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.
For Democrats there is no path for a Senate victory in 2022 either if things continue as they have.
Biden must go full economic populist from day one:
1. Wages. Bring up a vote on raising the minimum wage, but also establish a new framework for minimum wages in the United States. We need a clear differentiation between regions and inside regions between urban, suburban and rural areas. Bring up the minimum wage for professionals, administrators and executives too.
2. Place based development. Good jobs are concentrating in only a few neighborhoods in a few cities. The federal government must require corporations, starting with federal contractors, to spread jobs so that the working class, both white and non-white, has access to good quality jobs.
3. Follow up on executive action on prescription drugs.
4. Marihuana decriminalization, both legislative and executive-regulatory.
5. Instruct the Department of Justice to continue and expand anti-trust actions in the information technology sector.
6. Instruct the Department of Justice to begin anti-trust actions in the agriculture sector. Expand subsidies to agriculture as a consequence of trade wars, but require more production for domestic consumption.
Biden must also move to the right or center right on several issues:
1. Funding the Police. Get the Party behind a unified legislative and fiscal position that is easy to explain. Make sure this position can be implemented quickly everywhere from the biggest and most diverse cities to the smallest villages that Democrats control. Convince the most radical Democrats that this is the best position to have. Democrats can’t continue with the current messaging cacophony.
2. China. Keep Trump’s framework. Actually, pledge to deepen the decoupling.
3. Support national voter id and other changes to address even the slightest possibility of voter fraud.
4. Authoritarianism in Latin America. As foreign policy is within the President’s primary jurisdiction, develop a policy on how to deal with Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, as well as Brazil, that puts the primary focus on human rights and democracy. Go beyond platitudes and appoint someone with an exclusive focus on this. Reject incrementalism in sanctions (either putting them in place or lifting them) though, it doesn’t work.
5. Immigration. Allow moderate immigrant groups to shape the Party’s position. This will inevitably lead to focus on comprehensive reform and a rejection of open borders. The Party should repudiate the concept of sanctuaries. The Party wouldn’t tolerate sanctuaries for racism, so why support sanctuaries where the law is not applied evenly. Defunding sanctuary cities should be contingent on passing comprehensive reform.
6. Israel, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and the Middle East and East Mediterranean. Keep Trump’s policy objectives. Biden’s original idea of partioning Irak shows he understands that final solutions are important. On Iran the point is basically about making it a better regional actor. No simple return to the previous nuclear framework. On the Middle East Peace Process the pressure needs to be kept up on Palestinians and repudiation of boycott movements against Israel. Palestinians should be both pressured and allowed to hold elections so that they can appoint a legitimate peace negotiator with Israel, which is what has been missing for more than a decade. Lebanon may also be about to flip. Saudi Arabia’s modernization needs to be supported, so no place for sanctions there. The Yemeni peace process is important but secondary to other objectives. The Syrian, Libyan and Iraq stabilization are more important and require real geopolitical vision. The US needs to intervene more on the Cyprus and Greek Aegean conflicts, so that Turkey can be at least partially appeased. The Armenians and Kurds problems need to receive more US attention with the US pressuring both to compromise in relation to their territorial ambitions.
7. Military spending, more and better.
8. Global warming. Push other countries to make more efforts. Continue supporting natural gas at home and its use abroad. Get other countries to stop using coal. Focus at home and abroad on electric cars. Develop a framework for a carbon tax at the border on imported goods just like the European Union is considering.
9. Crack down on higher education cost inflation.
The reason so many Democrats are mad as hell is because not only did the party underperform, but the polls we rely on for deciding things in primaries would also probably be wrong.
Late deciders once again broke for Trump though.
In the most fundamental way this election was an “its the economy, stupid” vote.
Losing with the white moderates in Maine. Losing with the white populists in Montana. Where are the Senate pickups we were promised?
Arizona already went through decades of Trumpism, just like California before it. Doesn’t mean the model is replicable in states with less Hispanic immigration or with immigration from Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, etc.
Trump has done well even with Libertarians running pretty good in many states. Meanwhile the Green vote collapsed.
Democrats ran on covid and demeanor. Republicans ran against political correctness and on the economy.
The people who came out for Trump voted because they liked him.
The Democrats who came out again for Biden (many after not voting in 2016) voted for a diversity of reasons. The few Republicans who voted for Biden did it to stop Trump.
The Republican party is the minority party yet is more structurally strong now than in 2016. They have a clear path forward with America First and opposing all the myriad manifestations of toxic wokeness. Their path is clear as in Europe.
Gays will continue voting for Trump. Trump was bad on transgender rights but neutral on gay rights. Transgender rights are stuck because they are choosing the wrong framework to push for an incoherent agenda. More equal protection under the law and less culture wars on pronouns. The bathroom thing is unenforceable and easy to mock but transgender leadership is choosing moralizing.
The left is not anywhere near ascendant in the US.
30% of Puerto Rican in Florida voted for Trump, for example.
Florida voted to raise the minimum wage and to enfranchise ex convicts. It also reelected its Republican Governor, elected a Republican Senator and twice voted for Trump. Floridians who are moderate must have buyers’ remorse with their experience with Gillum. But the state is not reactionary or conservative.
If I was in Florida looking at how California closed Disneyland and Universal Studios taking away the livelihoods of all those Hispanic service workers and still having an epidemic and then considered that Democrats would also close Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando if voters let them I would have to balance competing ethical interests. When it comes to covid old people are voting out of self interest. It doesn’t mean their ethics are superior, as we see in all the other ways they vote.
2018 was overshadowed in 2020 by moralizing about masks and ambiguity over cultural issues.
Is it progress that in order to have the Squad speaking about things that will never become legislation we have to lose seats that are key to getting anything at all done? Loses in congressional and state legislative seats, including in New York, will soon tell us.
If Biden wins and loses the Senate it will be a good reminder that the Electoral College is not the only constitutional problem. Democrats had no ideas beyond filibuster reform (which would be moot) and ludicrous ideas about DC and PR as states.
Encouraging mail vote turned out to be an incredibly flawed strategy when it comes to perception. Even early voting in places like New York that don’t do an early count was a bit stupid.
Neither the Democratic party nor the left have paths forward.
1. The white suburban route requires moving a lot more to the cultural center and that wouldn’t pay dividends for a while.
2. A white working class route would be even more uphill as it would pit the suburban fiscal moderates against the working class populists.
3. The Bernie strategy of turning out disenchanted progressives has been twice disproven.
4. The identity politics BLM agenda doesn’t even have the support of many Black elected officials and is stuck even in the Bluest of cities, yet is incredibly divisive at the national level and in most key battlegrounds.
Black Democratic partisans made Biden the nominee. Dettached Black voters are another thing.
I suspect that the strategies of neither Biden nor Bernie would have worked.
The presumption that covid would only work against Trump I think was misguided. Covid also worked in his favor as people want to get back to work. The media fear mongering over covid may have backfired.
The Black, Hispanic and White working class male vote (including the gay vote) may have tipped further enough towards Trump to make the Republican party even more hegemonic in most of the states of USA.
Democrats’ historic mishandling of deindustrialization and China, silence over authoritarianism in Latin America and the ambiguity over defunding police all contribute to pushing at the margins just enough against Democrats.