Here is more from Politico:
President Donald Trump took office eight years ago as the ultimate outsider whose rhetoric often shocked Washington but was seldom taken seriously by the policy shops that have long helped administrations transform their agenda into action.
Now, he has an army of think tanks and other advocacy groups behind him, reverse-engineering even his off-the-cuff statements into white papers, training legions of his acolytes — and jockeying for influence.
There are now MAGA-specific think tanks, like the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute; MAGA recruiting and training organizations, like American Moment; and MAGA incubators, like the Conservative Partnership Institute, all aimed at not only bolstering the Trump cause but strategizing how to sustain it with just four years until his successor is named, according to interviews with more than a dozen Trump allies, former administration officials and other conservatives who work for think tanks or other outside groups, many of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about dynamics between the organizations.
Democrats have long leaned on the Center for American Progress, the Urban Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, among other groups, for progressive brain power. For Republicans, that intellectual heft has for decades come from think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. But the massive political realignment Trump ushered in has knocked many of those onetime mainstays from their vaunted position, with the MAGA movement dismissing some of them as liberal.
Among other things, that article notes that the Center for Renewing America (CRA) is positioning itself to fill the void as a nimbler, more MAGA Heritage Foundation.
