Russ Vought: Donald Trump’s holy warrior

CLAD IN REDMAGAOMB baseball caps, draped in the American flag and cheering for Donald Trump, the movement can be rather brash. Yet one of the people driving it forward is anything but. It is almost easy at first to overlook Russell Vought (pronounced “vote”), with his tortoiseshell spectacles, neatly trimmed beard and scholarly demeanour. That would be a mistake. Mr Vought’s calm exterior belies an incendiary streak, fuelled by his . And he will be a pivotal player in Mr Trump’s administration, aiming at nothing less than a destruction of the status quo in American governance.If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider Mr Vought’s own words. “I want to be the person that crushes the deep state. I think there’s a lot of different ways to do that,” he told undercover reporters in a meeting shortly before the election. Characteristically, Mr Vought did not fume and did not prevaricate when the secret recording of his comments was released; rather, a representative thanked the reporters for “airing our perfect conversation”.Mr Vought’s plans will become a lot more familiar to America and the world in the coming months. Among the 50-plus people nominated so far by Mr Trump for senior positions requiring Senate confirmation, just a few are returnees from his first term. Of them, only Mr Vought has been tapped to return to the exact job he previously held—a sign of Mr Trump’s respect for his abilities. Once again he will be director of the Office of Management and Budget. The has a claim to being the most powerful agency in Washington that few people have heard of: it helps to write the president’s budget and co-ordinate the regulatory activities of other agencies. In some ways Mr Vought never left it. In the four years since the last election, he has been crafting his strategy for what he would do at its helm if given a second chance, vowing to “break the bureaucracy to the presidential will”.Mr Vought has come a long way from his blue-collar upbringing in a small Connecticut town. His father was an electrician and his mother a schoolteacher. They inculcated in him a prodigious work ethic that colleagues over the years have remarked on. He graduated from Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian school in Illinois, and spent more than a decade working on budgetary issues on Capitol Hill. His faith remains at the core of his life and politics. Mr Vought calls himself a Christian nationalist. In 2021 he founded the Centre for Renewing America, an organisation whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”.His religious views have provoked controversy. In Mr Vought’s confirmation hearing in 2017—he squeaked through by a single vote—Senator Bernie Sanders pointed to an article by Mr Vought in which he described Muslims as “condemned” for having rejected Jesus Christ. Mr Vought replied that he respected the right of every person to express their religious beliefs. In the secretly recorded meeting last year he said that elected leaders should discuss whether to prioritise Christian immigrants over those of other faiths. And he has called for a total abolition of abortion—a position that is too extreme for even most American conservatives.But Mr Vought’s religiosity gives a scorching fervour to his criticism of politics and society, and that appeals to the Republican base. He regularly describes the federal government as “woke and weaponised” and has warned that the Democratic Party is “increasingly evil” because it forces secularism on families. He also was an early combatant in the pushback against diversity policies, which became a potent campaign theme for Mr Trump: in 2020 he wrote an official memo saying that anti-racism training in the federal government was divisive and anti-American.Mr Trump has turned to Mr Vought not for his religious teachings but for his mastery of the budget process as well as his radical policy ideas. Mr Vought was one of the architects of “Project 2025”, a for how Mr Trump should reform the federal government. (During the election campaign Mr Trump assured voters that he had “nothing to do” with Project 2025.) In his contribution to the document Mr Vought argued that there was an “existential” need for the president to make aggressive use of his powers. He wants the White House to hold back, or impound, expenditures approved by Congress in order to slash overall federal spending, and also wants to end employment protections for thousands of career civil servants.These proposals, if implemented by Mr Trump, could greatly enhance the ability of the White House to control the bureaucracy and dictate policy. Yet they would encounter fierce resistance both on Capitol Hill and in courts. Legal scholars question the constitutionality of impoundment, and the targeting of civil servants raises the spectre of cold-war-style tests of political loyalty. Mr Vought, for his part, has no doubt that he is on the right path. “The storm clouds are upon us,” he said in a recent interview on a Christian podcast. “We need to trust that the duty is ours and the results are God’s.”