Over the weekend The Washington Post’s Beth Reinhard published an excellent article about one of Donald Trump’s most visionary advisers, a man virtually no one has heard of by the name of Russ Vought. He was a boring GOP bureaucrat who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 until Trump left office after having served as deputy director and acting director before that. Prior to his stint in the White House he was at Heritage Action, the activist arm of the Heritage Foundation and worked as budget director for the Republican Study Group in the congress. In other words, for years he was a numbers cruncher providing far right Republicans with their specious arguments about the government going broke and the need to drastically cut the safety net.
Who knew that such a person also had big ideas about how to destroy the United States government from the inside out? He’s a self-described Christian Nationalist who is spearheading plans for a rapid expansion of executive power under a theory he calls “radical constitutionalism” (which is an oxymoron but it sure sounds snappy.)
He has been working for a conservative network called Center for Renewing America which is full of Trump acolytes, many of whom will likely be in a future Trump administration. That includes Vought himself who is often discussed as a likely Chief of Staff.
Reinhard writes:
“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”
Vought aims to harness what he calls the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy that stymied the former president by stocking federal agencies with hardcore disciples who would wage culture wars on abortion and immigration. The proposals championed by Vought and other Trump allies to fundamentally reset the balance of powerwould represent a historic shift — one they see as a needed corrective.
Vought has been named by the Trump RNC as the policy director for the 2024 platform committee. He wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025. He is said to be in charge of planning for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.
Vought is an Evangelical Christian who has adopted the Trump credo of the ends justify the means. When he was in the White House he saw people who balked at illegal and unethical activity as squishes and whenever he could his office was helping Trump do end runs around the law and regulations, from re-appropriating funds for his border wall to helping him to blackmail the Ukrainian president in exchange for slandering Joe Biden, which got Trump impeached. He’s the one who came up with the notorious Schedule F, the plan to eliminate the civil service and replace government employees with Trump lackeys. They didn’t have time to fully implement it in Trump’s first term but you can bet they’ll get it done asap if he wins in November,
Trump’s only agenda is to prove he’s not a loser, keep himself out of jail and wreak revenge on his enemies. Whatever else they have planned for his second term is fine with him and Vought has plans, big ones. His “radical constitutionalism” is an extreme reinterpretation of what the American system and rule of law stand for.
For instance, according to Reinhard, he seeks to redefine immigration as an “invasion” which would allow the president to invoke wartime powers. He’s on the same page as Trump with respect to mass deportation because he doesn’t believe that most immigrants can understand America’s Judeo-Christian worldview. He calls this “rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”
He is one of the primary influences in right wing circles pushing hard to eliminate any independence of agencies in the executive branch starting with the Justice Department. On a recent podcast he backed Trump’s call to prosecute Trump’s enemies saying, “it can’t just be hearings, it has to be investigations, an army of investigators that lead to firm convictions.” He supports invoking the Insurrection Act, banning medical abortions and implementing policies to boost the birthrate. (Yes, he’s one of those guys too.) In other words he is an authoritarian nightmare.
Whenever I read about extremists like Vought and others who are plotting to overturn the Constitution, like so many others, I can’t help but think about 1930s Germany. The parallels aren’t perfect but they are way too close for comfort. The Nazi Big Lie was about the supposed “stab in the back” that led ordinary Germans to buy into the idea that Germany didn’t actually lose WWI but were instead betrayed by Jews, Marxists, democrats, and internationalists. Trump’s Big Lie is that he didn’t lose the election (so typically all about him) but it’s had the same motivating effect on his followers.
In both cases, there is a fairly pathetic attempt to overthrow of the government and the political establishment subsequently fails to take the legal steps available to prevent them from making a comeback. This facilitates the growth of an authoritarian movement, infused with racism and grievance and although this movement never achieves a majority in the country over time its leaders learn that there are better ways of achieving its goals by exploiting weaknesses in the system which had previously gone undiscovered.
This form of revolution doesn’t rely on violent overthrow but it does require intimidation and threats of violence against political enemies. And it cannot succeed without the enabling and cooperation of establishment politicians and officials who either believe they can control the extremists in their midst or simply sign on for their own ambition uncaring of the consequences.
Vought is in the latter category, an opportunist who sees Donald Trump as the ticket to a Christian Nationalist America. Whether he is a MAGA true believer is immaterial. He’s an efficient bureaucrat, trained in the right wing fever swamps who knows how to get things done. And what he wants to do is horrifying.