Over the weekend, the Washington Post's Beth Reinhard published an excellent article about one of Donald Trump's most visionary advisers, an obscure figure named Russ Vought. He was a boring Republican bureaucrat who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 until Trump left office. He previously served as deputy director and acting director at OMB and prior to his stint in the White House worked at Heritage Action, the activist arm of the Heritage Foundation, where he was budget director for the Republican Study Group in Congress. In other words, for years Vought 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 U.S. government from the inside?
Vought is a self-described Christian nationalist who is spearheading plans for a rapid expansion of executive power under a theory he calls “radical constitutionalism" (an oxymoron, but it sure sounds snappy.) He has been working for a right-wing network called the Center for Renewing America, which is full of Trump acolytes, many of whom would likely become high-ranking officials in a future Trump administration. That includes Vought, often discussed as a potential White House 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 power would represent a historic shift — one they see as a needed corrective.
Vought has been named by the Republican National Committee as the policy director for the 2024 platform committee. He wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025. And 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 that the ends justify the means. While in the White House, he saw people who balked at illegal and unethical activity as squishes and whenever he could do so, his office helped Trump do end-runs around the law and regulations, from reappropriating funds for his border wall to helping him pressure Volodymyr Zelenskyy to slander Joe Biden, the scandal that got Trump impeached the first time around. Vought also came up with the notorious Schedule F, a plan to eliminate many civil service posts and replace long-serving government employees with Trump lackeys. They ran out of time to fully implement that strategy 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 his underlings and enablers have planned for his second term is fine with him. Well, Vought has plans, and they're big ones. His "radical constitutionalism" is an extreme reinterpretation of what the American system and the rule of law stand for.
As Reinhard reports, Vought 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 supposed Judeo-Christian worldview. He calls this "rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution."
Vought is one of the primary influences in right-wing circles pushing to eliminate any independence of agencies in the executive branch, starting of course 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 birth rate. (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" — the notion that the Germans hadn't actually lost World War I but were instead betrayed by Jews, Marxists, democrats and internationalists. Trump's Big Lie is that he didn't lose the 2020 election (typically, it's all about him) but it's had a similar motivating effect on his followers.
In both cases, there is a fairly pathetic attempt to overthrow 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. 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 that 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. 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 Vought 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.
