We need to talk about Russell Vought – But Properly

Why certain mainstream outlets insist on sanitizing Vought as a devout “small government” conservative – and what actually animates his war against pluralistic democracy

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Russell Vought is currently receiving a lot of public attention. You watch the news, or you open a newspaper, there is a decent chance right now that Donald Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget is staring at you; you listen to a politics podcast, and there he is again. In the past ten days or so, there has been news report (Opens in a new window) after news report (Opens in a new window): Who is Russell Vought? The New York Times published a long profile (Opens in a new window), then followed that up with a whole episode on Vought in their main podcast The Daily (Opens in a new window), just days after The New Yorker’s The Political Scene (Opens in a new window) podcast had done the same. International audiences are also told they should know about this man: The British BBC (Opens in a new window) has profiled him this week, so have German newspapers (Opens in a new window).

At first sight, it is perhaps surprising that a man who presents as a rather boring political operative and runs a rather obscure agency is being so heavily scrutinized. And the unfortunate reality is that a lot of the Vought discourse is just people repeating the same few lines about him over and over, providing abstracts of abstracts that are already out there. There is also something uncomfortable and slightly problematic about focusing on this one figure so much. It inevitably serves to elevate him in ways the Trumpists might enjoy: I am sure Russell Vought likes the idea that he could be the Left’s bogeyman.

Some of you will know that I say this having contributed myself, in whatever small measure, to focusing public attention on Vought. I initially wrote a very long profile here on Democracy Americana (Opens in a new window) focusing on his worldview and the ideological underpinnings of what he does last November; I then wrote an updated profile for German newspaper Die Zeit (Opens in a new window) just a few weeks ago. And as a baseline, I think it continues to be a good thing that the broader public is paying attention to this man. He is a key figure in the world of Trumpism, with a rare – and dangerous – combination of ideological zeal and operative competence. As OMB Director, he is undoubtedly in a crucial position right now, determined to use the shutdown as pretext for escalating his assault on the modern state. Few people in this regime have as much power to cause – and are causing – as much harm as Vought.

However, the picture of Vought that is being presented in major mainstream outlets is, unfortunately, severely flawed and misleading in ways that will only serve the regime. I want to focus on The Daily, the news podcast produced by The New York Times that runs five days a week, as an instructive example. The Daily matters because, like it or not, that’s where literally millions of people get their news explained every day. It is easily one of the handful of most downloaded podcasts in the United States and around the world – and therefore, without exaggeration, one of the most influential political formats in existence. Even here in Germany, the first and often only contact people have with U.S. politics comes through The Daily (as a matter of fact, it was the editor of a German newspaper who alerted me to their episode on Vought). On October 6, The Daily published “The ‘Grim Reaper’ of the Government Shutdown” – a show entirely dedicated to Vought. Host Natalie Kitroeff spoke to Coral Davenport, Washington correspondent for the New York Times, who says she spent “weeks and weeks” reporting on Vought, interviewing 30 to 40 people, and also wrote a profile (Opens in a new window) the Times had published about a week before the podcast aired.

So, what does the New York Times’ flagship podcast tell its millions of listeners about Russell Vought? They present him as a devout Christian with an incredible work ethic who grew up with parents struggling with the burdens placed upon them by an overbearing state and channeled that experience into working tirelessly to help the American people; a proper “small government” conservative who, while perhaps being a bit radical in his approach sometimes, loves the free market and therefore tries to rein in the sprawling government bureaucracy. Remarkably, I don’t think there is anything in The Daily’s profile that Vought himself wouldn’t agree with. They are accepting at face value everything Vought claims, resulting in a portrait of Vought that must be almost entirely in line with the regime’s preferred version of who he is and what he does.

The Daily’s bizarrely credulous approach to Vought matters because it is indicative of a much broader tendency to normalize the assault on the modern state, democratic self-government, and the constitutional order – to sanitize those who are responsible for it and the extreme ideas that are animating them. Russell Vought embodies the radicalization of the conservative movement; his example captures how far removed from democratic politics the Trumpist Right is. Vought is convinced to be fighting a noble war against a vast leftist conspiracy that has supposedly taken over the country and is destroying the nation. He dreams of a comprehensive “counter-revolution” and believes that any measure, regardless of how extreme, is justified in this struggle against the “leftist” enemy. But if you only listened to The Daily, you wouldn’t get any of that.

Let’s dive into what The Daily gets so wrong and why, how it is indicative of certain blind spots and fallacies that characterize the broader political discourse, and what we actually need to understand about Russell Vought.

“A true believer” – but in what?

“He is such a true believer,” the New York Times reporter says about Vought. And that’s actually a good start if we want to understand what animates a man who is entirely convinced that what he does is good and noble. But the question must be: A “true believer” in what?

The Daily offers two answers – focusing on one, only touching on another in passing. They put the emphasis firmly on Vought as a small-government conservative who loves the free market and is driven by the idea of cutting public spending in order to free “the people” from an overbearing state. That is his first belief, and he came to it, we are told, very early on, growing up in a blue-collar household: “I think he really genuinely sees the burden of paying for taxes and government as weighing so heavily on families like his own.”

We are also told that Vought is very religious – a devout Christian who “takes his faith really seriously.” And here we quickly arrive at a core problem with how The Daily approaches Vought. What holds these two beliefs – the desire to cut public spending, the free-market fundamentalism on one side, and the Christian faith on the other – together? It is certainly true that, in today’s political reality in the United States, the two often find themselves in a coalition; but is it not worth asking why a pious man would dream of slashing welfare programs and firing government workers? Why he would be so obsessed with the free market that he “even named his dog Milton for Milton Friedman”? The Daily’s host at least clocks one thing as slightly odd: Isn’t his devotion to Trump a little weird, considering that – amongst other things, one might add – the President “has a foul mouth,” as the NYT reporter admits, while Vought won’t ever curse? But all we get in response is: “I think just culturally, there was some discomfort with that fit.” And that’s it, let’s move on.

That’s indicative of what we are getting here. For the Times, presenting Vought as a “true believer” just means: He is a devout Christian who really believes in “small government” and has been working towards achieving his goal for a long time.

This perspective is useful as a reminder that Trumpism didn’t fall out of the sky and MAGA isn’t a complete aberration from some noble conservatism that came before. Vought’s professional biography points to the many ways in which Trumpism builds on long-standing tendencies and impulses on the Right and emerged from within the rightwing coalition. In many ways, Vought, 49 years old, has had a fairly “normal” path as a career operative who has held positions at almost every level inside and around the Republican Party in Washington, DC. Over the course of about two decades, he went from low-level staffer to high-level éminence grise; he was a congressional aide, a part of the think tank and lobbying machine, a campaigner, a member of the Trump administration.

But emphasizing only this part of the story can easily make it sound like nothing has changed on the Right or within the Republican Party. And that’s not true either. We also need to understand the significant radicalization that has shaped today’s Right and grapple with a fairly recent trajectory: From at least a rhetorical commitment to free-market, small-government libertarianism to embracing the rightwing populist culture war, and from at least pretending to be committed to restraining governmental power to aggressively mobilizing the coercive powers of the state to roll back pluralism.

The problem with the way The Daily tells the story is this: They offer absolutely no answer to why Vought and his fellow Trumpist leaders are so angry and aggrieved – how they are giving themselves permission to embrace authoritarianism and extremism?

Instead, one of the most influential political platforms in the world chooses to perpetuate what is perhaps the number one fallacy about the modern Right: That this is all about “small government.”

Small government, governmental restraint to guarantee individual liberty and freedom, to keep the state out of people’s private lives, to make sure it doesn’t meddle with private business. Such ideas have, at least rhetorically, always been a key element of the modern conservative political identity. But taking these claims at face value never led to a plausible interpretation. What emerged as the modern conservative political project in the middle decades of the twentieth century was in many ways defined by an alliance between two distinct factions. One the one hand, there were reactionary traditionalists and, especially from the 1970s onwards, a newly mobilized Religious Right. On the other, there were market-fundamentalist libertarian factions, staunchly opposed to the New Deal state and the reformulation of liberalism into a governing philosophy that embraced an active role for the state in creating the kinds of conditions in which individuals would be protected from the worst excesses of capitalism and be enabled to thrive as equal citizens. What united the different factions of the newly formed “modern conservative” alliance was the fight against communism, socialism, liberalism – terms conservatives tended to use synonymously. More specifically, they were aligned in the fight against any attempt at leveling traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, gender, and religion. In the context of this broader struggle, they have always been comfortable with “big government” in certain areas, if it served to uphold the “natural order” and traditional hierarchies. This has found its most obvious expression in the drastic expansion of the law enforcement apparatus as part of a “law and order” politics since the 1970s.

It's not about “small government”

The idea that a “small government” conservatism is animating today’s Trumpist Right is rather bizarre. And to their credit, the leaders of the MAGA coalition are quite open about what is really behind their assault on the modern state. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, for instance, in a truly revealing passage of his Foreword to the Project 2025 policy agenda (Opens in a new window), stated that the project of “dismantling the administrative state” was not about the actual size of government at all. The goal was to cut “the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening.” All the leftist subversion, Roberts was certain, was orchestrated and funded by the government. The goal, therefore, had to be to “bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.”

A vast conspiracy. Enemies everywhere. Un-American forces have overtaken “every last institution” and especially the state. Radical countermeasures are urgently needed. That is also the starting point for everything Vought does. His end goal is not, as The Daily claims, to “shrink the federal government”, he is not merely “deeply driven by fiscal austerity and cutting budgets.” He is less concerned about the actual size of government and more about cutting and curtailing the parts that he thinks are aiding “the Left” and its “subversive” aims. That’s what he means when he is talking about “dismantling the administrative state” – while simultaneously attempting to mobilize and weaponize the coercive powers of the state in order to use the vast machinery that is the U.S. government to impose a reactionary order on American society.

It would be one thing for the New York Times to miss this and get this wrong if Vought and his ilk were cunningly obscuring their true project. But Vought, in particular, fancies himself an intellectual leader, prompting him to constantly articulate the ideas that define the radical Right and animate its escalating assault on democratic pluralism.

A piece Vought published in September 2022 in The American Mind, the online magazine of the rabidly Trumpist Claremont Institute, offers perhaps the clearest insight into Vought’s worldview and his understanding of our particular moment in U.S. history. It’s titled: “Renewing American Purpose: Statesmanship in a Post-Constitutional Moment.” (Opens in a new window) In my profile of Vought (Opens in a new window) from last November, I tried to provide a detailed analysis and contextualization of what Vought outlined in there and where it sits in the intellectual history of the Right. The shorter version goes something like this:

Key to understanding Vought’s worldview is the idea that the constitutional order - and with it the “natural” order itself - has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what is no more. Vought certainly sees himself in the modern conservative tradition, but he also disdains the conservative establishment for their inability to understand and act upon the radical demands of the moment. Power, Vought claims, now lies with a “permanent ruling class” of leftist elites who control all major institutions of American life and especially the “woke and weaponized” agencies of the state. In order to defeat them, conservatives must become “radical constitutionalists” - and take radical action. While Vought traces the “leftwing revolution” back a hundred years, to the progressive era, there is no question that the election of Barack Obama was a radicalizing moment for him and many key thinkers on the radical Right - as were the multiracial protests in the summer of 2020. Vought is convinced that America is facing an existential threat, a situation he has likened to 1776 and 1860: (Counter-) Revolution and total war, that is what America must face if it is to survive. Vought is therefore not interested in “normal” democratic politics: He seeks to “traumatize” civil servants, use the military to suppress protests, and sees Trump as an agent of God’s will.

The Daily explicitly references Vought’s idea of a “radical constitutionalism,” so we must assume the reporter was aware of and read this particular piece. Ignorance is not a good explanation for why we are nevertheless getting “devout Christian, small-government conservative” Vought in the profile. Then what is?

Sanitizing Russell Vought and the Trumpist Right

It is obvious how committed The Daily is to sanitizing Russell Vought – and the movement from which he emerged. In a revealing moment, the New York Times reporter describes the Tea Party as a manifestation of “this wave of intense fiscal conservatism, anti-government, sweeping through Washington.” But the Tea Party was animated mostly by racial resentment; Tea Partiers weren’t actually concerned about the absolute size of government - but about government supposedly letting the “wrong” people cut in line. Another example for how committed The Daily is to presenting a soberly respectable picture of Russell Vought is how they describe his relationship to Trump. We are given to understand that Vought may not be entirely comfortable with the President (remember: the foul mouth...) – but sees him “as someone who can help him realize this vision of much smaller government.” But Vought is quite a bit more enthusiastic in his devotion to Trump than what we are led to believe here. He is singularly focused on bending the entire machine to Trump’s will because he believes Trump is the nation’s last chance at survival – he is the leader of a revolutionary counter-offensive against the evil forces of “unnatural” leftism. Literally, in Vought’s words, “a gift of God.”

The Daily failing to properly describe the combination of religious devotion and authoritarian leader cult that informs Vought’s relationship with Trump points to another really glaring omission: They are not even mentioning Vought’s overt Christian nationalism. This, again, is quite the choice, considering that Vought himself has explicitly described himself as a Christian nationalist (Opens in a new window). That is also why Vought not particularly liking Trump’s “foul mouth,” as The Daily emphasized, is entirely irrelevant for their relationship. Christian nationalism is best described as a form of political identity that fuses a reactionary version of Christianity with aggressive ethno-nationalist sentiment. It is, more than anything else, defined by a sense of grievance – by a perception that “our” country (“real America”) is being taken away from “us” (white Christians). Much of Trump’s appeal to the base as well as to elites like Vought stems from the fact that he is consumed by this sense of grievance himself – that is the “authenticity” his followers sense and admire. He is aggrieved as a white man who is convinced he has been wronged as he is being denied the constant reverence and subservience to which he believes he is entitled. And Trump is always eager to emphasize that he is being wronged as a white Christian as well.

The New York Times is unable and/or unwilling to unpack any of that. I believe that is indicative of a larger issue that is shaping their coverage of the Right (and that comes on top of the more obvious points that the Times wants to make money and some higher-ups are evidently quite comfortable with accommodating the regime): They don’t want to engage with what they see as unsavory ideology at all (as opposed to the kind of free-market fundamentalism that the mainstream discourse has long treated as not ideological). Because doing so would make it very hard to uphold the “normal politics” framework that defines much of mainstream political journalism in the United States: Both sides are roughly the same, and the overriding goal of the journalist is to provide “balanced” coverage from a “neutral” position in equidistance to either side. That framework is much easier to justify if you pretend to be dealing with “normal” politicians and operatives – as opposed to committed ideologues pursuing an extreme project.

Vought is “driven by radical ideological fire,” we are told towards the end. But The Daily never takes that idea seriously at all. Here, that is only meant to say: He really wants to shrink government. Vought’s notion of “radical constitutionalism” is mentioned as well – but it is presented as some kind of originalism applied to the structure of the federal government, as if Vought was just attempting to turn the clock back to the vision of the Founders: A small executive, no independent agencies. They are completely missing and/or obscuring what matters here. Vought’s ideology of “radical constitutionalism” captures the defining sensibility on the Trumpist Right: The “Left” has command of America, all that is noble has been destroyed, there is nothing left to conserve, therefore nothing short of a radical “counter-revolution” can now save the nation.

Too many mainstream journalists simply refuse to accept that they need to approach people like Vought as the leaders of a radicalizing authoritarian movement – as opposed to “normal” political operatives who can be understood and described with the vocabulary of “normal” politics, and within the boundaries that define the comfort zone for New York Times reporters.

This leads to some really bizarre distortions. Instead of a proper explanation for Vought’s radicalization, we are told that during the Biden years, the poor guy, heartbroken that he hadn’t been able to achieve his “small government” dreams, was “in the wilderness,” lonely and sad, and that’s what led to him “getting angry.” But Vought was not some geek who didn’t handle loneliness very well. He was a powerful operative throughout, always remaining in Trump’s orbit while also serving as one of the architects behind Project 2025. The main reason why he is so angry is that he is not just after political power in a narrow sense but obsessed with status and cultural domination. Like so many of MAGA’s leaders, he perceived the mass mobilization in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 as a radicalizing event because it seemed to prove that the forces of “leftist” pluralism had advanced to the point where they were redefining who and what counted as “real America.” But to Russell Vought, it is the prerogative of people who look like him and share his sensibilities to define the boundaries of who gets to belong, to have their own image reflected back at them in the public square.

It is October 2025, the assault on what is left of American democracy is escalating, and one of the New York Times’ most influential formats is still presenting one of the Trumpist regime’s leaders as a devout “small government” conservative with a great work ethic and a real conviction that he can help the American people best by “clearing out all the inefficiencies and streamlining the government.” The Daily makes Russell Vought sound entirely reasonable, and they even add more than a tinge of admiration by calling him a “consummate disciplined executor.” On this basis, most Americans would probably register Vought as a noble, or certainly respectable guy.

But there is nothing noble about what Vought is doing. He is a fully competent, utterly committed radical ideologue. He lusts for counter-revolution and radical measures. There is no line he doesn’t feel justified to cross. He does not talk about the conflict with “the Left” in the idiom of democratic politics, but that of war (Opens in a new window). Vought is at war with large swaths of the population, with the very idea of a democratic society defined by egalitarian pluralism. If you have correctly identified that this guy is now in a really influential position, that people like him are now in control of the American government, how is that not the main story?