Russell Vought: American Torquemada

The OMB nominee is committed to ending democracy. Everything should be done to ensure this president is a failure because his success means losing our freedoms.

Edgar Allan Poets Art & New York Times

“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 because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Whenever I see Russell Vought’s face at a hearing or giving a speech, I get the shivers. Cold. Heartless. Calculating. Soulless. The stone mask that is his face. The Arctic gaze that reflects no humanity.

I’ve seen such faces occasionally in the past. True believers who regard other humans as prey, or insects to be crushed if they get in the way. Most notable was Son Sen, Cambodia’s Heinrich Himmler, responsible for carrying out the genocide that resulted in some 2 million of his compatriots’ deaths under brutal Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s. I got to observe this cold-blooded killer for a year many years later sitting across from him at a negotiating table. Like Vought, he was a coldly reptilian figure with a ghoulish smirk, in a fine suit.

Trump’s nominee to head the powerful Office of Management and Budget appears to delight in cruelty as expressed in the above quote about federal workers. Another revealing one is,

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.

What he’s referring to is the “Deep State,” a brobdingagian fever swamp monster conjured up in the paranoia-driven far-right’s pitch-black imaginations. What the rest of us see as bland functionaries manning a multitude of agencies doing their best to deliver services to the American people, MAGA true believers view as a satanic cabal of baby-eaters hell-bent on destroying White Christian America.

Vought is one of these. For, you see, for him and MAGA the “Deep State” is as real as yet another Chicago White Sox loss is for the rest of us, as revealed in his declarations, “We have to solve the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch” and “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer aptly captures Vought’s persona:

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.”

Whenever I watch and read about Russell Vought, my mind brings up another true believer — Tomás de Torquemada, a Dominican friar who served as the Grand Inquisitor of the Tribunal of the Holy Office in Spain in the late 15th century. His quest was to rid Spain of heresy. A chronicler at the time called him “the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order.”

In 1484 Torquemada laid down 28 articles to guide his fellow inquisitors. These included not only crimes of heresy and apostasy but also sorcery, sodomy, polygamy, blasphemy, usury and other fabulist offenses; and torture was authorized as a means to obtain evidence. The ideology of the Inquisition was, “We have heresy in our midst and our duty to God is to root it out.” Eliminate from Christendom a mass of infidels who are contaminating it and who represent a threat to the true faith.

Over a span of five decades, tens of thousands of people, mostly Jews and Muslims, were persecuted. Some 2000 were burnt at the stake. Approximately 40,000 Jews were evicted from Spain.

“I am guilty of only one crime. . . that of being too merciful,” Torquemada is reported to have said.

Torquemada’s influence over Spanish Queen Isabella was enormous and they shared one obsession: religious purity and the threat of heresy. So is it with the Vought-Trump relationship. But in this case, it’s ideological purity and “woke” heresy on their agenda.

Like Torquemada, Vought is not inhibited by the application of violence to achieve the MAGA regime’s ends. In the lead-up to Trump’s second term, Vought advocated invoking the Insurrection Act to stop riots as a “Day 1” idea, a well-established legal measure which the president could employ unilaterally, according to internal communications obtained by the New York Times.

Vought is also a big picture guy. He is the person who pulled together the radical right manifesto, “Project 2025.” A central tenet is the concept of the “unitary executive theory,” i.e., the notion that the president possesses sole authority over the Executive Branch. But Trump/Vought go further: the goal to usurp as much power as possible from Congress. Hence, the flurry of executive orders, some unlawful, since Trump took office attempting to appropriate the power of the purse as well as reinterpreting parts of the Constitution — notably unilaterally canceling the 14th amendment’s section addressing birthright citizenship.

In pushing the unitary executive theory, MAGA thinkers like Vought are inspired by the writings of chief Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who was a vigorous proponent of the concept of Führerprinzip — Leader Principle — which held that the Führer had complete power and authority over everything.

Most puzzling, however, is the MAGA regime’s war on its own government. The mass dismissals of senior agency officials and the ham-handed and illegal effort to get 2 million civil servants to quit simply boggles the mind. So, if you destroy government, then who mans your administration? Who provides services to the American people? Who defends the country? Who even implements the president’s orders? Isn’t this what anarchism is about?

Or are Vought and his ilk embracing Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in which intellectuals, bourgeoisie and other counter-revolutionary “running dogs” were sent en masse to the hinterlands to labor shoulder-to-shoulder with the enlightened peasantry? How did that turn out?

So, this is the first time I’ve ever summoned up the Spanish Inquisition, Mao Zedong and Nazi legal theory in an essay. But what I want to underscore is the existential danger people like Donald Trump and Russell Vought pose to the United States, its democracy and its people. Whenever extremists pursuing a radical ideology take over the reins of power, always, always expect the worst.

What action to take?

Certainly, not cooperating with or even assisting the radicals, as former ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul proposes:

I want Trump to succeed in defending American national interests. To the best of my abilities, I will try to help him succeed, which sometimes may mean criticizing his actions. I, too, believe in America First. I just don't think some of Trump's strategies are the best way to achieve that goal.

I have much respect for Amb. McFaul, but he’s flat-out wrong here. On the contrary, everything should be done to ensure this president is a failure because his success means losing our freedoms. Just as Sen. Mitch McConnell committed that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” the foremost goal of those who cherish democracy is to make Trump a failed president, something, frankly, he needs little help to bring about.

The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said, “An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.” We must not allow that to happen.