His reputation for being “Trump’s Holy Warrior” during the 45th president’s first term didn’t stop him. His intimate involvement with the Project 2025 agenda for Trump’s second administration, which became so controversial that the Trump campaign all but disavowed it, didn’t stop him. His espousal of radical ideas about presidential power during his confirmation hearings didn’t stop him. His suspected association with a wildly unpopular federal funding freeze imposed by the agency he was nominated to run didn’t stop him. And Senate Democrats, who belatedly mobilized a boycott of the a committee’s vote endorsing him and then launched an all-night “talk-a-thon” on the Senate floor to warn of his malevolent designs, couldn’t stop him. And so on Thursday night, with a vote along party lines, Russell Vought was confirmed to return to the directorship of the Office of Management and Budget, which he has described as the “nerve center” of the federal government.
With this vote a very important piece of the Trump 2.0 machinery was snapped into place. Other Cabinet-rank appointees are much flashier and get more attention. Their departments do things that everyone understands and that touch millions of lives directly. But far beyond his specific responsibilities (preparing the president’s budget and reviewing fiscal and regulatory decisions), the new OMB director is a particularly valuable player in the planned MAGA transformation of the federal government. To borrow a sports term, Vought is a “glue guy.” He’s the team member who lifts the performance of everyone around him without necessarily being the big star himself. And if you are alarmed by the counter-revolutionary ambitions of this administration, that should make him a very scary man for real.
In the shake-up of the federal government that MAGA folk generally call an assault on the “deep state,” there are three main forces. One is a Congress controlled by a Republican Party that has sworn an unusually intense allegiance to Trump, and that has its own ideological reasons (mostly related to the need to pay for tax cuts and Trump’s mass deportation program, while making at least a stab at reducing deficits and debt) for taking a sledgehammer to the parts of the federal government that don’t involve GOP sacred cows like Social Security and defense. Another is DOGE, Elon Musk’s pseudo-agency that is already wreaking havoc in agency after agency as he applies his radical corporate-takeover methods to the public sector with a giant social-media troll army at his back. Each is engaged in demolition work that could be at least temporarily stopped by federal court orders (in Musk’s case) or by internal wrangling (in Congress’s). Vought’s OMB is the third force that will make sure Trump’s agenda moves forward one way or the other. And he is perfectly equipped to coordinate these disparate forces and supply blows to the bureaucracy if and when others fall short.
The funding freeze showed us what a single memo from OMB can do, spawning nationwide chaos and panic. A more sustained effort, and one that relies less on “pauses” and more on a true freeze of grants and contracts backed up by explicit presidential executive orders, can do a lot more damage to the programs and services that MAGA folk don’t like anyway. Meanwhile OMB can exchange intel with DOGE on potential targets in the bureaucracy, while OMB will definitely guide congressional Republicans as they put together massive budget-reconciliation and appropriations bills.
Vought’s personality, worldview, and experience make him a lot more pivotal than his job description, believe it or not. He’s in sync with deep wellsprings of the conservative infrastructure as a committed Christian nationalist (he is a graduate of the old-school fundamentalist Wheaton College, and is closely associated with the theocratic neo-Calvinist wing of the Southern Baptist Convention), a think-tank veteran (at the Heritage Foundation and his own Center for Renewing America), an heir of the budget-slashing tea-party movement, and as someone who perfectly synthesizes the hardcore right of both the pre-Trump and Trump eras.
Just as importantly, Vought is the one person other than Trump himself who may be able to keep his budget-cutting allies working together and not fighting for power. He spent many years working on Capitol Hill and knows the House GOP culture particularly well; he is a natural ally of the fiscal radicals of the House Freedom Caucus, who currently have enormous influence (and perhaps even control) of 2025 budget decisions thanks to their willingness to blow up things if they don’t get their way. But he’s also as radical as Musk in his antipathy to the deep state, as the chief apostle of the idea the president should have vast powers to usurp congressional spending decisions if he deems it necessary. And unlike Musk and his team of software engineers, he knows every nook and cranny of the enemy territory from his earlier stint at OMB. Vought has also forged personal links with the turbulent tech bro, according to The Wall Street Journal:
“A senior administration official said Vought and Musk have been building a partnership since just after Trump’s victory in November.
“’They share the same passion for making the federal government more efficient and rooting out waste, corruption and fraud, so I think they are very aligned,’ said Wesley Denton, a longtime adviser to former Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) and a Vought friend.”
So Musk may get the headlines, and Mike Johnson and John Thune may flex their muscles on Capitol Hill as they compete to turn Trump’s lawless impulses into laws. But the hand on the wheel may really belong to Russ Vought, who is trusted implicitly by a president who isn’t interested in the details of governing and appreciates a loyal subordinate who shuns the spotlight as much as his radical views allow.
Democrats are driving a polarization over immigration that will probably backfire.
Liberals are confusing support for a humanitarian DACA with support for open borders.
Democrats are officially not in favor of open frontiers but the discourse on the left has finally arrived at a place where it amounts to tacit support for it.
If you oppose the Wall, ICE enforcement, the use of administrative law, detention and deportation, then in essence you support open borders.
If you think there should be very few restrictions on family reunification (chain migration), that risk of absconding should be ignored and that everyone who is eligible for asylum should receive it (no quotas) and be resettled, then in essence you support open borders.
DACA negotiations have collapsed because Democrats and the far right are colluding to undermine them. The far right with bad faith proposals and Democrats with a no compromise stance given that the courts have suspended Trump’s DACA repeal action.
One can understand Democrats’ defense of the diversity lottery and some family reunification rules, as well as an unrestricted path to citizenship for Dreamers and many other previous immigrants, but Democrats have adopted a take it or leave it attitude, even though they are the party in congressional minority.
Once DACA arrives to the Supreme Court immigrants may be left with very few protections. Democrats are gambling with time and with immigrants’ interests.
The fact that the Obama administration (with the exception of DACA) had legislative, fiscal and administrative policies regarding immigrants that were similar or even identical to Trump will always explode in the face of Democrats when trying to pin Republicans with accusations of abuse and lack of sensitivity.
The left has arrived at a place where opposition to police brutality is confused with opposition to all police enforcement and opposition of ICE brutality is confused with opposition to all immigration enforcement.
At the same time, the left wants vigorous federal enforcement of civil and voting rights laws and LGBT rights, ADA, labor law, abortion rights, consumer law, privacy laws, environmental laws, freedom from religion, etc.
Gun rights and freedom of religion don’t get the same defense and are tacitly opposed. So are some aspects of freedom of expression and association.
In other words, the rule of law is to be applied selectively.
Liberals talk about human rights, but countries of origin and transit have a duty to respect the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
And it is a legitimate question to ask if parents risking their children’s lives are doing it for the children or for themselves.
The notion that Mexico is such a bad country that everyone deserves to leave is itself racist in the dual forms of white supremacist thinking and white saviorism.
When the right talks about alternative facts and fake news these are the kind of issues they talk about.
One can understand that Trump’s comments over immigrants are problematic, but he is being smart about making those comments in contexts where the facts can easily be interpreted as favoring his position. His conflation of all immigrants with gang members is meant to provoke liberals into defending gang members. This is what he has done for two years and it seems to keep working. Trump is pushing for cynicism because cynicism only favors the right.
The left is increasingly complicit in pushing cynical views about how government works.
ICE and the Police are conflated with overall brutality. People only have rights but no obligations. International law only applies to the United States.
The right of people to look for democracy and a better life doesn’t include domestic citizens. The opinions of domestic citizens are reduced to racism if they don’t support policies that are tantamount to open borders even though nobody openly talks about open borders.