What Evil Lurks Behind Trump’s Throne? Architect Of Authoritarianism: Vought’s Plan For Forever Rule

Russell Vought Isn’t In The Spotlight— He’s Writing The Script

No doubt all Trump’s instincts are horrible. But if you’ve listened to him trying to express himself, you will quickly understand that he’s no no more running the show than Biden was. At the Saudi business roundtable this week: “The drone is killing tremendous numbers of people. You hide behind a tree and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire and you don’t have a chance; the tree comes down also by the way. It’s so intense; you see these trees being knocked down like, they’re being sawed down by a top-of-the-line timber man like you know who? Shawn Duffy. You know that Shawn Duffy, the had of the Transportation Department, who’s working right now on the airports and getting assistance because Biden didn’t do a thing for four years and Pete Buttigieg was the head and he goes bicycling to work.”

Yes, so… that senile psycho is not running the show. So… who is? Is it Susie Wiles? A bit. Paymaster Elon Musk? Partially. In-house Nazi Stephen Miller? Even more so than Musk. But many people say the man behind the throne is really extremist ideologue Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, the man behind Project 2025 and “among the most powerful figures in today’s Washington.” 

I hope lots of people read McKay Coppin’s essay about it in The Atlantic. All the pieces of the shattered federal government demolished by Musk and DOGE in the first 100 days was picked up yo Vought who is reassembling them “into a radically new constitutional order... Vought’s agenda includes shrinking the government, but it goes deeper than that. His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it. A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicized or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.”

[A]s head of an agency that touches every aspect of the $6.8 trillion federal budget, Vought is in position to enact his vision. And he’s wasted little time.

In his early days as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau— an independent agency that was designed to be insulated from partisan pressure— Vought sent layoff notices to 1,500 employees, closed the office, canceled contracts, and declined funding for the agency from the Federal Reserve. Across hundreds of other federal agencies, he is spearheading an effort to simply stop enforcing many regulations. And last month, Trump proposed a rule that would convert 50,000 federal workers into Schedule F employees, whom the president can fire at will— a policy that Vought has championed since the first term. Vought’s ideas, once seen as radical, are now being realized.

Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda— for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID— are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.

Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”

… Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.

What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.”

…After Republicans failed to recapture the White House in 2012, Vought joined a small group of activists and operatives who began gathering a few blocks from the Capitol, at the Judicial Watch offices, to strategize. They called themselves Groundswell, and their stated mission, according to leaked documents, was bold if a bit grandiose: to wage a “30 front war” that would “fundamentally transform the nation.” The weekly meetings drew a who’s who of influential insurgents, including Ginni Thomas, Dan Bongino, Leonard Leo, and Bannon, who was then running Breitbart News. Their agenda was diffuse, but they were united in a shared conviction that the Republican establishment and much of the conservative movement were insufficiently radical. They were impatient with the standard small-government activism of the era— they wanted more confrontation, and were open to more extreme ideas.

… Vought has expressed pride in his record of pushing boundaries in ways that unsettle less dogmatic Republicans. Whereas many religious conservatives distance themselves from the “Christian nationalist” label, Vought wears it proudly. At a Heritage event, he sarcastically derided some of the Cabinet officials in Trump’s first term, whom he described as “a bunch of people around him who were constantly sitting on eggs and saying, Oh my gosh, he’s getting me to violate the law.”

And in a 2023 speech at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank he led after Trump’s first term, Vought touted the virtues of cruelty as he held forth on his plans for the federal civil service. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at a closed-door meeting, according to a video that was later leaked to ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

As disruptive as Vought’s early moves have been, his most dramatic provocations are likely still to come. Vought has been a vocal champion of reviving the presidential “impoundment” power, which would allow the president to effectively circumvent Congress to unilaterally withhold appropriated funds. Congress outlawed the practice in 1974, and the Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional. But Trump has publicly rejected this interpretation of the law, and Vought has called impoundment “a necessary remedy to our fiscal brokenness.”

Coppins concluded that “the durability of Vought’s ideological project might depend on just how much of the federal government Trump can unravel before he leaves office.” And, of course, that’s precisely what makes Vought so dangerous: he’s not some erratic flame-thrower looking to burn it all down on impulse— he’s the guy calmly drawing the blueprints for controlled demolition. Vought doesn’t just want to “unravel” the federal government; he wants to reforge it in the image of a permanent right-wing counterrevolution, perhaps with himself as high priest of a new Christian nationalist order.

This isn’t conservative policy as we’ve known it— it’s soft fascism wrapped in faux-serious white papers. Vought envisions a presidency where the executive branch acts as a blunt-force weapon against political enemies, “deep state” bureaucrats, and any institution that resists MAGA orthodoxy. As Cpiins explained, under his blueprint, the independent civil service is purged and packed with loyalists. The DOJ becomes an instrument of retribution. Regulatory agencies are gutted or turned into patronage mills for oil barons and televangelists. The idea of a neutral, professional bureaucracy? Gone. Vought calls it “biblical worldview governance.” Most people would just call it theocracy.

Vought’s evil genius is in wrapping authoritarianism in the language of “constitutional restoration.” He talks about “restoring the rule of law” while planning the destruction of checks and balances. He calls it “draining the swamp,” but what he’s building is a permanent ruling caste of ideologues, answerable only to the next Trump— or whoever carries the torch. Oddly, much of the media still treats him like a technocrat, a budget wonk with a few hard-right views. That’s the real scandal. He’s the most dangerous man in Trumpworld precisely because he doesn’t look the part. No gold toilet. No screaming caps-lock rants. Just a methodical, evangelical crusader who believes God has a plan— and that plan involves using the U.S. government to enforce his doctrine, criminalize dissent, and salt the earth where democracy once grew.