Trump’s Budget Director Pick Would Restructure Government to Aggressively Push a Christian Nationalist Agenda

Russell Vought believes revolutionary statism, not conservatism, should define the right today

Incoming Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought

The speed with which the right has, in just a few short years, entirely abandoned its supposedly principled commitment to curbing the power of the state in general and presidential Caesarism in particular is remarkable. During the Obama years, Republicans insisted that they had a constitutional obligation to oppose the White House’s dictatorial overreach. The Tea Party craze saw Republicans casting themselves as defenders of the Founders’ vision of small, responsible, unobtrusive government. The animating conservative concern—rhetorically if not often substantively—was government restraint to guarantee individual liberty: keeping the Nanny State out of people’s lives and insisting on government non-interference in business.

Now, the same movement that derided Obama as a lawless tyrant every time he considered exerting power via a presidential executive order is urging President-elect Donald Trump to upend the system with precisely that instrument. This trajectory—from at least rhetorically championing government restraint to aggressively mobilizing the coercive powers of the state to roll back pluralism—is a fairly recent one. And no single figure in the world of conservative policymaking better embodies this shift than Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget.

MAGA Mind

Vought, who presents as an ordinary political operative running a boring department, is the architect of one of the farthest-reaching policy initiatives we’ve ever seen: Project 2025’s “180-Day Playbook,” a suite of potentially hundreds of pre-prepared executive orders for Trump to issue once in office with a view to reshaping the executive into a ruthlessly efficient vehicle for unilaterally carrying out the MAGA agenda. He’s not exactly new to Republican politics: Across almost two decades, Vought went from low-level staffer to high-level éminence grise, being entrusted with various posts related to the design and implementation of Trumpism as a policy agenda.

Before the Trump era, Vought held various positions within conservative policymaking and advocacy. He was executive director of the Republican Study Committee, one of the power centers within the GOP. He was policy director of the House Republican Conference. He spent seven years as vice president of Heritage Action, a lobbying and advocacy arm of the influential Heritage Foundation. In 2016, Vought was part of Trump’s transition team. In the Trump White House, he was first brought in as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget; then, in early 2019, he took over as OMB director from Mick Mulvaney.

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Vought made that position his own. He went all-in on getting the government to execute Trump’s every wish. Some of his “greatest hits” include holding up military aid to Ukraine because Trump wanted to pressure the Ukrainian government into delivering dirt on Joe Biden; redirecting billions of dollars from the Pentagon to Trump’s border wall when Congress blocked funding; aggressively advocating for Schedule F, the presidential executive order Trump announced in the very last weeks of his presidency that was intended to convert thousands of civil servants into political appointees in order to strip away job protections for agents of the “deep state”; and in 2020, if the Biden administration is to be believed, doing everything he could to sabotage the transition.

Over the past four years, Vought has kept busy. Upon leaving the White House, he founded the explicitly Christian nationalist Center for Renewing America to serve as a kind of administration-in-waiting—and, as noted, he played a key role in designing Project 2025, authoring the chapter on the Executive Office of the President in the agenda document and taking charge of the “180-day Playbook,” the only part of Project 2025 that has not been made public. In a secretly recorded conversation that surfaced in the summer, Vought claimed he and his team had already drafted hundreds of executive orders and regulations; he specifically emphasized executive orders to implement the mass deportation of more than 20 million people as quickly as possible. Whatever tensions there were between the Trump campaign and Heritage, Vought’s standing was unaffected. He always remained close with the right’s undisputed leader. In May, the RNC named Vought policy director for the Republican 2024 platform committee—a move Trump enthusiastically approved, even while denying he knew anything about Project 2025.

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Now, Vought is set to return to the OMB and focus all his energies on bending the entire machine to Trump’s will. Vought steadfastly believes that any check on the president’s power—on the power of Donald Trump, specifically—is illegitimate. MSNBC’s Hayes Brown called Vought the “unofficial prime minister” of the first Trump administration. It’s an apt description, though not in the sense of a modern parliamentary system in which the prime minister is the head of government: Imagine instead an absolute monarch’s prime minister, his executive officer who gets the machinery to do as the chosen leader commands.

‘Radical Constitutionalism’

Vought is convinced that the constitutional order is no more, that the “extreme left” has destroyed it, and that truly radical measures are needed to restore it. In Sept. 2022, Vought outlined his diagnosis of the problem and his vision of what needs to be done to save America in a piece for the Claremont Institute-run American Mind. The moment that America took the wrong turn, Vought explains, was when the progressive movement under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson figured out how to “radically pervert” the Constitution without having to officially amend it. The left—Vought uses “the left,” “progressives,” “Marxists” interchangeably—started treating the Constitution as a living document. Instead of defending and preserving the constitutional order, they wanted to modify it in order to “keep up with a modernizing nation.”

At first blush, this may sound like the prelude to standard-fare “originalism,” the kind associated with the conservative legal movement for decades. But when Vought talks about the Constitution in a Claremont Institute publication, and about Woodrow Wilson as the beginning of evil left-wing subversion, there is a specific meaning to what he says. Ideologically, the Claremont Institute is the home of West Coast Straussianism, a term pointing to a specific school of thought on the right that goes back to political philosopher Leo Strauss. His disciple, Harry Jaffa, a famous Lincoln scholar and one of the most influential conservative intellectuals particularly in the mid-20th century, is a key figure in the West Coast Straussian intellectual tradition. While there are reasons to believe Jaffa, who passed away in early 2015, would not have gone along with this project, it was Jaffa’s students who founded the Claremont Institute in the late 1970s.

Even as many East Coast Straussians such as The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol have become vocal Never Trumpers, West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timelessly pure essence it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism—ideologies that seek to remake humankind and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America—they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

Today, as Vought and his ilk see things, the constitutional order is no more. “We are in a post-constitutional moment,” Vought declares. Power now lies with the executive branch, according to Vought—not with the president, however, but with the agencies, the unelected bureaucrats, the civil servants. And these agencies are fully in the hands of a “permanent ruling class” of leftist elites. “It has been a slow-moving revolution for over a hundred years,” Vought claims. It’s crucial to understand that, for Vought, this isn’t a prediction of what’s to come—this has already happened. The left-wing revolution has already succeeded. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what has long been destroyed.

“So where do we go from here?” Vought asks. He believes conservatives need to become “radical constitutionalists.” Vought demands that the right “throw off the precedents” and “be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.” In his 2022 piece for American Mind, Vought gives an example of what “radical constitutionalism” may look like in practice: he suggests that Republican governors should declare an “invasion” of “illegal aliens,” take control of the border themselves, and “apprehend and return illegal aliens to the border without the federal government.” In January 2024, that’s precisely what Texas Governor Greg Abbott did. Invoking a right to “self-defense,” Texas announced it was going to defy the president’s authority and nullify federal law.

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Vought implores his readers to fully grasp the severity of the situation: “the hour is late, and time is of the essence.” The “woke and weaponized” leftist regime “is now increasingly arrayed against the American people,” treating patriotic parents as “domestic terrorists” and “putting political opponents in jail.” But all is not lost yet. Because in Donald Trump, a savior, an “existential threat” to the leftist regime, one who can “break the political cartels,” has arrived. The only way to save America is to recognize “that we are living in a post-constitutional time.” Just winning elections and “meddling at the margins” will not be enough. Patriots on the right, Vought concludes, must decide to “cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in.”

Where Is The Line?

Vought pays lip service to religious liberty but at the same time explicitly suggests Christianity should have a privileged role in influencing American society. And, in his own words, “nationalism is not just a patriotic love for one's country, but a commitment to prioritize the needs and interests of one's own country over others.” This is why Vought’s Christian nationalism specifically underwrites his plans to implement the “largest deportation in history.” Immigrants, to Vought, are neither conducive to increasing Christianity’s influence on society nor are they a part of his nationalist conception of American identity.

But how does a restoration of the Constitution fit with advancing a Christian nationalist agenda? If the “natural order” and “Christian civilization” are under threat, what must a movement pledged to their preservation do? Does constitutional “conservatism” imply inherent limits that must be respected—or does a commitment to conserve the divinely ordained order require radical measures when crisis hits? Modern conservatism has a long tradition of debating these questions. Where is the line? Who gets to define it?

The American right today has become dominated by forces and factions that are convinced that the answer is that our moment requires not restraint and preservation but radicalism and counter-revolutionary force. As the major institutions of American life are supposedly in the grip of anti-American, leftist, “globalist,” “woke” forces that desire to tear the moral fabric of the nation apart, as the “natural order” is supposedly under siege, those who used to call themselves “conservatives” need to do whatever is necessary to defend a particular kind of “freedom”: the freedom to live in accordance with the “natural order,” which necessitates imposing it on the whole country.

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The fundamental diagnosis behind what Vought calls “radical constitutionalism” has become dogma on the far right—“The American constitutional order has been overthrown,” concludes another American Mind piece from June. In it, the author declared: “Either the regime will solidify its power in November or Trump will be elected. If the former, we will descend further into the regime’s totalitarian grip. If the latter, unpleasant things will have to be done to hold people to account.” We are already seeing some of those “unpleasant things”—for instance, Trump has mused that the congressional Jan. 6 Committee should be investigated and even jailed for ... fulfilling its constitutional mandate to investigate the brazen attack on the U.S. Capitol perpetrated by Trump’s insurrectionary stirrings.

This is the animating mood on the right these days. Responding to Trump’s Manhattan conviction in late May, Vought raged:

Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution. Do not tell me that these are mere political disagreements of Americans with different world views. This is only the most recent example of a post-Constitutional America furthered by a corrupt, Marxist vanguard pulling out all the stops to protect their own power. ... But this isn’t just about winning an election to shift the see saw toward our agenda. It’s about demanding that our leaders destroy this threat at every level with every tool.

Vought is clearly incapable of offering a reasonable assessment of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case. This is the reaction of a zealot, not a measured appreciator of laws and norms.

Conservatism Is No Longer Enough!

The idea here is that conservatism is no longer enough—this is a moment, Vought and his ilk believe, that requires radical, even revolutionary, politics. A massive upheaval of the system, not a “conserving” of institutions.

In Oct. 2022, The Federalist, a formerly conservative publication that has now become a hotbed for MAGA foot soldiers, ran an instructive piece titled: “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives.” It pleaded with conservatives to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more appeals to “small government” political philosophy: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life—and in some cases, a blunt instrument. ... Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

The radical political project that has emerged on the right, and that Vought is the policymaker embodiment of, cannot be captured by the platitudes with which modern postwar conservatism has been usually understood. As Claremont-affiliated far-right thinker Glen Ellmers put it in an infamous essay in 2021: “Conservatism is no longer enough.” Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it—literally every single Democratic voter, whom Ellmers derided as “zombies” and “human rodents”—is simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic.

Vought’s War

Vought lusts for counter-revolution and radical measures. He does not talk about the conflict with “the left” in the idiom of democratic politics but that of war. In late October, ProPublica reported on private speeches in which Vought registers a genuinely unsettling yearning for freedom from legal and democratic accountability. Vought is not merely critical of civil servants, he wants to “put them in trauma.” He does not merely want to quell protests; he is very clear that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to brutally put them down: “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’” Just like Trump, Vought has no more patience for the conservative legal movement in general which he sees as hopelessly bound to an idea of preserving an order that he believes has long-ago collapsed. Instead of right-wing warriors committed to “radical constitutionalism,” Vought says, “we have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.”

Many people get caught up in Trump’s nomination of clowns and buffoons to key positions. That’s invariably bad. But something even scarier awaits us: Trump also empowers competent radicals like Vought who pursue goals like “rehabilitating Christian nationalism” and “pursuing the largest deportation in history,” as an undercover video caught him saying. And unlike in the first go-round, there won’t be the moderating presence of “adults in the room” in Trump’s second term. That’s the whole point of Project 2025, of the Center for Renewing America, of handing Vought the policy keys from the beginning. Vought’s “radical constitutionalism” is about to be elevated to a position of immense influence and power, unbothered and undisturbed by inconvenient guardrails like moral and legal accountability, for the next four years. Somehow, he’s convinced himself that this is just what the Founders would have wanted.

An earlier version of this piece was first published in Thomas Zimmer’s newsletter, Democracy Americana. Please consider subscribing to it.

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