Russel Vought is The Enemy Within -- Here's Why
What our great MSNBC anchors are overlooking — or worse, seeing all wrong — is that Russell Vought is running this shutdown while he carries out the gutting of the US Government no matter where trump is — on the golf course, building a ballroom, palling around with Asian leaders -- because Trump told Vought to go for it. This is not solely about congressional republicans, not the Epstein files, not Putin. Russell Vought was really the dictator on day one, and trump has been his distraction and vengeance wingman. And still is. Before trump gives permission to congressional republicans to end the shutdown, it’s because he's gotten Vought’s permission. As he's structured "trumpism," the next republican president will also have to.
Sure, we know Vought is the author of Project 2025. Sure we know he was the acting director of the OMB in trump’s first term.
But did you know it was Russell Vought who, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it? Did you know that later that same year, after trump tried to pressure Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, who was running for president, it was Vought who froze $214 million in security assistance to Ukraine? Did you know that Vought met Elon at Mar-a-Lago, and they hit it off so well that Vought directed Elon's techbro DOGE crews to exactly the key agencies to hit in those first hundred days?
You can read all about exactly how Vought has become the real commander-in-chief in this week’s New Yorker (Oct 27), entitled
"The Shutdown Artist — Inside Russell Vought’s dismantling of the federal government" by Andy Kroll.
https://archive.ph/9j5sR (90% of what’s below is a paraphrasing of only a small part of this astounding 9 page piece of investigative journalism)
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The last days of trump’s first term, he met trump in the Oval Office, and both felt as if they’d had unfinished business, Vought would later recall.
Trump told him that after three and a half years as president, he had finally gotten the hang of the job. “Russ, we’ve got to get another term,” trump said. “We finally figured out how to do this.” He told trump that he would launch a new political operation that would keep the maga movement alive while attacking policies of the Biden administration. trump blessed the venture, with one request: that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the national protests, he wanted Vought to find a way for conservatives to push back against the Black Lives Matter movement. “This was an assignment I was given from President Trump,” Vought later recalled. “I'm the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.”
Days after trump left office, Vought announced the launch of the Center for Renewing America, a maga think tank that was the incubator for future Republican administrations. Vought surrounded himself with other radical “constitutionalists.” He brought in Jeffrey Clarke, Kash Patel, and Ken Cucinelli, top immigration official in trump’s first administration. Cucinelli explained at the first policy summit that working at the center allowed him to “stake out the outer boundary of reasonable constitutional law.” The CRA’s ideas included how the president could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops to American cities to put down protests, how the White House could freeze billions in federal funding without waiting for a vote in Congress; how agency leaders could defy government unions and fire workers in masse. The think tank also set out to create shadow versions of the OMB and Justice Dept’s Office of Legal Counsel to anticipate legal challenges and give pushback. In his 2024 policy summit address at the center, Vought explained, “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”
Vought has called himself a Christian nationalist. “We were meant to be a Christian nation.”
He has said that American democracy has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench, and by a permanent class of bureaucrats who advance “woke” policies to divide Americans and silence political opponents.
During a conference hosted by the CRA in 2024, he said, “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus. And they have aimed it at us.” In his telling, the central struggle of our time pits the defenders of this “post-constitutional” order — that he calls the “cartel” or the “regime," which includes Democrats and Republicans — against the “radical constitutionalists” fighting to destroy the deep state and return power to the presidency and ultimately to the people. He includes himself in the latter group, which also includes his stalwarts like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, architect of trump’s mass deportation campaign. They have pointedly inserted “weaponize” and “woke" (70 times in the conference's 90 page summary proposal of structural changes) in everything that came before, including the U.S. military.
The ultimate radical constitutionalist, Vought says, is Donald Trump.
In his view, trump is the singular figure in the history of the American republic, a once persecuted leader who returns to power to defeat the deep state.
“We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of this country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.” Bannon, sitting onstage with Vought at closed door conference 2023, said, trump is “a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord.”
In Vought’s vision for the US govt, an all-powerful executive branch would be able to fire workers, cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations on air and water quality, financial markets workplace protections and civil rights. The DOJ, meanwhile, would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House.
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How long did it take Vought get the country to this point? That’s all covered in the rest of this article.
Because of who Russell Vought is and what he's doing, Trump, Bannon, Miller, DOGE (even the “demoncrat” and “enemy within" invectives, and Peter Thiel’s religiosity & Hegseth’s “lord and savior” talk at his confirmation) all make more sense now.
Many of us just thought their only point was incompetent loyalty, chaos and cruelty. Nope.
There’s an unholy alliance in this much older backstory.
What we have not seen is that Russell Vought is the one man unelected deep state OMB coordinator of his christian nationalist kingdom come.
He doesn’t need trump. Any future republican president can be his wingman.
Now would some Democrats please, please, tell Rachel and Lawrence to read this article and rethink whose vision is behind the wannabe king?
36 donors to a kingly ballroom notwithstanding, if christian nationalists know him and have remained silent, then we Christ followers have been had.
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