(New York) He considers Donald Trump “a gift from God”. He advocates the deployment of the army to repress the demonstrations which are boiling over. He dreams of defunding the Environmental Protection Agency.
By many measures, Russell Vought is Donald Trump’s most radical nominee for office in the next Republican administration. However, he largely goes under the radar, unlike Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, who have been the subject of multiple reports and criticism.
His looks may be the cause. With his horn-rimmed glasses, his well-trimmed beard and his intellectual airs, this son of blue-collar workers from Connecticut could pass more easily for a university professor than for a fan of the MAGA movement (Make America Great Again).
The reason may also be the position that Donald Trump wants to entrust to him. Position for which he will have to participate in a hearing before a Senate committee on Wednesday (Tuesday, Hegseth will have faced the first questions from senators from another committee in connection with his appointment as Secretary of Defense).
Russell Vought already held this position during the second half of Donald Trump’s first term as president: director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
If confirmed to the role, Vought will be formally charged with developing the president’s budget and reviewing federal agency regulations. However, behind this definition of bureaucratic task hide vast powers which have involved this 48-year-old man in some of the biggest controversies of Trump’s first term in the White House.
He was the one who delayed military aid to Ukraine to force President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into Joe Biden, as Donald Trump demanded. He’s the one who redirected billions of dollars from the Pentagon to Trump’s border wall when Congress blocked funding for it.
And it was he who was one of the most ardent supporters of a decree called “Schedule F” and whose objective was to convert thousands of civil servants into political appointees in order to facilitate their replacement by executives dedicated to the Trumpist cause.
This plan is today part of Project 2025, this conservative program of which Russell Vought is one of the architects. And it remains a priority for this ideologue who passed through the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and Republican circles in the House of Representatives before ending up in Donald Trump’s entourage.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatized,” he said in a 2024 speech at an event of the Center for Renewing America, the think tank he created in 2021. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work because they are increasingly seen as the bad guys. We want their funding cut off so that the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) cannot enforce all the rules against our energy industry. We want to shock them,” he added, according to video of the speech obtained by the ProPublica news site.
PHOTO ANNA MONEYMAKER, THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
Russell Vought, then acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, testifies before the Senate in February 2020.
The Center for Renewing America is inspired by Christian nationalism, an ideology that Russell Vought claims for himself. Its mission “is to renew consensus around the idea that America is a nation under God.” A graduate of Illinois’ evangelical Wheaton College, Vought is personally opposed to abortion under any circumstances and gender-affirming care, among other divisive issues.
In his writings and speeches, he also promotes “radical constitutionalism”. According to him, the United States has experienced over the past 100 years “nothing less than a quiet revolution” during which the “left” betrayed the American Constitution by stripping the president of his powers for the benefit of agencies federal governments, bureaucrats and unelected civil servants, what others call the “deep state”.
He thus sets the objective of restoring to the president all the powers that he believes the Constitution confers on him and of putting an end to the independence of federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve. Over the past few months, he has helped draft hundreds of memos and executive orders that will enable Donald Trump to implement his promises on day one of his presidency, including the deportation of illegal immigrants and the exclusion of transgender people from the army and schools.
According to him, the survival of the United States depends on the success of the fight against this “quiet revolution” led by the Democrats and which transformed, in his opinion, the United States into a “post-constitutional regime”.
In a speech before November 5, he compared 2024 to 1776 and 1860, giving the year of the presidential election the same importance as the year the American colonies declared their independence from England and the one where the first southern state seceded in reaction to the election of Abraham Lincoln.
“God put us here for such a time,” he said, according to one of the videos obtained by ProPublica.
He also invoked God by explaining that only a “radical constitutionalist” of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison could stop the “Marxist” left and bring about the changes demanded by American citizens. Fortunately for the United States, Donald Trump is there to defend the legacy of Jefferson and Madison, he rejoiced during one of his speeches.
“We have in Donald Trump a man who is uniquely positioned to play this role, a man whose interests are perfectly aligned with those of the country. He saw what (the left) did to him, and he saw what they are trying to do to the country. This is nothing other than a gift from God. »
