#russell vought

[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

[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.

[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]

« 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

[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.

[syrma-sensei]

That does put a smile on my face

[arlengrossman]

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies. By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman/ New York Times/ July 17, 2023 Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping…

[wilwheaton]

A disintegrating Trump puts Vance a heartbeat away from the presidency, but there’s more than Vance to fear. Although Trump has publicly disavowed the architects of Project 2025, any distance between him and the scheme is a mirage. We know, for example, that at least 140 people who once worked for his administration have contributed to the plan, which was orchestrated primarily by the Heritage Foundation. Vance even wrote the forward to a book written by Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Trump has to fill a second administration somehow – and for years, his allies in Washington, D.C., have been strategizing for just such an occasion. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” said Russell Vought to a pair of undercover British journalists this summer. Vought, a former Trump official, is widely considered to be a candidate for Trump’s prospective chief of staff. He added that “we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”

Trump Is Deteriorating, Helping J.D. Vance and Project 2025

[beemovieerotica]

Trump has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.

The Biggest Lie Trump–Biden 2024 Rematch Voters Are Telling Themselves

Americans have a normalcy bias. It leads them to believe anyone who tells them that everything is awesome and that a system is “holding”—even as that system is hanging together by way of dental floss...And many journalists have a normalcy bias so acute they wouldn’t know how to cover an authoritarian takeover if it meant that one of the two presidential candidates threatened jail for his political opponents—even as he continues to refer to these journalists as “the enemy of the people.” It also means that they tend to cover “Trump convicted on 34 felony counts” in terms of “how much would this story make us deviate from covering a normal election?” It turns out that we’re normalizing the abnormal, covering the election as a horse race between democracy and illiberalism without mentioning illiberalism or considering the stakes and the consequences, and repeatedly applying a false equivalence to Trump and Biden. We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do...The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.