#russell vought

[tomorrowusa]

« It will never make sense, but people believed Donald Trump when he lied—about Vice President Kamala Harris, about President Joe Biden, about the economy, about immigrants, about trans people, about his accomplishments. 

Yet, when he told the truth about what he would do if elected, people didn’t believe him. »

— Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, AKA: "Kos", at his blog Daily Kos.

Remember when Trump denied any knowledge of Project 2025?

So Trump made one of the chief architects of Project 2025 a senior member of his administration.

Trump picks Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought to lead budget office

When it comes to Trump's credibility, always remember the number 30,573.

Washington Post counts 30,573 false or misleading claims in four years by Trump

[lordrakim]

Hidden-camera video shows Project 2025 co-author discussing his secret work preparing for a second Trump term

Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, DC, hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. Continue reading Hidden-camera video shows Project 2025 co-author discussing his secret work preparing for a second Trump term

[alwaysbewoke]

An influential conservative think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration if the former president returns to power, according to documents that we obtained. Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America (CRA). He’s rumored to be a potential chief of staff if Trump returns to the White House. Vought – who served in Trump’s first admin – has remained close to the former president and hopes to elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a potential second term, according to two people familiar with the plans, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. One document drafted by CRA includes a list of top priorities for a second Trump term, including “Christian nationalism,” invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era. Vought also: ➡️ has said immigration requirements should include whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history” ➡️ has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump admin official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives ➡️ is advising the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. Proposals include repealing LGBTQ+ rights, increasing abortion surveillance and defunding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, CRA is already influencing Trump’s positions. His thinking on withdrawing the U.S. from NATO and using military force against Mexican drug cartels is partly inspired by separate CRA papers, according to reports by Rolling Stone. Trump’s campaign has repeatedly insisted that it alone is responsible for putting together a policy platform and staffing for a future administration. They declined to comment. So did Vought.

x

so many people claim that voting for biden would somehow be immoral given what's happening in gaza, but what these people fail to realize is that there are numerous issues at play. biden is at the top of the hill of shittiness; however, at the same time, we simply cannot allow what the right has planned to be carried out. it would not help gaza, and it would surely make life here worse for everyone, including those who want to see a free palestine.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 9, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 10, 2024

Yesterday the Washington Post published an article by Beth Reinhard examining the philosophy and the power of Russell Vought, the hard-right Christian nationalist who is drafting plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, and he was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. 

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised the far right, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on. 

Last month the Republican National Committee (RNC), now dominated by Trump loyalists, named Vought policy director of the RNC platform committee, the group that will draft a political platform for the Republicans this year. In 2020 the Republican Party did not write a platform, simply saying that it “enthusiastically” supported Trump and his agenda. With Vought at the head of policy, it is reasonable to think that the party’s 2024 platform will skew toward the policies Vought has advanced elsewhere.

Vought argues that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect individual Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought calls for what he calls “Radical Constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.

There are historical problems with this assessment, not least that it attributes to “the Left” a practical and popular change in the U.S. government to adjust it to the modern industrial world, as if somehow that change was a fringe stealth campaign. 

While it has been popular among the radical right to bash Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for the 1913 Revenue Act that established the modern income tax, suggesting that it was this moment that began the creation of the modern state, the recasting of government in fact took place under Republican Theodore Roosevelt a decade before Wilson took office, and it was popular without regard to partisanship. 

The liberalism on which the United States was founded in the late 1700s came from the notion—radical at the time—that individuals have rights and that the government generally must not intrude on those rights. This idea was central to the thinking of the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who put into the form of a mathematical constant—“we hold these truths to be self-evident”—the idea that “all men are created equal” and that they have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as the right to live under a government of their own choosing. 

To keep the government from crushing those individual rights, the Constitution’s Framers wrote the Bill of Rights. Those first ten amendments to the Constitution hold back the federal government by, among other things, prohibiting Congress from making laws that would establish a national religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion, limit freedom of speech or of the press, or hamper people’s right to assemble peacefully or to petition the government for a redress of grievances. 

The belief that liberalism depended on a small government dominated the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the rise of industry in the late nineteenth century shifted the relationship between individuals and the government. Was everyone really equal when industrialists were worth millions and commanded state legislatures and Congress, while workers, consumers, and children had little leverage to protect themselves? 

The majority of Americans said no, and Theodore Roosevelt agreed. The danger for individuals in their era was not that the government would crush them, but that industrialists would. In order for the government truly to protect the people, Roosevelt argued, it must regulate businesses and support the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. A true liberal government, one that protected the rights of individuals, must be big enough and strong enough to act as a referee between workers, consumers, and businessmen. 

Roosevelt actually loathed Wilson, in part because Wilson ran for office in 1912 with the argument that as soon as the government broke up big corporations, the country could revert back to a small government. To Roosevelt, this made no sense. Unless the conditions of the modern economy were changed—and he believed they could not be, because the trend was always toward bigger and bigger enterprises—industry would always concentrate. Only a big government could stop those corporations from taking over the country.

Tearing apart the modern state, as those like Vought advocate, would take us back to the world Roosevelt recognized as being antithetical to the rights of individuals promised by the Declaration of Independence. 

A key argument for a strong administrative state was that it could break the power of a few men to control the nation. It is no accident that those arguing for a return to a system without a strong administrative state are eager to impose their religion on the American majority, who have rejected their principles and policies. Americans support abortion rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ+ rights, minority rights: the equal rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence. 

And therein lies the second historical problem with Vought’s “Radical Constitutionalism.” James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, explained why a democracy cannot be based on religion. As a young man, Madison had watched officials in his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by 1773 he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices, but he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience. 

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights on which our own Bill of Rights would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants. 

Journalist Reinhard points out that Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently praised Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” who are going to destroy the U.S. government. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it,” Bannon said. 

In July 2022 a jury found Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that October, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced him to four months in prison. Bannon fought the conviction, but in May 2024 a federal appeals court upheld it. 

On June 6, Judge Nichols ordered him to report to prison by July 1.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[faircatch]

Trump and his allies plan to infuse "Christian nationalism" into his administration.

[grrlscientist]

"While much public attention has been focused on Musk & Ramaswampy’s fantasy Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), OMB director Russell Vought will be vastly more influential in implementing IRS spending cuts."

[rodgermalcolmmitchell]

Would you trust a baker who doesn't know the differences between salt and sugar?

It often isn’t easy to determine whether information falls into the “miss-” (unintentional) category or the “dis-” (intentional) category. For instance, Fox News has promulgated faulty information of the “dis-” sort, while your addled neighbor usually mouths “mis-“. I have the infinite ability to create U.S. dollars just by pressing computer keys, but I want you to give me more dollars and keep…

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Excerpt from transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain what the OMB does, the Office of Management and Budget, why it’s such a powerful position.

MOLLY REDDEN: It’s such a powerful position because, first of all, it oversees all of the regulations that the administration puts out. So, Congress can write a check for — you heard him in those videos talk about defunding the EPA and making sure regulators don’t have what they need. So, even if Congress appropriates money for clean water regulation, you know, scrubbing pollution from the atmosphere, Vought can — Vought and his agency can oversee how rules get technically written so that that money can dry up. That’s just one example. You know, they really get into the details of how you spend money. And that’s just so incredibly powerful, because that’s really where the rubber meets the road for any policy in any administration.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk more about how he would — why being in that position would matter when it comes to his support for deploying the military at home, on the streets of the United States.

MOLLY REDDEN: That has a little bit more to do with the work that Vought did between the two Trump administrations. So, he founded a think tank called the Center for Renewing America. And what that think tank did is, in between the two administrations, sort of in that interim, it played host to a number of people who had been in high-up positions of the Trump administration, and they incubated and drafted a lot of ideas for what a second Trump administration could do to execute its agenda more effectively.

And I think we all remember from the first Trump administration, he, the president, cycled through a lot of appointments who came from more traditional Republican institutional backgrounds. And a lot of them stood in the way, sort of acted as a bulwark against some of the more aggressive and, you know, history-defined things that Trump wanted to do. Deploying the military against protesters during the summer of 2020 George Floyd protests is a really good example of this.

And so, you know, that’s over in the second Trump administration, right? You can see from his appointments, whether they’re people who have defended his agenda really aggressively on Fox News or people like Russ Vought, who have been thinking for four years about how to build a legal framework and staff an administration that will do whatever Trump wants, that they are really focused on making sure that they have an administration that is loyal to Trump, rather than, you know, focused on what existing law says you can do.

So, at the Center for Renewing America, one of the things that Vought spoke about in those videos, they are preparing legal doctrines, basically, that will rationalize Trump’s domestic deployment of the military. Another thing that Vought has been a really big proponent of is, your viewers might be familiar with, Schedule F, which is basically a way to reclassify government civil servants so that they’re all political appointees and easier to fire if they don’t comply with what the administration wants them to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly, I wanted to go back to August, when we reported on an undercover video that showed Russell Vought bragging about his ties to Trump, even as Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025. It shows Vought meeting at a five-star Washington, D.C., hotel with two men who he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. He was actually talking to two undercover reporters with the Center for Climate Reporting, an independent British news outlet. They were secretly recording him. This is part of the video accompanying their investigation called “Undercover in Project 2025: The secretive 'second phase' and the radical policies set for rollout on day one":

NARRATOR: We want to meet the man writing the game plan for Trump’s second administration. Vought believes that in his first term Trump’s agenda was frustrated by what he calls the “deep state.” So Vought is planning a radical centralization of government power under the president, firing civil servants and ending the independence of agencies like the FBI and DOJ.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their — an agency’s notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.

[news-buzz]

Trump Is Nominating A Project 2025 Architect To A Key Role News Buzz

Despite repeatedly distancing himself from Project 2025 while on the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated one of the conservative blueprint’s major authors to lead a key post in his administration. Trump announced on social media that he’s tapping Russell Vought, who served as the Office of Management and Budget director during his first term, to once again head up the…

[filosofablogger]

You'll Need A Jacket For This One ...

Remember when Trump said he knew nothing of Project 2025?  We all knew that was a lie when he said it … in part because anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is a lie, and in part because a huge number of Trump’s former cohorts participated in creating the project.  Well, the truth is now out … Trump not only knew about the project and gave it his blessing, but now he’s beginning its…

[tomorrowusa]

John Oliver described what a Trump second term would be like. It's a lot worse than just being a rerun of the 2017-2021 period.

This was broadcast before Trump's dip in the polls over the past few days. Hopefully that dip will continue when more people see this vid.

Oliver devotes time to the outline for a second Trump administration called "Project 2025" which is sort of a Christian nationalist „Mein Kampf” for the 21st century.

In short, Trump and his enablers want to destroy constitutional government as we've known it over the past couple of centuries.

One of the people John Oliver mentions is Russell Vought who speaks about a "post-constitutional" America. Of course post-constitutional is just a weaselly way of saying dictatorial.

Project 2025 is not a dog whistle – it's a vuvuzela hooked up to a foghorn. And anybody who can't hear it is deaf to the danger posed by some of the most extreme elements in America.

A little bonus reading...

Trump’s Christian Nationalist Friends Have a Horrifying Plan for a Second Term

[justjensenanddean]

‘Tracker’: Justin Hartley on Working With Good Friend Jensen Ackles for First Time

ET has a first look at Justin Hartley and Jensen Ackles on set of ‘Tracker’ season 2, which airs Wednesdays on CBS.

[usindistress]

Russell Vought, Trump's budget director was caught on tape saying Trump is lying about NOT implementing Project 2025, in order to get more votes.

Project 2025