For someone destined to be such an indispensable man in the incoming Trump administration, it’s remarkable how few Americans outside of Washington know anything about Russ Vought.
Remarkable, but perhaps unsurprising.
Vought isn’t a politician. He’s a thinker. And the former director of the Office of Management and Budget in Donald Trump’s first term, who currently serves as the president of the Center For Renewing America but will likely return to government in some grand capacity (quite possibly in his old OMB job, or perhaps in something with respect to finance), is peculiar in that respect.
Vought is a guy who runs a Washington think tank, but to hear him talk you quickly recognize that he’s not all that complimentary of most think tanks inside the Beltway.
Neither is he particularly complimentary of the conservative movement — or, more particularly, the three-legged stool “fusionism” which signified its political rise in the back half of the 20th century, and particularly after Ronald Reagan rode it to American political dominance and victory over communism in the Cold War.
In an entire 100-plus-minute interview with Tucker Carlson that was published on Monday, Vought never once mentioned the word “Bush,” but it’s very obvious based on that interview that he’s completely opposed to the establishment “conservative” mindset I’ve called Bush Republicanism.
And ready to bury it once and for all.
Interestingly, Vought, who describes our current moment as not quite midnight for America but more like 11:59 p.m., and speaks repeatedly about the need to “save the country,” places great emphasis on retracing conservatism’s steps in an effort to find where it went wrong. He says that at his organization’s events, attendees will find themselves being given books — old books, in fact, like Whittaker Chambers’s Witness or Pat Buchanan’s various works.
Vought’s conservatism — what I would call, and have repeatedly called, Revivalism — is the kind that the Washington establishment can’t stand. But it turns out that the American people like it a whole lot better than anything the elite political class has to offer.
It’s what the public just voted for, in fact.
In the Carlson interview, Vought lends a good deal of intellectual and policy heft to Donald Trump’s re-ascension to the presidency, and he frames Trump’s challenge in ways the elite will see as a binary, existential conflict.
Reagan framed a not-dissimilar conflict, then with the Soviets, as “we win, they lose.” Listening to Vought, that’s how it’s going to have to go with the Deep State.
He talks about the necessity of learning quickly how to manipulate the system to permanently alter, if not destroy, the abusive corruption it now inflicts on society. About how elected officials must retake power from unelected bureaucrats. The president must take it from the corrosive fourth branch of government in the agencies using various tools to manage employment of bureaucrats, and Congress must take it from bureaucrats by writing legislation that clearly delineates what power the agencies have and what power they don’t. In the aftermath of Supreme Court decisions that have done away with Chevron deference, this seems obvious.
Interestingly, though, Vought also talks about the president retaking power from Congress, and in particular the power to impound funds appropriated by Congress but are neither needed nor wanted. He notes this was a long-standing tool of American presidents that was taken away in the post-Watergate era, the effect of which being that the federal budget has skyrocketed out of control ever since.
Reorienting the American government toward accountability, transparency, and a lighter footprint on American life is a clear passion of Vought’s, but interestingly, he advocates using the full power afforded to the executive branch by the Constitution in order to do that.
What didn’t come up in the Carlson interview was Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led playbook for a second Trump administration that Vought wrote a chapter for. His was titled “Executive Office of the President,” and the Center for Renewing America is listed as a contributing organization to the 922-page document. Trump’s campaign disavowed Project 2025, but it’s fairly clear that was just an effort to deflect something the Democrats were trying to weaponize against him.
Essentially, Project 2025 is Fight Club. And the first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club. Politically, it’s a waste of time to try to defend against Democrat attacks on it; none of those were made in good faith, and basically all of them were distortions and untruths. So deny you’re doing any of it while speaking generally in favor of its aims by another name, diffuse the issue during the campaign, and then implement as many of its recommendations as possible once in office.
Everybody knew this was happening. Nobody was particularly angry about it, because everybody knew the attacks on Project 2025 were typical campaign fearmongering.
And what Vought clearly understands, as does Trump’s team, is that the change they represent doesn’t scare the American people much but it absolutely terrifies the Washington elites.
Which he expresses as a good thing.
In the interview, Vought uses the word exhilarating several times in talking about the proposed Trump cabinet and the impending structural reforms of the federal government that await.
I’ve said that the world changed on Nov. 5 and that we’re now officially through with the New Deal/Great Society era of American politics. Watch Vought’s Carlson interview and you’ll get a solid glimpse into what comes next.
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