Another pivotal week in the political life of America. As Congress reconvenes, the swearing in after an almost two month delay of Democratic U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva is certain to provide the votes needed for the release of the full Epstein files, and even by the time this column hits the streets, one can only guess how much will have hit the fan.
Edward Luce in the Financial Times Wednesday called the Epstein affair Trump’s long-standing personal friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, let alone his hours aboard the “Lolita Express” his “Achilles Heel.”
Former uber-Trumpian Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green has promised to publicly read out the names of any men accused of raping young girls. With Trump’s approval rating already having sunk below 40 percent, this will be a huge blow to his dwindling base of support.
Yet, lest we forget, the full-scale assault on democracy and the rule of law does not begin and end with Trump, not by a long shot.
Take the article in a recent New Yorker magazine, “The Technocrat Engineering a Vast Expansion of Trump’s Power” is the title of the story by Andy Kroll with the subtitle, “How Russell Vought, an Author of Project 2025, is Using a Once Low-Profile Budget Office to Decimate Federal Agencies, Fire Vast Numbers of Workers, and Test the Rule of Law.”
Vought, the subject of the expose, is a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” report whose draconian contents were made public by Democrats during the 2024 presidential election, yes, just a year ago now, in a desperate attempt to warn American voters of what would happen if Trump were re-elected.
Trump denied any association with that blueprint for fascism during the campaign. Afterwards, of course, it quickly became clear how totally Trump 2.0 is operating on just that agenda. Chapter 10 outlines the Project goal of assaulting the SNAP program. That is only the start of it. It also involves ending foreign aid programs knowingly costing innumerable lives, as will the escalation in costs of health care to average Americans.
Vouight is a man who calls himself a Christian Nationalist who knowingly asserts inordinate power in Trump 2.0 to insist on policies that will starve and kill vulnerable people.
He embodies the outlook expressed by Fox News commentator Brian Kilmeade’s recent comment that homeless people should be euthanized. Kilmeade remarked on national TV in September that homeless persons should be subject to “involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them.”
I’m sorry, but the New Yorker expose, as thorough and damning as it is, doesn’t use the kind of language that this situation warrants. Vought and his ilk, akin to Elon Musk earlier this year and his claim that the main weakness of western civilization is empathy, are murderers, and given their influential roles, are engaging in their crimes on a massive global scale.
Vought is known as the Grim Reaper. He has consolidated power by heading the Office of Management and Government such that a senior agency official said, “We work for the President, but right now, it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the Commander-in-Chief.”
So you see, it is not enough to get rid of Trump alone.
While Musk’s early “DOGE” efforts to cut federal programs included bragging about “feeding USAID into the wood chopper,” the “details of such downsizing were ironed out in Vought’s office,” according to the New Yorker.
When a child, Vought’s mother helped launch a Christian school, and she told a local newspaper that if the American people give up on Judeo-Christian values, “then they are going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.”
Vought went to Wheaton University, a notoriously right wing evangelical Christian hotbed. He has said that “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his son, and they stand condemned.”
In speeches he has proposed “plans to reshape the government by using military force against protesters.”
This sniveling Nazi and all of his ilk need to be rooted out.
