For his part, Trump himself is known for hating dogs. Which, of course, has not stopped him and his running mate from spreading a baseless rumor that dogs (and cats) are being eating by immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and pretending to be very upset about it.