Russell Vought and Kash Patel. (Photos by Saul Loeb and Peter Zay via Getty Images.)
Many of the men and women likely to animate the Trump cabinet and “leadership” group come across as reckless, dangerous buffoons, more defined by their inexperience, incompetence and extremism than their capacity to inflict damage smartly and methodically.
Then there’s Russell Vought, a chief architect of Project 2025, who stands out as a particularly determined ideologue and tactician with a clear extremist agenda to dismantle government agencies by inflicting “trauma” and demoralizing civil servants and other government employees to convince them to quit their jobs. This is all in the name of serving a president whose emergence for a second term he calls “a gift from God.” This is who Donald Trump selected to run the Office of Management and Budget, which might sound eye-glazingly boring and bureaucratic but is exactly the spot where he can wreak massive damage with OMB’s ability to stop or redirect spending allocations.
Then there’s Kash Patel, who stands out as a particularly determined, aggrieved and unprincipled henchman who is champing at the bit to execute retribution on behalf of Trump. With great excitement, this former House staffer and aggressive critic of the FBI foreshadowed his menacing intentions in a podcast last year with Steve Bannon: “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said. “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly—we’ll figure that out.” This is the sycophant who wrote a children’s book called The Plot Against the King, about a villain named Hillary Queenton, a hero named King Donald and a wizard named Kash. Seriously.
This is who Donald Trump has said he wants to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation, despite lacking the needed experience in a position so sensitive to the nation’s safety (and which would require FBI director Christopher Wray resigning or being fired). Don’t just rely on me; here’s what former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr wrote in his memoir when Trump tried to make Patel deputy director of the FBI during his first term: Patel “had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency. The very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality.”
While the issue with nearly every one of Trump’s dangerous nominees is their incompetence, inexperience, cruelty and arrogant extremism—just the kind of “leadership” Trump seeks to lead his demolition derby—Vought and Patel represent particularly vivid and vicious examples of how Trump can succeed in destroying our system of checks and balance, our commitment to the rule of law, and our traditional dedication to providing government departments the independence they need to perform their work with seriousness and skill and without poisonous partisanship.
These two faces of fascism are fully committed to turning the president into a king, accountable to no one, opposing any criticism, meting out punishment to serve the whims of their ruler.
Consider what Vought said in a private speech last year, its video recently obtained by ProPublica, when he led the pro-Trump Center for Renewing America. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought told the invite-only gathering. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
That’s not all. He has talked about employing the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests, prioritizing Christianity in government and making all government departments subservient to the will of the president. In an interview with Tucker Carlson soon after the election but before his nomination was announced, Vought said, “The president has to move as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers. Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies.”
Have no doubt the planning for this dismantling is already far along. This key architect of Project 2025—the agenda Trump denied knowing anything about or who its creators were—said before the election that they were busy shaping a plan for Trump’s presidency: “We have detailed agency plans. We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Russell Vought may look and sound like a dry, dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat, but pay attention to his plotting and you can be sure he’s a radical ready to destroy the governmental infrastructure that has built and advanced modern America. While other nominees may face a tougher time achieving Senate confirmation, I suspect this dangerous ideologue who served as OMB’s acting director during Trump’s first term will be advanced.
That is more predictable because Kash Patel will be a lightning rod for everyone who rejects a fascist presidency driven by vengeance, fear and hate. While I will offer a few examples of Patel’s dangerousness, I urge you to read writer Elaina Plott Calabro’s October profile in The Atlantic titled “The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump.” It opens like this: “Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.”
A few nuggets worth paying attention to from Calabro’s article and elsewhere:
- In his first term, Trump considered naming Patel deputy director of the FBI. The response of Attorney General Bill Barr: “Over my dead body.”
- Near the end of his term, CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign after learning that Trump planned to name Patel deputy director of the agency. Only the intervention of VP Mike Pence and others stopped Trump.
- A year ago, Trump was already promising to employ Patel if he got back into office. “Get ready, Kash,” Trump said at a public event of young Republicans. “Get ready.” As author Calabro summarizes: If Trump wins, “there will be no [General Mark] Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he seeks revenge against his political enemies. Instead, there will be Patels—those whose true faith and allegiance belong not to a nation, but to one man.”
- In his 2023 book Government Gangsters, Patel wrote that “the rot at the core of the FBI isn’t just scandalous, it’s an existential threat to our republican form of government.” He also called the FBI a “tool of surveillance and suppression of American citizens,” recommended emptying the agency’s headquarters and turning it into a “Museum of the Deep State,” and fingered the “entire fake news mafia press corps” as members of this so-called deep state.
- Even Trump has brought up Patel’s extremism, but clearly with respect. “A lot of people say he’s crazy,” Trump once said of Patel, Calabro reports. “But sometimes you need a little crazy.”
I share these brief summaries not to fuel your fear or increase your worries. Rather, let’s take this information to motivate our opposition. That includes reaching out to every GOP senator in hopes of discouraging their spineless kowtowing to Trump and going along with an outrageous nomination like Kash Patel. It also means supporting groups that support civil rights, free speech and a free press because—whether Patel is leading the FBI as a tool of Trump vengeance or other toadies are carrying out his sick whims—Trump political rivals and other critics will surely be singled out for retaliation in some way.
We may also take strength from the optimistic insight yesterday from John Dean, the White House counsel who testified against Richard Nixon and hastened his resignation. Yesterday Dean commented on the potential power of opposition within the federal government. “Recall what happened with the FBI when Nixon politicized it by appointing Patrick Gray director,” Dean noted on the social media platform Bluesky. “The rank and file leaked, leaked and leaked up to the assistant director (aka Mark Felt/Deep Throat) level. They destroyed Nixon. Trump is inviting big trouble with Kash Patel.”
Should it be Patel at the FBI or Vought at OMB, we can hope that there will be dedicated civil servants who refuse to carry out their hateful demands. The opposition is going to require all willing patriots committed to serving their country and pushing back against fascist rule.
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