Meet the Ideologue of the “Post-Constitutional” Right

Russell Vought, one of the architects behind Project 2025, believes there is nothing left to conserve. He desires revolution – and to burn down the system

credit: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

An audio version of this piece will be added by Thursday evening.

During the presidency of Barack Obama, Republicans loved to talk about how they, as “constitutional conservatives,” had an obligation to act as a bulwark against the dictatorial overreach from the White House. They framed the political confrontation as a conflict between the quasi-totalitarian progressive movement on one side and the defenders of the Framers’ vision on the other: 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. In his “Mission Statement” for National Review, in the fall of 1955, William F. Buckley, who was instrumental in forging the coalition of self-identifying libertarians and traditionalists that defined movement conservatism, famously listed as one of “our convictions”: “It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly.”

However, those very same Republican, “constitutional conservative” circles who derided Obama as a tyrant every time he considered using a presidential executive order now want Donald Trump to completely upend the system with precisely that instrument. As part of their so-called “180-Day Playbook,” for instance, the folks behind Project 2025 have drafted hundreds of executive orders in their efforts to prepare a more efficient, more ruthless rightwing regime.

Are they all just a bunch of hypocrites? There undoubtedly is – and has always been – a good deal of hypocrisy at work. But if we want to understand the significant radicalization that has shaped today’s Right, it is worth grappling 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.

Enter Russell Vought, who embodies that trajectory like few others. It was reported last week that Vought will serve as the head of the Office of Management and Budget in the next Trump administration, the same position he held at the end of Trump I. If that doesn’t necessarily sound like much to most people, let me assure you that Vought is a key figure in the world of Trumpism. He went from being a Republican operative who raged against government overreach in the early 2000s to literally drafting, as the man chiefly responsible for Project 2025’s “Playbook,” the avalanche of presidential executive orders with which the Trumpists hope to take over the state and reshape society; “from fiscal hawk to MAGA warrior,” as the Washington Post put it in a profile of Vought. And because Russell Vought fancies himself an intellectual leader, he also constantly articulates the ideas that define the radical Right and animate its escalating assault on democratic pluralism.

The story of Russell Vought

Most people, I assume, wouldn’t imagine the great political villains, the dangerous masterminds behind extremist movements, to look like Russell Vought. He presents very much like a normal, boring politician. And in many ways, Vought, 48 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 almost 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. In the 2000s, he was executive director of the House Republican Study Committee, one of the power centers of the conservative wing within the GOP, then policy director of the House Republican Conference. Vought was aligned with the conservative establishment, he worked closely with Mike Pence. And his job was to rail and rage against big government and come up with ever new ways of demanding spending cuts. Russell Vought remained a “fiscal hawk” when he joined the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm about halfway through the first Obama term.

In 2016, Russel Vought was part of Donald Trump’s transition team. He entered the administration first as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget; then, in early 2019, he took over as OMB director from Mick Mulvaney. And in that position, he went all in on protecting Donald Trump and forcing the government to execute Trump’s every wish. Vought’s greatest hits: It was OMB that held up military aid to Ukraine because Trump wanted to pressure the Ukrainian government into delivering dirt on Joe Biden; it was Vought’s office that redirected billions of dollars from the Pentagon to Trump’s border wall when Congress blocked funding; Vought was the most aggressive proponent of Schedule F, the presidential executive order Trump announced in the very last weeks of his presidency that was intended to convert thousands of civil servants into political appointees in order to strip away job protections for agents of the hated “deep state”; and after the 2020 election, Vought did everything he could to sabotage the transition.

Over the past four years, Vought has kept busy. Upon leaving the White House, he founded the explicitly Christian nationalist Center for Renewing America. He also played a key role in Project 2025, authoring the chapter on the Executive Office of the President in the policy agenda and taking charge of the “180-day Playbook,” the only part of Project 2025 that has not been made public. In a secretly recorded conversation that came out in the summer, Vought claimed he and his team had already drafted hundreds of executive orders and regulations; he specifically emphasized executive orders to implement the mass deportation of more than 20 million people as quickly as possible. Whatever tensions there were between the Trump campaign and Heritage, Vought’s standing was unaffected. He always remained close with the Right’s undisputed leader. In May, the RNC named Vought policy director for the Republican 2024 platform committee – a move Trump enthusiastically approved and embraced.

And now, Russell Vought will be back as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that position, he will be singularly focused on bending the entire machine to Trump’s will. That was how he interpreted his mission the first time around, and he has only radicalized since. Vought steadfastly believes that any check on the president’s power – on the power of Donald Trump, specifically, who Vought sees as an agent of God’s will – is illegitimate. In his MSNBC column, Hayes Brown called Vought the “unofficial prime minister” of the first Trump administration. And I think that is quite apt. But don’t imagine a modern parliamentary system in which the prime minister is the head of government. Vought wants to be the absolutist monarch’s prime minister, his executive officer who gets the machinery to do as the divinely chosen leader commands.

“Radical constitutionalism”

When it was announced that Vought was going back into the White House, the reactions understandably focused on his role as one of the architects of Project 2025. But Vought is not merely a stand-in for the Heritage crew. He is a committed ideologue. Vought is convinced the constitutional order is no more, that the extreme Left has destroyed it, and that truly radical measures are needed to restore it.

In September 2022, Vought outlined his diagnosis of the problem and his vision of what needs to be done to save America in a piece titled: “Renewing American Purpose: Statesmanship in a Post-Constitutional Moment.” It was published in The American Mind, the online magazine of the Claremont Institute, a rightwing think tank based in Southern California. Over the past decade, Claremont has become the institutional center for the most openly and aggressively Trumpist part of the rightwing intellectual sphere. The thinkers in and around the Claremont Institute are constantly trying to provide high-minded justifications for the Trumpist political project and build a pseudo-sophisticated ideology around Trump as the undisputed leader of the Right.

Vought opens his essay by invoking Whittaker Chambers’ notion that we all “crave a little height,” by which Chambers meant: some deeper understanding of the reality around us – or, as Vought puts it: “the ability to get up and see the lay of the land, above the various forces of history moving us when we don’t know we are being moved.” As a self-regarding conservative intellectual, writing for what considers itself an intellectual audience in the Claremont magazine, one does not bring up Whittaker Chambers lightly. He was a towering figure in the history of the conservative intellectual movement. Chambers, a former communist and Soviet spy in the 1930s, emerged after his defection as one of the most prominent anti-communist voices; he became famous when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee against fellow former Soviet spy Alger Hiss in 1948; his autobiographical reflections, titled Witness, published in 1952, quickly became one of the core texts of the emerging conservative movement. By bringing up Chambers, Vought seeks to lend importance and gravitas to himself and his argument. In the tradition of Whittaker Chambers, Russel Vought declares, his essay sets out “to gain some constitutional height about where we are as citizens.” And just like when Chambers stood up against the acute threat of communist subversion, we are asked to understand, the nation is faced with a grave danger – the same danger, in many ways – yet again; and yet again brave conservative leaders must rise and speak their conscience.

The moment America took the wrong turn, Vought explains, was when the progressive movement under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson figured out how to “radically pervert” the constitution without having to officially amend it. The Left – Vought uses these terms indiscriminately: the Left, progressives, Marxists, it is all the same – started treating the constitution as a living document. Instead of defending and preserving the constitutional order, they wanted to modify it in order to “keep up with a modernizing nation.”

At first sight, this may sound like standard “originalism,” the type we have been hearing from the conservative legal movement for decades. But when Vought talks about the constitution in a Claremont Institute journal, and about Woodrow Wilson as the beginning of evil leftwing subversion, there is a specific meaning to what he says. Ideologically, the Claremont Institute is the home of West Coast Straussianism, a term pointing to a specific school of thought on the Right that goes back to political philosopher Leo Strauss. His disciple Harry Jaffa, a famous Lincoln scholar and one of the most influential conservative intellectuals particularly in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is a key figure in the West Coast Straussian intellectual tradition. It was Jaffa’s students who founded the Claremont Institute in the late 1970s.

West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding – and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timeless essence which it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism – ideologies that seek to remake man and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the Left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America – they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

Today, the constitutional order is no more. “We are in a post-constitutional moment in our country,” Vought declares: We have entered “a new arrangement – a new regime if you will –that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” Power now lies with the executive, Vought explains. Not with the president, however, but with the agencies, unelected bureaucrats, civil servants. And these agencies are fully in the hands of a “permanent ruling class” of leftist elites.

“It has been a slow-moving revolution for over a hundred years,” Vought claims. And this is crucial: The leftwing revolution has already happened and succeeded. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what has long been destroyed.

“So where do we go from here?” Vought asks. He has a solution: Conservatives need to become “radical constitutionalists.” Vought demands the Right “throw off the precedents” and “be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.” For instance, he suggests Republican governors should declare an “invasion” of “illegal aliens,” take control of the border themselves, and “apprehend and return illegal aliens to the border without the federal government.” (In January 2024, Texas governor Greg Abbott did just that, declaring that the “lawless border policies” by the “lawless president” Joe Biden had failed to protect the state of Texas from the “invasion” of migrants; by claiming a right to “self-defense,” Texas announced it was going to defy the president’s authority and nullify federal law.) According to Russell Vought, the current “regime” simply has no legitimacy whatsoever.

Vought then diverges to bring up the death of Queen Elizabeth II, mere weeks before the publication of this piece. In her, Vought sees a warning “of where the Left is trying to go”: Instead of an “energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people,” they want “a monarch with massive historic grandeur and symbolism and no remaining authority,” while everything is controlled by “all-empowered career ‘experts’ like Tony Fauci to wield power behind the curtains.”

This analogy is revealing in how implausible it is: The British monarch is not the equivalent of the U.S. president, as Vought suggests. The monarch is not the head of government. The people do get to express their will when they elect a prime minister. The only way Vought’s analogy makes sense is to stipulate that the unelected monarch embodies the true will of the people. And that is indeed precisely how Vought views Donald Trump.

Towards the end of his piece, Vought implores his audience to fully grasp the severity of the situation: “the hour is late, and time is of the essence.” The “woke and weaponized” leftist regime “is now increasingly arrayed against the American people,” treating patriotic parents as “domestic terrorists” and “putting political opponents in jail.” But all is not lost yet. Because in Donald Trump, a savior has arrived, an “existential threat” to the leftist regime, one who can “break the political cartels.” But the only way to save America is to recognize “that we are living in a post-Constitutional time.” Just winning elections and “meddling at the margins” will not be enough. Patriots on the Right, Vought concludes, must decide to “cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in.”

Where is the line?

If the “natural order” and “Christian civilization” are under threat, what must a movement pledged to their preservation do? Does “conservatism” imply inherent limits that must be respected – or does a commitment to conserve the divinely ordained order require radical measures when crisis hits? Modern conservatism has a long tradition of debating these questions. Where is the line? Who gets to define it?

The American Right today is dominated by forces and factions that are convinced our moment requires not restraint and preservation, but radicalism and “counter-revolution.” As the major institutions of American life are supposedly in the hands of anti-American, leftist, “globalist,” “woke” forces that desire to tear the moral fabric of the nation apart, as the “natural order” is supposedly under siege, those who used to call themselves “conservatives” need to do whatever is necessary to defend a particular kind of “freedom”: the freedom to live in accordance with the “natural order,” which necessitates imposing it on the whole country.

The fundamental diagnosis behind what Russell Vought calls “radical constitutionalism” has become dogma on the Right: “The American constitutional order has been overthrown,” as another piece in American Mind, the same Claremont magazine, put it in June. Under the title “The Post-Constitutional Order,” a rightwing lawyer and blogger named TJ Harker warned, just weeks after Donald Trump was convicted in Manhattan, that “the regime is so powerful that it exercises near total dominion over the rule of law, easily wielding the legal system as a tool to prosecute its political opponents with impunity.” Same with the mainstream media: fully commanded by the regime. “There are now only two paths forward,” the author declared: “either the regime will solidify its power in November or Trump will be elected. If the former, we will descend further into the regime’s totalitarian grip. If the latter, unpleasant things will have to be done to hold people to account.”

Russel Vought himself also reacted to Trump’s Manhattan conviction. In a long post on ex-Twitter, he raged on May 31: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution. Do not tell me that these are mere political disagreements of Americans with different world views. This is only the most recent example of a post-Constitutional America furthered by a corrupt marxist vanguard pulling out all the stops to protect their own power.” No more normal politics, no more electoralism: “But this isn’t just about winning an election to shift the see saw toward our agenda. It’s about demanding that our leaders destroy this threat at every level with every tool.”

Conservatism is no longer enough!

The general sentiment that it is no longer enough to be “conservative,” that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics, is being echoed across the Right – among pundits, activists, politicians, intellectuals. People at the center of conservative politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” outright. In October 2022, for instance, The Federalist published an instructive piece titled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” It pleaded with conservatives to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more “small government”: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” John Daniel Davidson, the author of the piece and senior editor at The Federalist, was fully aware of the implications of what he demanded: “If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

The radical political project that emerges here cannot be captured by the platitudes with which modern post-war conservatism has usually been described since the 1950s or in the terms in which conservatives themselves have presented their cause. As Claremont-affiliated far-right thinker Glen Ellmers put it in an infamous essay that was also published in Claremont’s online magazine The American Mind in the spring of 2021: “Conservatism is no longer enough.” Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. Ellmers derided them as “zombies” and “human rodents.” There was only one way to ensure the survival of “authentic America,” Ellmers was sure: “Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.”

No line Russell Vought won’t cross

Russell Vought lusts for counter-revolution and radical measures. He does not talk about the conflict with “the Left” in the idiom of democratic politics, but that of war, speaking about “enemy fire” and “battle plans.” In late October, ProPublica reported about a couple of private speeches Vought had given and quoted extensively from them. Vought is not merely critical of civil servants who he regards as agents of the “deep state,” he wants to “put them in trauma.” He is also very clear that the Insurrection Act should be invoked to oppress protests: “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’” He certainly shares the frustration about the lawyers in and around the White House who kept Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 with the Right’s leader himself who has often claimed that this is one of his major regrets. And just like Trump, Vought has no more patience for the conservative legal movement in general which he sees as hopelessly bound to an idea of preserving an order that, as he believes, has long collapsed. Instead of rightwing warriors committed to “radical constitutionalism, “we have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.”

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. What gives Vought hope is his devotion to Donald Trump, “uniquely positioned to serve this role” as the leader of such a revolutionary counter-offensive against the evil forces of “unnatural” leftism. Literally, in Vought’s words, “a gift of God.”

There is something uncomfortable about focusing on individual figures on the Right. It inevitably serves to elevate them in ways they might enjoy: I am sure Russell Vought likes the idea that he could be the Left’s bogeyman. It is therefore important to emphasize that Russell Vought is not some larger-than-life figure, he is not the Right’s cunning mastermind or the man pulling the strings. He does understand government, and as we are once again trying to figure out how much this regime’s malevolence might be tempered by its incompetence, that is indeed crucial to remember. Trump insists on nominating clowns and buffoons and is himself inevitably a chaotic presence. But he also brings people like Vought with him into power. Many people tend to think that the extremists, the nutty MAGA people, are inherently incompetent; and that conversely, when you go up on the competence scale, you are likely to encounter fewer ideological extremists. Vought, however, is a fully competent, utterly committed radical ideologue. There is nothing particularly innovative about his ideological views – which makes the situation more, not less dangerous: What Vought calls “radical constitutionalism” captures the ideas that have come to fully dominate on the extreme Right. These circles have never been so close to power as they will be the moment Donald Trump enters the White House.