[Russell] Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term, was known for his provocative public pronouncements. But he went even further in private, envisaging a Trump presidency in which regulatory agencies would be shut down and career civil servants would be too depressed to get out of bed.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in one recording. “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.”
ProPublica
Mission accomplished. And a reminder that Christian Nationalists are not Christian.
“We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Who claimed, while running, that he didn't know anything about Project 2025.
“The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said in one speech. “Our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”
Every accusation is a confession.
A lot of what we do as reporters is akin to squinting through opaque windows at events unfolding in a very dimly lit room. We can see who is inside and how they’re moving, but our lack of context often prevents us from understanding what’s really happening. We default to assuming that the future will be roughly like the past, guessing that, say, Trump 47 will be roughly like Trump 45 with fewer guardrails.
[...]
Vought has returned to his post as the budget office’s director, and his plans for eviscerating entire agencies and decimating the morale of federal workers have turned into reality. Trump 47 looks very different from Trump 45, just as Vought told his audiences that it would.
[...]
It seems appropriate to give Vought the last word since the worldview he described has proven so accurate. What sounded grandiose in the preelection days seems today like a reasonable summary of the path Trump and his allies have chosen.
“We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,” Vought said, citing the years when the colonies declared independence from Britain and the first state seceded over President Abraham Lincoln’s election.
“God put us here for such a time as this.”
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