Why Russell Vought Is Worse Than Watergate

“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…. We want to put them in trauma.”
—Russell Vought, May 2023
“[The Center for Renewing America is] an organization that I helped turn into the Death Star…. I want to be the person who crushes the Deep State.”
—Russell Vought, July 2024
“We are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country.”
—Russell Vought, July 2024
“The president in that first term wanted to cut off funding for Ukraine…. It’s a totally normal policy process to go through that people lost their minds about…. I had been personally told, you know, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it’s going.
“And we cut the money off. And it was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.”
—Russell Vought, interview with Tucker Carlson, describing his role in provoking the first of Donald Trump’s first-term impeachments, November 2024
“The Consumer Financial Protection Act requires the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to transfer each quarter an “amount determined by the Director to be reasonably necessary” for the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection to carry out its authorities under law....
“This letter is to inform you that for the Third Quarter of Fiscal Year 2025, the Bureau is requesting $0.”
—Russell Vought (in his capacity as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), February 2025
“I’m a Christian, and I believe in a Christian set of principles based on my faith.”
—Russell Vought, June 2017

Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s director of the White House Office and Management and Budget, is Charles Colson 2.0.

Colson was the most viciously partisan member of President Richard Nixon’s White House team. He described himself as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and hung a sign in his house that said “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Colson also supposedly said he would run over his own grandmother to elect Richard Nixon (though that turned out to be a slight embellishment on what someone else said about Colson). Inevitably, Colson was the first Nixon aide to go to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal (for obstructing justice).

Colson’s downfall prompted him to have a religious awakening. After he got out of jail he declared himself born again and started the nonprofit Prison Fellowship ministry, which is still in business thirteen years after Colson’s death. Although it’s quite conservative, Prison Fellowship has a record of doing good in the world, promoting rehabilitation, less severe sentences for drug offenders, and so on.

In Colson’s day, conservatives believed you could be a hatchet man or you could commit yourself wholeheartedly to Jesus Christ, but you couldn’t do both at the same time. How quaint! Today’s generation of conservatives rejects that false choice, none so vehemently as Vought.

My purpose in beginning this article with a long string of quotations was to demonstrate that Vought presents himself as both an amoral political actor and a devout Christian. Vought wishes trauma on civil servants and has inflicted same; boasts about turning his think tank into a “Death Star”; panders to the right’s paranoid streak by claiming Marxists rule America; helps Trump withhold aid to Ukraine illegally after its leader declines to investigate the son of Trump’s 2020 opponent; and impounds congressional appropriations in gleeful defiance of court precedent. Pretty sinful, no? Not to Vought. While doing all this Vought proudly declares his deep devotion to the Christian faith.