“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work…. We want to put them in trauma.”
“[The Center for Renewing America is] an organization that I helped turn into the Death Star…. I want to be the person who crushes the Deep State.”
“We are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country.”
“The president in that first term wanted to cut off funding for Ukraine…. It’s a totally normal policy process to go through that people lost their minds about…. I had been personally told, you know, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it’s going.
“And we cut the money off. And it was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.”
“The Consumer Financial Protection Act requires the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to transfer each quarter an “amount determined by the Director to be reasonably necessary” for the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection to carry out its authorities under law….
“This letter is to inform you that for the Third Quarter of Fiscal Year 2025, the Bureau is requesting $0.”
“I’m a Christian, and I believe in a Christian set of principles based on my faith.”
—Russell Vought, June 2017.
Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s director of the White House Office and Management and Budget, is Charles Colson 2.0.
Colson was the most viciously partisan member of President Richard Nixon’s White House team. He described himself as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and hung a sign in his house that said “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Colson also supposedly said he would run over his own grandmother to elect Richard Nixon (though that turned out to be a slight embellishment on what someone else said about Colson). Inevitably, Colson was the first Nixon aide to go to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal (for obstructing justice).
Colson’s downfall prompted him to have a religious awakening. After he got out of jail he declared himself born again and started the nonprofit Prison Fellowship ministry, which is still in business thirteen years after Colson’s death. Although it’s quite conservative, Prison Fellowship has a record of doing good in the world, promoting rehabilitation, less severe sentences for drug offenders, and so on.
In Colson’s day, conservatives believed you could be a hatchet man or you could commit yourself wholeheartedly to Jesus Christ, but you couldn’t do both at the same time. How quaint! Today’s generation of conservatives rejects that false choice, none so vehemently as Vought.
My purpose in beginning this article with a long string of quotations was to demonstrate that Vought presents himself as both an amoral political actor and a devout Christian. Vought wishes trauma on civil servants and has inflicted same; boasts about turning his think tank into a “Death Star”; panders to the right’s paranoid streak by claiming Marxists rule America; helps Trump withhold aid to Ukraine illegally after its leader declines to investigate the son of Trump’s 2020 opponent; and impounds congressional appropriations in gleeful defiance of court precedent. Pretty sinful, no? Not to Vought. While doing all this Vought proudly declares his deep devotion to the Christian faith.
Christian nationalists are like that. Vought explained a couple of years ago what “Christian nationalism” means in describing the policies of his Center for Renewing America:
We’re a nation under God. So we’ve talked about being a nation that’s for God. That’s a consensus that we want to renew in this country, that we have religious liberty, but it cannot come from this notion that a country isn’t understanding the reality that it has to obey God, and there is only one true God, and that is Jesus Christ our Lord.
Vought believes in the First Amendment’s injunction that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” but only because it’s obvious to him that America already has an established religion, and it’s Christianity. Vought’s God has no patience with infidels. “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology,” Vought has written. “They do not know God because they rejected Jesus Christ his son and they stand condemned.” In Vought’s view, “We’ve been a little too libertarian on the right.”
Vought came by these views growing up in a family that, when he was four, turned to religious fundamentalism after the automobile-accident death of his half-sister. His mother helped start a Bible-based Christian school in Connecticut and told a local newspaper that if America gave up on Judeo-Christian values “then they’re going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.” In a 2023 interview, Vought said, “My mom led me to the Lord when I was four years old.” Vought was educated at a private Christian academy and then the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois.
During the Biden years, in a Newsweek op-ed, Vought wrote an essay defending Christian nationalism against its critics:
Psalm 2 asks, “Why do the nations rage and the people plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord…. Now therefore O kings, be wise; be warned O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling”.... If Psalm 2 is taken seriously, what is the political manifestation of that corrective? Is it not to recognize the healthiness of a people, including public officials, consciously and publicly positioning themselves for the Lord or under God?
Vought’s God isn’t going to bend your ear with a lot of sentimental nonsense about the least among us. Maybe He did with Chuck Colson, but He doesn’t with Russell Vought. Instead, the Lord wishes to abolish the Agency for International Development, of which Secretary of State Marco Rubio named Vought acting administrator so he could finish the damned thing off. Eliminating USAID was billed as a DOGE accomplishment, but (as I observed in June) Vought was Elon Musk’s DOGE puppetmaster. Killing off the agency was Vought’s project, not Musk’s.
Project 2025, of which Vought is widely credited to be the architect, called USAID “a permanent and immiserating feature of the global landscape.” That’s a novel way to describe a program to alleviate global poverty. According to an October ProPublica profile of Vought by Andy Kroll that was published in The New Yorker, an OMB staffer at a February meeting proposed to Vought that they cut USAID’s budget in half. Vought replied that he wanted to get as close to zero as possible. But more people will die, the aide protested. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought answered.
Last month I noted that the Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols projected that Trump’s AID cuts would cause the deaths of about 640,000 people, 430,000 of them children. Since then Nichols has revised upward her estimated number of deaths by about 38,000. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
While we’re pondering theological puzzles: Why would that same Redeemer who drove the moneychangers from the temple (“Ye have made it a den of thieves”) want Vought to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB? That was Vought’s doing, too. “Highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable” is how Project 2025 described an agency created to protect ordinary people against the sort of financial abuses that gave us the financial crisis of 2008 and the worst recession since the Great Depression.
As with USAID, Vought is CFPB’s acting administrator. In November, Vought ordered what’s left of the CFPB to recite before every examination of a financial institution a “humility pledge” promising “to work collaboratively,” to give “advance notice of scheduled examinations,” to encourage “self-reporting,” and to avoid enforcement actions wherever possible. As The New York Times’s Stacy Cowley pointed out, the pledge was “mostly symbolic” because Vought had already barred CFPB examiners from initiating new investigations and to close out the old ones.
“By empowering scammers, payday lenders, and other bad actors who routinely rip off consumers,” Rep. Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, said November 20, “Trump and Vought are taking money out of Americans’ wallets.” Yea, verily, unto the temple is laid a red carpet and hung a white banner that saith: Welcome back moneychangers! All is forgiven!
To this bystander, the only identifiably Christian aspect to Vought’s worldview is its apocalyptic framing. Here lies my way and there lies (as mom taught) the way of sin, sickness, disease and anarchy. Other conservatives judge the federal bureaucracy an inconvenient obstacle to Trump’s deregulatory agenda. To Vought, it’s a “cartel working behind closed doors.” Close your eyes and you can almost see the brimstone, pentagrams, and sabbatic goats. Vought doesn’t aspire merely to hold permanent Washington at bay; he wants “to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations.” Every battle is Armageddon.
“We are in a post-constitutionalist moment,” Vought wrote in 2022, “a new regime” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” To fight liberal deviationism, conservatives must become “radical constitutionalists” (italics his). Where others on the right say government took a wrong turn during the New Deal or during the Progressive Era, Vought says “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years” (italics mine). If the slogan “Make America Great Again” raises the question, “When was that?” Vought’s answer would appear be 1825. It all went to hell after we opened the Erie Canal.
A logical Christian view of Donald Trump is that he is not a good man. Our judicial system has ruled him a fraudster and a sexual abuser. He is using his presidency to make himself rich in multiple ways. He is taking medical care away from lower-income people. He is committing murder in the Caribbean. He mocks handicapped people, blames the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner on the film director’s own “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” makes excuses for white supremacists, and sometimes gives them jobs. Is there a Christian mother alive who wants her son to grow up to be like Donald Trump? Nobody, Christianity tells us, is beyond redemption if appropriately contrite, but Trump doesn’t do contrition. Yet Vought said last year: “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country…. That is nothing more than a gift of God.”
I’ve written previously that the prevailing Republican doctrine is not identifiably conservative. As an ethnic non-believing Jew, I claim no expertise within the metaphysical realm. But how on earth does the prevailing Christian ethos in Donald Trump’s Washington, as practiced by Russell Vought, align with the Christianity that the goyim have been telling me about my whole life?
Like Chuck Colson, Vought would run over his own grandmother to serve his president. But unlike Colson, Vought would also do it to please his Creator. If there’s an afterlife, Colson’s wondering why in hell he never thought of that.
