The leading figure behind a hard-right policy manifesto reportedly boasted about killing his neighbor’s dog with a shovel.
Kevin Roberts—president of the Heritage Foundation, which produced the Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump presidency—bragged to colleagues and dinner guests about the alleged incident in 2004, during his time as a professor at New Mexico State University, according to The Guardian.
The news comes as the Republican Party pushes claims, widely debunked as an internet hoax, that Haitian migrants are killing and eating people’s pets in vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s home state of Ohio.
The Roberts report also follows several months after one-time frontrunner South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was not chosen by Donald Trump as his running mate after she wrote in an autobiography that she had once killed a family dog.
The Guardian, which published the Roberts revelations on Tuesday, reported that it interviewed three people who attested to having heard the story directly from Roberts, as well as several others who claim to have heard of it secondhand.
“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,” Kenneth Hammond, a fellow former history professor at the university, told the newspaper.
“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a horrific thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it,” said Marsha Weisiger, another of Roberts’ former colleagues.
“If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” she went on, adding that Roberts had apparently also said he’d considered killing the dog’s puppies.
Roberts denied killing the dog to The Guardian, saying “This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence.” But the newspaper reported that he did not answer questions about why his former colleagues say he told them he did it.
Although the newspaper reported that it was not able to independently verify whether the killing actually took place, reporters were able to track down the dog’s former owner, Daniel Aren, at his home in Las Cruces.
“Man, you never know what’s inside someone’s head,” Aren said. “I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that. But I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her.”
