Elon Musk Is Grabbing Headlines, but This Man May Be Even More Dangerous

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The first signs of Donald Trump’s ambitions to dismantle the government actually emerged during the end of his first term, when the Office of Management and Budget tried to use—but ran out of time to implement—his “Schedule F” executive order to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of government workers. Related From Slate What Trump Really Wants Is Clearer Than Ever Vought termed his philosophy, as he laid it out in a 2022 article, “radical constitutionalism.” He argued that the left had brought the country into a “post constitutional moment” by expanding the “administrative state” and empowering “permanent, ‘expert’ civil servants.” The result was an unnatural version of the government that the founders would have abhorred: A relatively small cohort leads powerful congressional committees and the nonelected career civil servants actually run the government, while the president and the majority of lawmakers hold little true power. He would root out the “deep state” actors from the intelligence and law enforcement agencies who either investigated Trump’s alleged illegal behavior or served as a check on it. In 2021, Vought wrote an article for Newsweek in which he proclaimed himself a “Christian nationalist,” vowed to preserve “our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage,” and argued that a “shared religious heritage” is essential to “being a nation.” America, he wrote, should be recognized as an explicitly Christian nation “where our rights and duties are understood to come from God” and where there is “an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.” He has pushed for abortion drugs to be made illegal, suggested that immigrants should have a “sense of the Judeo-Christian worldview” of the U.S., and described Trump as “God’s gift” to America.