Loathe Stephen Colbert as he may, the dark comedian within US president Donald Trump would have privately tipped his cap at the show host’s deft line this week on the administration’s decision to send military troops into Portland, Oregon.
The City of Roses in the far northwest had been happily getting on with its pursuits of liberalism, coffee bars and a long tradition of excellent stoner bands. But last Saturday’s post by Trump that he had ordered secretary of war Pete Hegseth to send the troops into “War Ravaged Portland” roused them out of their spliffy contentment.
“Yes, history will never forget the Battle of Portland,” said Colbert. “When we freed the citizens from the tyranny of over-priced doughnut shops and white ladies with dreadlocks named Raindrop. Of course, this isn’t our first war with Portland. We’ve all seen the classic war movies like Full Flannel Jacket and All Vegan on the Westside Brunch.”
Hegseth gets to order the troops into the city, completing a front-and-centre week for the faffing secretary of war who delivered an already infamous speech delivered to a room full of blank-faced US generals. But while the secretary of war grabbed the headlines, this has been the week when the most anti-performative figure in Trump’s administration is coming into his own. It is Russell Vought’s moment.
For Canadians, relaxation comes naturally, even when the Taoiseach brings the rain
China’s marriage rate is at its lowest in nearly 40 years. Why are singles put off settling down?
How Trump’s UN speech revealed US claim of total power over people’s lives
Trump delivers Maga rebuke to world with familiar litany of boasts and chastisements
With the government shutdown coming into effect on Wednesday, Trump name-checked Vought, director of the office of management and budget and the man who will quickly put in motion the plan to fire scores of federal workers amid the Senate stalemate.
Trump’s frontline is crowded with song-and-dance specialists – even Stephen Miller, whose emotional range extends from angry to furious, rarely sees a microphone he does not love.
Vought is different: a name often mentioned but a voice seldom heard. He is a steadfast member of Trump’s team who rarely grants interviews and is seldom photographed in the Oval Office.
According to a recent New York Times profile, while the cabinet races to their retreat homes, Vought likes to work through weekends, deep in the Eisenhower Executive Office, where he has a staff of more than 500 and where he keeps a photograph of his political idol: Calvin Coolidge.
“I have never been hurt by what I had not said,” Coolidge said, and it’s an aphorism Vought has taken to heart in his decades-long campaign to completely reorder the shape, scale and purpose of federal government. One of the key architects of Project 2025, deeply Christian, low key and, according to many who work with him, fearless, Vought is regarded by many as the spine and steel behind the bluster and showmanship.
“Russ has got a vision,” Maga populist and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told Mackay Coppins of The Atlantic.
“He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer. What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over. There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”
Vought has made his case over the past decade, not just in Project 2025, but in a series of essays that have made clear his belief that US governmental institutions have been transformed into something grotesque: “a new regime that pays only lip service to the old constitution.”
“Why is that?” he explained in a 2022 essay for the American Mind.
“Because the Left quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change that left the constitutional system of separate powers in place but radically perverted how they operated, their incentive structures, and their responsiveness to the American people.”
His solution to overcoming this is to behave as “radical constitutionalists”.
“What I mean by that is the Founders designed our system for titanic struggle between the branches horizontally and between the states and the federal government vertically.’
Slashing of USAid; the ongoing row in Congress over healthcare cuts, the mass lay-off of federal workers all bear Vought’s imprint. In a 2023 video, he made his views on federal staff plain: “We want to put them in trauma.”
One of his first acts this week was to freeze $18 billion in funding earmarked for New York, the home state of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. His aim is to try to overturn the Impoundment Control Act, which came in after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and was drafted to limit any president’s ability to revoke spending.
Vought emerged from the unlikely environs of Connecticut, a Democratic bastion, and was shaped by his years at Wheaton, the evangelical college in the midwest. His time was spent working for Texas Republican Phil Gramm, who shared Coolidge’s belief in fiscal austerity.
Now, after decades in happy obscurity, Trump has forced Vought to take his bow as the latest Maga star.
On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social an AI video in which he – the United States president – is seen wearing a hooded robe while playing the cowbell on a version of Blue Oyster Cult’s classic The Grim Reaper. Vance plays drums. Vought, carrying a scythe and wearing a mourning robe, is the bald, bespectacled, solemn-faced Reaper himself, stalking a nightmarish Washington: revenge of the policy wonk.
“Russ Vought is the Reaper,” run the lyrics.
“He wields the pen, the funds and the brain.”
There was a time when something like that would have sparked widespread outrage throughout the United States. Not any more.
