Welcome back to Polite Disputes. I’m Allen Schyf.
Well, keeping up with developments in the US of A at the moment is impossible. Anyone who is still defending the Trump administration’s daily actions and pronouncements is delusional. I mean that, and I will say it to your face: Politely, but firmly. This is a coup.
Steve Bannon said this week that Trump deserves a third term and will have one. Donald himself is now making quote-unquote “jokes” about quote-unquote “unitary executive theory” virtually every day. That theory, by the way, holds that the head of the executive branch should have power over all aspects of the executive branch. It certainly does not extend any authority from the executive branch to the powers invested in the other branches of the US government, as originally conceived.
He is also, it seems, fully delusional, in that whatever vague tendency to fact-checking perhaps once existed for him (maybe, in uncharacteristic moments of confusion) are now just gone. His reaction to the Reagan ad was to call it a fake AI video. It is not, it is actual footage and recordings. Nevertheless, that is now the watch-word for his supporters. Neither he nor they are interested in finding out the truth of the matter. They do not want to verify with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, who could only protest weakly that the statements had been taken out of context. I’ve read the speech, and I don’t think it was taken out of context.
I’ve made my argument that humans are prone to cult-like behavior. So, there’s nothing surprising about this. It’s predictable. Ask a Mormon, or an Islamist, or a die-hard Evangelical, about truth. They, too, will quote you their leaders and their books, and ignore anything else. This is par for the course.
Trump is openly claiming that as the President, he can do whatever he wants. He is getting no pushback from what were, once upon a time, the other co-equal branches of government. No pushback. Think about that. As the saying goes, an unenforced law is no law at all. They are not speaking up, and that, in my opinion, makes it essentially true. The US is now an authoritarian state.
As I noted in my last episode, this was intentional. I’ll show you, now, the years of preparation for what Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts called “the second American Revolution.” Roberts also said that it would be a bloodless revolution only if the left submitted peacefully. Otherwise, it’s Civil War. Since Roberts helped design and co-ordinate the agenda of this second Trump presidency, we should take him seriously.
This network operates with remarkable openness about its goals. Russ Vought, who along with Stephen Miller is now making national decisions while Trump, in the words of his press secretary, focuses on his ballroom, has declared “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected” and continually advocates “rehabilitating Christian nationalism.” Miller’s leaked emails show him promoting white nationalist literature and calling for immigration restrictions based on “civilizational” preservation. Leonard Leo built the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority and now aims to “crush liberal dominance” across media and culture. Together, they’ve created what Vought calls “the Death Star”— an interconnected network of think tanks, legal organizations, and training programs preparing for comprehensive government takeover.
Let’s dive in.
Donald Trump: A willing tool
In July 2024, Donald Trump publicly declared he knew “nothing about Project 2025.” This is a documented lie from a documented liar. Secretly recorded conversations reveal the truth: Russell Vought, Project 2025’s chief architect, told undercover reporters that Trump “blessed it” and is “very supportive,” explaining Trump was merely “running against the brand, not the people, not the institutions, not the policy.”
This gap between public denial and private coordination illuminates the most significant political alliance of the Trump era — a fascinatingly immature and clumsy bargain between religious nationalists seeking a “second American revolution” and a narcissistic strongman seeking absolute power. Through extensive direct quotes, leaked recordings, and first-person statements, the full architecture of this alliance comes into view: Christian nationalists who view Trump as God’s “imperfect instrument,” a president who describes himself as “a very stable genius” chosen by providence, and an infrastructure of 350+ pre-drafted executive orders, 10,000 vetted loyalists, and billions in dark money — all designed to reshape the American government into a white Christian theocracy.
But that isn’t what Trump wants. He doesn’t care about their agenda, and they don’t care about his. He wants respect, deference, praise, and acquiescence. He wants to be treated like big daddy mob boss, whose permission is needed for everything, and whose blessing is unquestioned across his domain.
Trump’s self-described identity centers on his conviction of unparalleled genius. In January 2018, responding to questions about his mental fitness, Trump declared himself “a very stable genius,” explaining: “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star... to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius.” This wasn’t casual boasting but a consistent pattern. Trump tweeted in 2013: “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest — and you all know it!” When asked about intelligence briefings in 2016, he explained he didn’t need information repeated or elaborated on, because “I’m, like, a smart person.”
His claims extend to omniscient expertise across every domain.
Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” Trump proclaimed at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He elaborated with specific assertions: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.” “Nobody is bigger or better at the military than I am.” “Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump.” This grandiosity reflected not campaign rhetoric but a genuine self-perception, as Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker documented in their book “I Alone Can Fix It”: “Trump was powered by solipsism... He governed to protect and promote himself.”
His view of presidential authority matched this unlimited self-confidence. “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” Trump said in 2017. Few narratives angered him more than suggestions his staff managed him. According to reporting, Trump told aides: “These guys are going to tell me how to communicate? They’re going to tell me when I’m going to do a rally and when I’m not?” This rejection of constraints extended to demanding absolute personal loyalty.
Trump’s narcissistic self-perception, again not surprising or ground-breaking in any way, but easily observed in the mentally disturbed in every society, has merged with explicit claims of messianic, divine selection that I don’t think could have come from anyone but his much more clever Christian advisors.
On August 21, 2019, while discussing China trade policy, Trump looked skyward and declared: “I am the chosen one. Somebody had to do it, so I’m taking on China.” That same day, he retweeted Wayne Allyn Root’s statement that “President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world... the Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God.”
As I said, this religious framing wasn’t Trump’s creation — but was eagerly embraced. Energy Secretary Rick Perry told Trump in 2019: “You said you were the chosen one. I said, ‘You were.’ If you are a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated on CBN: “I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times and I think that He wanted Donald Trump to become president.” Franklin Graham said: “I think somehow God put him in this position... I just have to think that God, in some reason, put him there for a purpose.” (Graham also publicly pleaded with Trump to stop swearing, by the way. Donald acknowledged the advice and said he’d try.)
When asked directly by CBN News about claims God appointed him “for such a time as this,” Trump responded: “I almost don’t even want to think about it. Because you know what, all I’m gonna do is, I hope it’s true. All I’m going to do is, I’m going to do my best.” This carefully hedged response avoided rejecting the divine mandate narrative while maintaining plausible deniability. In March 2024, promoting a Trump-branded Bible, he stated: “All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book... Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country.” At the National Religious Broadcasters convention in February 2024, Trump promised religious leaders: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.”
Trump’s philosophy on subordinates has, for his entire life, centered on absolute personal loyalty. This isn’t special. It’s an old-school view of leadership that is not uncommon for capitalists, particularly from his generation. We tend to give all credit for an organization to its nominal leader. No one ever mentions the thousands of workers, engineers, and visionaries who aided Edison or Ford. They’re always just credited individually.
In his 2007 book “Think Big,” Trump wrote: “I value loyalty above everything else — more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy.” On January 27, 2017, at a private Oval Office dinner with FBI Director James Comey, Trump stated directly: “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” When Comey remained silent, an awkward pause followed. Comey later testified to the Senate that Trump’s demand was unmistakable. Comey has now been indicted, in response to a public request from the president — one of many impeachable offenses that no Democrat president has ever dared to commit. Private pressure? Sure. A public request? Never.
According to accounts from his first term, Trump conducted literal loyalty tests. One source present in 2017 reported: “He was quizzing people in the Oval if they were loyal to him or previous bosses. He went around the room asking each aide to declare allegiance.” By the 2024 campaign, these tests became systematic. Job-seekers faced questions about who they voted for and when their “MAGA revelation” occurred. The Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Personnel Database requires candidates to agree that “the President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal officials.”
Obviously, he shows little reciprocal loyalty. A Rolling Stone analysis noted: “Trump’s demands for aides and lawyers to martyr themselves for him hasn’t saved him. If anything, it’s done the opposite, driving several possible key witnesses to consider throwing Trump under the bus before he gets the chance to do it to them.” Trump publicly humiliated officials who failed loyalty tests: Rex Tillerson was “dumb as a rock,” Jeff Sessions was “very weak” and “scared stiff,” Wilbur Ross was “past his prime.” Most dramatically, after Steve Bannon’s quotes appeared in “Fire and Fury,” Trump declared: “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” He dubbed him “Sloppy Steve” who “cried when he got fired and begged for his job.”
Part of the exasperation and disgust any reasonable person must feel for this man is the immaturity of his insults. There are any number of clever, funny, pointed ways to insult your political opponents. He doesn’t do that. His idea of clever is an AI-generated video of him as the Pope, or as a king whose political opponents are forced to genuflect before him, or most recently, depicted wearing a crown and flying a fighter-bomber to dump a massive load of his diarrhea on his fellow Americans.
[An aside: There are plenty of people in this world who laughed when they saw that video. They giggled and shared it to each other and said things like, “he’s such an amazing troll!” These are the same people who think Katherine Leavitt’s recent “your mom” reply to a journalist is a 4-D chess move. I really, really doubt they can play chess.]
Trump’s relationship with Project 2025 epitomizes his transactional approach. In April 2022, at a Heritage Foundation dinner, Trump praised Kevin Roberts and declared Heritage was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do... when the American people give us a colossal mandate.” Yet during the 2024 campaign, facing criticism, Trump executed a complete public reversal. On Truth Social in July 2024, he wrote: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.” At the September presidential debate, he claimed: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025... I’m not going to read it purposely. I haven’t read it.”
I actually do believe him on that last claim.
This public denial proved strategic theater. Post-election, Trump abandoned pretense. On October 2, 2025, he posted: “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut.” CNN analysis found two-thirds of Trump’s first-week executive orders “evoke proposals outlined in ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ Project 2025’s 922-page policy blueprint.” Trump appointed at least six Project 2025 contributors to major positions, including Vought as OMB Director. Paul Dans, Project 2025’s overseer, stated: “This is exactly the work we set out to do.”
The contradiction reveals Trump’s operational philosophy: Embrace useful allies while maintaining public deniability, then implement their agenda once safely elected. Stephen Miller, now Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, called Vought a “transformative pick.” According to ProPublica reporting in 2025, Vought has “consolidated power to an extent that insiders say they feel like ‘he is the commander in chief,’” controlling “trillions of dollars and millions of federal workers.” During the 2025 government shutdown, Vought directed agencies to prepare for “mass firings” rather than furloughs and canceled billions in projects in Democratic states.
Let’s talk about Russ.
Russell Vought: The Christian nationalist “Death Star” architect
Russell Vought embraces the Christian nationalist label without equivocation. “I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation... the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term,” he has stated in multiple speeches. In undercover recordings obtained by the Centre for Climate Reporting in July 2024, Vought elaborated: “I want to make sure that we can say, ‘We’re a Christian nation.’ And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be ‘Christian nationism.’ That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”
Vought’s religious worldview permeates his organizational mission. His Center for Renewing America explicitly seeks to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” In speeches, Vought argues the country has become a “post-constitutional regime” that abandoned the Constitution’s “true meaning” and become “too secular” and “too globalist.” He told The Washington Post: “I have a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”
In other words, the church shouldn’t be the entity running the country — a dedicated institution should do that. But that institution should be influenced by the church.
His formative education shaped this theology. Vought graduated from evangelical Wheaton College (known as the “evangelical Harvard”) and was raised in Christian schools with curricula instructing students to “Defend the statement that all governmental power and authority come from God.” His mother taught him that if Americans abandoned these values, “then they’re going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.” In 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders questioned Vought’s statement that Muslims “stand condemned” during his confirmation hearing — a confrontation Vought later described as “the most freeing thing in the world.”
In his 2024 speeches, Vought positioned the current moment in apocalyptic terms: “God put us here for such a time as this.” He framed politics as spiritual warfare: “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus. And they have aimed it at us.”
Vought’s view of Trump blends pragmatism with theological justification. In a 2024 speech, Vought declared: “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country. He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.”
Please read that quote as many times as you can.
This framing positions Trump not as an ideal leader but as providentially provided for the historical moment. Steve Bannon, sitting onstage with Vought at a 2023 conference, made the theology explicit: “Trump is ‘a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord.’” Vought himself compared the moment to America’s founding, stating: “We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us.”
Vought positions Trump as a “radical constitutionalist” in the mold of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison — the necessary revolutionary figure for the current crisis. This framing allows Vought to embrace Trump’s flaws while focusing on utility. When Trump announced Vought’s renomination as OMB Director in November 2024, Trump stated Vought “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government.” Mark Paoletta, a former OMB official, explained Vought’s appeal: “The president loved Russ because he could count on him. He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.”
Vought’s most revealing statements came in private speeches to conservative activists. In a 2023 address at a Center for Renewing America event, obtained by ProPublica, Vought outlined his strategy with startling candor:
“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. 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.”
In a Tucker Carlson interview in November 2024, Vought elaborated: “We have to solve the woke in the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch. So my belief for anyone who wants to listen is that you have to — the president has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.”
Vought’s strategy combines defunding, demonization, and demolition. “We have to be able to defund agencies. That is why these things have to be indelibly linked, and that is why we are focussing so much on ‘woke and weaponized.’” He described building “shadow” agencies to circumvent legal justifications before they can even arise: “We’re trying to build a shadow office of Legal Counsel so that when a future president says, what legal authorities do I need to shut down the riots?” The goal was ensuring: “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”
In undercover recordings from July 2024, Vought revealed he spent “80% of my time” on plans to “take control of bureaucracies” and had produced “350 different documents — regulations and things we’re planning.” He described these as “very, very close hold” to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, to be distributed as a “big, fat stack of papers” during the transition “in such a way that they would never be made public.”
All of this is illegal in America. For years, they have planned this, knowing that unenforced laws are no laws at all. And they’re right, clearly.
Vought’s rhetoric extends to invoking military force against protests: “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’” He dismissed the concept of independent agencies entirely: “As an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”
His demonization of federal workers whose loyalty is not to Trump is explicit. He called them “all-empowered career experts like Tony Fauci... wielding power behind the curtains.” The power he’s talking about is expertise. They don’t want it.
He referred to January 6 defendants as “political prisoners” and stated “federal law enforcement agencies ‘are keeping political opponents in jail, and I think we need to be honest about that.’”
Vought positions himself as leader of “radical constitutionalists,” a group he says “also includes right-wing stalwarts such as the political strategist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign.” He describes his alliance with Miller as close — Miller called Vought a “transformative pick” and is described as sharing Vought’s vision of destroying the “deep state.”
His intellectual development traces through multiple phases. Working for Senator Phil Gramm from 1999-2003, Vought absorbed what he called the “conservative foundation” of his life, learning Gramm’s “Dickey Flatt test” — asking whether federal spending improved the lives of working-class Americans. From 2010-2017, at Heritage Action, Vought learned confrontational tactics, helping engineer the 2013 government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act. He praised progressive Congresswoman Cori Bush’s protest tactics: “We need this from Republicans.” He advocated that Republican speakers should have “a love for the shutdowns, because they create an opportunity to save the country.”
His organizational infrastructure reflects this evolution. The Center for Renewing America, which Vought calls “the Death Star,” brought on Jeffrey Clark (who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election), Kash Patel (now Trump’s FBI director), and Ken Cuccinelli. The organization’s stated mission is restoring “a people For God, For Country, and For Community.” Vought originally planned to attend seminary to become a pastor but says “God had other plans” when Trump offered him the OMB position.
Another aside: In the original Star Wars film, the Death Star’s commandant, Grand Moff Tarkin, described the station’s purpose as domination through the fear of annihilation. The Tarkin Doctrine, in Star Wars canon, is ‘peace through terror.’ Russ Vought thinks of himself like that.
Stephen Miller: Immigration hardliner with white nationalist influences
Stephen Miller identifies as “a conservative populist, someone who pushed his liberal high school in California to have the Pledge of Allegiance recited on a daily basis, who says he sees U.S. citizenship ‘as something sacred’ and who regards immigration as a defining element of the nation’s future.” This self-description, given to the Washington Post in 2019, positions Miller as a long-time activist focused on national identity and cultural preservation.
Yet Miller systematically deflects personal credit. The Washington Post noted he “aggressively minimized his role in the administration and would accept no credit for its direction,” despite being identified as “the singular force behind the Trump administration’s immigration agenda — making him a crucial White House figure on an issue central to the president’s reelection campaign.”
Miller’s public statements frame immigration enforcement in religious terms. “The U.S. government has a sacred, solemn, inviolable obligation to enforce the laws of the United States to stop illegal immigration and to secure and protect the borders,” he declared in 2017. Defending his zero tolerance family separation policy, Miller stated: “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement... The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”
That zero tolerance family separation policy is explicitly intended to visit cruelty on families by separating children from their caretakers, as a deterrent. I’m not kidding. America the Beautiful, indeed. That’s the same policy that set up detention centres for children, and Melania Trump wore a jacket that said, “I don’t really care, do you?” Cue the chorus of giggling, infantile supporters praising how clever their leadership’s trolling is.
Miller’s 2017 White House press briefing exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta revealed his ideological framework. When asked about English-language requirements for immigration, Miller responded: “Jim, it’s actually — I have to honestly say I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It’s actually — it reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree.”
That suggests that Miller ties the English language to being American, much as he wants Christianity to be the required religion in the US. That’s very strange, if you know Christian history. English is not the Christian language, dude. You should be advocating to go back to Latin, in my opinion.
Miller’s dismissal of the Statue of Liberty’s famous poem was equally revealing. When Acosta invoked Emma Lazarus’s “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” Miller responded: “The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and lighting the world... The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
What are you saying, Miller? That poem was written at a time when white European immigrants were coming in. You like those, remember? On the other hand, it’s a French statue in the first place, given as a gift, however hypocritically, to recognize that the country is supposed to be a symbol of freedom and hope for those fleeing oppression. It commemorates, especially, the freeing of the country’s slaves after the Civil War. I’m guessing Miller wants it torn down, ultimately.
In October 2020, Miller outlined his “aggressive second-term immigration agenda” to NBC News, stating: “The objective is ‘raising and enhancing the standard for entry’ to the United States... In many cases, fixing these problems and restoring some semblance of sanity to our immigration programs does involve regulatory reform.” Plans included limiting asylum, expanding travel bans, and curtailing work visas. Miller explained his merit-based proposal as ending “unskilled chain migration” while ensuring “the great inventors of the world, the great scientists of the world” could compete.
The most damning evidence of Miller’s worldview came from 900+ emails leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center, spanning 2015-2016 when Miller served as Senator Jeff Sessions’ communications director. These emails showed Miller actively promoting white nationalist literature and websites to Breitbart editors, hoping to shape their coverage.
“Someone should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints,” Miller wrote on September 6, 2015, recommending Breitbart cover a racist French novel beloved by white nationalists. On October 23, 2015, discussing whether Hurricane Patricia would drive migration, Miller responded “100 percent. And they will all get TPS” (Temporary Protected Status), then sent a VDARE link — a white nationalist website run by Steve Sailer.
These people believe that color is part of culture. This baffles me. They sincerely hold that ‘whiteness’ is linked to morality, compassion, and technological sophistication, even while they advocate cruelty to discourage brown and black people from asking for help. I wonder what color Miller thinks Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jew, was?
Katie McHugh, the Breitbart editor who leaked the emails, testified that Miller asked her if she had seen the recent ‘AmRen’ article about crime statistics and race. McHugh noted: “I remember being struck by the way he called it ‘AmRen,’ the nickname” — using insider terminology for American Renaissance, a white nationalist publication. The SPLC’s analysis found: “Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.”
After the Charleston massacre when Dylann Roof murdered nine Black churchgoers, Miller resisted Confederate flag removal, writing: “What do the [Confederate monument] vandals say to the people fighting and dying overseas in uniform right now who are carrying on a seventh or eighth generation of military service in their families, stretching back to our founding?”
Personally, I would note that the Confederacy was anti-American, and they rose up to protect slavery against Lincoln. Anyone who supports the Confederacy and flies what has become its flag is putting their name to that cause. Modern descendants of Confederate soldiers have taken an oath to the American flag, not the Confederate flag — they defend the Constitution of the United States, not the Constitution of the Confederate States, which includes this clause in Article 4, Section 2:
Sec. 2. (I) The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
Miller invoked President Calvin Coolidge approvingly, writing “Like Coolidge did” when discussing immigration restriction. The SPLC noted: “White nationalists lionize Coolidge, in part for his remarks condemning race mixing. ‘There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,’ Coolidge wrote in a 1921 magazine article. ‘Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.’” Coolidge signed the 1924 Immigration Act based on eugenics. A certain Christian nationalist leader, then on the rise in a certain European nation that mainly speaks German, praised Coolidge for that legislation.
Miller’s bond with Trump transcends typical staff relationships. “Because Trump has strong feelings about immigration but just superficial knowledge of how the immigration system works, the president relies heavily on Miller to explain and interpret it,” the Washington Post reported. A senior administration official stated: “The thing about Stephen is he can bully anybody he wants because he and the president share similar views, and he is channeling the president’s beliefs.”
Miller is “often referred to in Trump circles simply as ‘the prime minister’” according to CNN reporting in October 2025. NBC News reported that Miller, along with his wife Katie Miller and personnel chief Sergio Gor, are “the only ‘untouchable’ members of Trump’s White House team.” A White House official stated: “He is ruthless with bureaucrats being seen as disloyal to the president and his agenda.”
Miller rarely puts anything in writing, eschewing email in favor of phone calls to avoid creating records. It is his advice, in part, that guides the current administration’s deliberate breaking of the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told NPR in March 2025 that Miller “has loyally stood by Trump’s side for nearly a decade and has ‘been able to channel President Trump’s message and voice as a speechwriter on the campaign and at the White House.’” This translation function — guiding Trump’s instincts and shaping them into policy — defines Miller’s unique value.
Miller’s operational style maximizes Trump’s focus on immigration. McKay Coppins told PBS Frontline: “[Miller] believes anytime the country is focused on immigration, the president is winning. So when you’re at the border, getting footage of crying children being ripped from the arms of their mothers... To Stephen Miller, he thinks that this is drawing the attention once again to the issue we care about most... he sees that as a win.” An external White House adviser told Vanity Fair: “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border.”
His open enjoyment of the cruelty his influence has created have driven most of his family to disown him. His uncle points out that their family were Jewish immigrants fleeing European pogroms, and that his nephew’s vision of America would not have welcomed their family.
A former senior administration official said: “He is singularly focused on how to get people out of the country.” Miller aggressively targeted perceived disloyalty: “At times when others have hesitated to implement Miller’s directives, he has questioned their loyalty and encouraged the president to cut them loose.” Officials have learned to fear Miller’s retaliation, with the Washington Post noting: “Several of the officials who shared their candid views were unusually concerned with how they would be quoted, worried that specific words or phrases could be traced back to them. They said Miller would read quotes about himself with forensic interest to identify his critics, and to retaliate.”
Miller’s partnership with Steve Bannon predates Trump. During the 2013 Gang of Eight immigration battle, Miller worked for Senator Jeff Sessions while Bannon ran Breitbart News. Bannon lauded Miller and Sessions’ role in stopping the bill, likening it, incredibly, to ‘the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-sixties.’
“Steve Bannon was always looking for people like Stephen Miller to either bring into the Breitbart fold or to operate as an ally inside of Congress,” Robert Costa told PBS Frontline. Miller became “the point person for all of these talk radio hosts and activists and other back benchers like Steve King. They had to come through Miller to get to Sessions, and that was power.”
When Trump entered the race, the Sessions-Bannon-Miller nexus found their vehicle. Cliff Sims, former White House communications aide, recalled: “I remember riding on the campaign plane with Sessions, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon. And they suddenly had this vessel in Donald Trump and they were giddy. I mean, they were really excited. Like, ‘This is our moment. This is our historical moment.’”
Bannon viewed Miller as essential because “you just can’t wing it. Immigration is too important. You need policy people on this.” Miller provided the technical expertise and bureaucratic knowledge to implement their shared vision, while Trump provided the political will and mass appeal.
After Trump’s 2020 loss, Miller founded America First Legal, describing it as “the long-awaited answer to the American Civil Liberties Union” promising “relentless litigation and oversight [to] America First, Last, and Always.” The organization’s stated mission became making “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs illegal across the country — based on the argument that they violate the civil rights of white people.”
Axios reported in March 2025 that America First Legal “has become a private enforcement arm of the White House’s assault on DEI — or as it has billed itself, a right-wing version of the ACLU.”
I believe, personally, that anyone who can look at US history and conclude that white people need to be defended against non-white people, is simply racist. This is equivalent to Modi’s government in India defending Gujarati Hindus against everyone, the Chinese framing their ethno-state policies as a defense against multiculturalism, and Hitler’s framing of The Final Solution as the only path to Germany’s salvation.
America First Legal’s integration with Trump’s government is seamless: Miller’s co-founder Gene Hamilton joined the White House as senior counsel, and Reed Rubinstein, America First Legal’s senior vice president, was nominated as the State Department’s legal adviser.
The funding is substantial: “America First Legal has received $27 million in donations in recent years from the Bradley Impact Fund, a group that sends money to conservative organizations.” A lawyer close to the White House explained Miller’s strategy to NBC News: “The courts aren’t going to strike down all that they’re doing, and, at the end of the day, they’ll end up accomplishing more by flooding the zone.” This approach — overwhelming opposition with volume — characterizes Miller’s operational philosophy.
Miller’s civilizational rhetoric occasionally surfaces explicitly. At a Charlie Kirk memorial in September 2025, Miller declared: “You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic, because our children are strong, and our grandchildren will be strong, and our children’s children’s children will be strong.”
Kevin Roberts: Revolutionary rhetoric and Heritage Foundation’s radical agenda
Kevin Roberts embraces explicitly revolutionary language in describing Project 2025’s mission. His most notorious statement came on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast on July 2, 2024, where Roberts declared:
“In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back. We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
This wasn’t casual rhetoric. Roberts positioned this revolution as rivaling America’s founding moments: “We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us.” He predicted the revolution would be complete by 2050 and coincide with a “new ‘great awakening’ that would bring America to God.”
Roberts’ unpublished book “Dawn’s Early Light” made the revolutionary vision explicit. Originally titled “Burning Down Washington to Save America” with a match on the cover, it argued: “I believe we are living at the dawn of the Second American Revolution. What is a revolution but an attempt to overthrow the institutions of society?” The book declared: “It’s time for a conservatism of fire, to burn it down and steward once again the natural order of the world, the Western order of civilization, and the American order of government.”
Specifically, Roberts wrote that “many of America’s institutions... need to be burned. Included among those to be incinerated... are the FBI and the New York Times, along with ‘every Ivy League college’, ‘80% of ‘Catholic’ higher education’, and the Boy Scouts of America.” Any institution “merely ‘contemptuous of public prayer’ should probably ‘be burned down’.”
A note here that Roberts is that variety of fanatic who believes they need to save their church from the progressives corrupting it. He is extremely Roman Catholic, while hating fellow Roman Catholics who don’t hold his orthodox views.
His rhetoric invoked the Alamo: “Davy Crockett had the fire. He’d rather die than let it go out... What’s your Alamo? What are you dying for? Pick a place, pick a people, pick a project, and give it all you’ve got. Bet your life on it.” Roberts concluded: “There’s a time for writing and reading — and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country and build our future.”
Roberts explicitly positions Heritage Foundation’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” In a January 2024 interview with the New York Times, Roberts stated: “I view Heritage’s role today as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’ The Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”
This framing reveals Roberts’ focus on the movement rather than the man. In August 2024, Roberts declared: “No, the project is the conservative movement. We’ve got 111 conservative organizations that are part of it. We’re never going to stop doing presidential transition projects at Heritage.” He positioned Project 2025 as existing “in a policy lane and are waiting for the policymaking season.”
Post-election, after Trump’s victory, Roberts stated: “The entire conservative movement stands united behind him.” Heritage issued six statements praising Trump’s nominations, including calling Pete Hegseth “a tremendous choice for Secretary of Defense.”
The infrastructure Roberts built is comprehensive. When Project 2025 director Paul Dans departed in July 2024, Roberts tweeted: “Under Paul Dans’ leadership, Project 2025 has completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people.”
Roberts’ religious conviction permeates his political vision. In an April 2025 article titled “Now That Trump Is President, He Can Remind America That Christ Is King,” Roberts argued Trump should “unapologetically champion Christianity using tools of statecraft.” He stated flatly: “America is a Christian nation.” Roberts proposed “huge national celebrations” for 2033 marking the 2000th anniversary of Christ’s resurrection.
On the War Room podcast, Roberts explained: “God’s law can, in fact, be a huge influence on the civil laws.”
My personal favorite of his quotes is his redefinition of freedom. I think it’s the most sincerely expressed religious definition of freedom that anyone has ever come up with.
He said, “Our definition of ‘freedom’ is not the freedom to do whatever the heck we want, but the freedom to do what we ought.”
His book argued: “We have in this country a glorious tradition of religious freedom, but it is not freedom from religion but freedom for religion... America is rooted in Christianity, and so ‘institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals’.”
If I said this definition out loud while performing stand-up comedy, everyone would laugh. That holds true for a lot of what these people say. But still we have credulous supporters nodding solemnly and unironically, like, “Yeah, that’s how freedom works here.”
Roberts’ biography reveals deep Catholic influence. As president of Wyoming Catholic College from 2013-2016, he led the institution to reject all federal student loans and grants on religious liberty grounds. He receives weekly spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei priest at the Catholic Information Center in Washington.
He attended Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign as a college freshman and witnessed Buchanan’s “culture war” speech, later calling himself a “Buchananite.” That’s the speech where Buchanan framed feminism, abortion, gay rights, a non-Christian secular government, and other so-called liberal policies as not just policies, but as battlefronts in an existential battle for the country’s “heart and soul.”
At a May 2025 Thomas Aquinas College commencement, Roberts invoked his religious mission: “Put simply, the world is not going to repair itself. Neither can it be repaired from safe remove. For Christians, retreat is surrender — especially if it masquerades as purity. The whole world is mission country today... And Jesus is very clear that we are called to be missionaries in it.”
Roberts’ relationship with Trump demonstrates the alliance’s sophisticated coordination. In April 2022, Roberts and Trump shared a 45-minute private jet flight from Palm Beach to a Heritage conference where Trump delivered the keynote praising Heritage’s plans. This flight was documented through plane tracking data and photographs obtained by the Washington Post.
Roberts told the Washington Post in April 2024: “I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025, because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 [are informed].” Trump’s campaign immediately denied this claim.
At the February 2024 National Religious Broadcasters convention, Trump praised Roberts: “He’s going to be so incredible. I know that for a fact, because I know what he did and where he came from, and he’s going to be outstanding.” Trump added: “For nearly 50 years, this legendary institution, which is what it is, has been at the forefront of the conservative movement.”
When Project 2025 became politically toxic in summer 2024, Trump executed public distancing while Roberts maintained the relationship privately. Steve Bannon told the New York Times that Roberts was under consideration for Trump’s chief of staff. Bannon also said of Roberts: “Russ has got a vision. He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer. What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over. There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”
Listeners, as we reviewed in the last episode, compromise is the point of democracy. Regular transitions of power, bipartisan legislation, communication for the greater good — all these are vital components of democracy. At the most basic, philosophical level, democracy exists to force compromise and decentralize power. That is not what the modern-day Conservative movement wants. In fact, they are so, so, so tired of it.
Roberts also embraces Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian model, hailing Hungary as “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” On election denial, Roberts stated in January 2024 that he did not believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and when asked if Heritage would accept 2024 results, replied: “Yes, if there isn’t massive fraud like there was in 2020.” He invoked the Joe McCarthy era favorably, explaining: “I was referring to his motivation, and his motivation was, as you know, that real Communists, like capital-C Communists, had infiltrated the federal government.”
Roberts authored Project 2025’s foreword, laying out stakes he described as civilization-defining: “Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” He declared this “the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic. Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right.”
His policy prescriptions were comprehensive. On abortion, Roberts wrote the administration must remove “the terms ‘abortion, reproductive health, [and] reproductive rights,’ among others, ‘out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.’” On transgender issues: “Allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end.”
I’ll put another aside here that extremists on both sides love the straw-man fallacy: You grab the most easily mockable part of the other person’s argument and highlight it relentlessly, while ignoring as much as possible any valid points that might come up. These are not good faith examples of the need for abortion or gender tolerance: They are the most bad-faith examples anyone can find. For instance, I could easily respond by hollering that, “Well, obviously Republicans love it when women die of brutal, painful sepsis in childbirth because the fetus wasn’t viable in the first place. They love that! It’s their favorite thing in the world!”
I hope you can see the flaw and lack of logic in these kinds of arguments.
On pornography, Roberts argued it “promotes sexual deviance, the sexualization of children, and the exploitation of women; is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution; and should be banned.” He recommended “the criminal prosecution of people and companies producing pornography.” When reminded of Trump’s Playboy appearances and affairs with pornstars, Roberts explained: “Our Lord works with imperfect instruments.”
Roberts’ vision for government transformation centers on mass firings and agency closures. “People will lose their jobs. Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that. Buildings will be shut down. Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry.” Project 2025 aims to replace merit-based federal civil service workers with people loyal to “the next conservative president” through Schedule F classification. Roberts declared: “All federal employees should answer to the president.”
The personnel infrastructure is massive. Project 2025 created a database of 20,000 applicants with “online trainings and loyalty tests to narrow down potential hires to those who will commit to follow Trump without question.” Project 2025 senior adviser John McEntee explained: “The number one thing you’re looking for is people that are aligned with the agenda.”
Leonard Leo: Dark money architect of judicial transformation
Leonard Leo built the infrastructure that reshaped the federal judiciary, serving as Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, which he describes as “an organization of 53,000 individuals that is premised on advancing limited, constitutional government.” In his official biography at Catholic University, Leo states he has “helped to build a nationwide infrastructure of lawyers, judges, and business leaders who seek to foster the application of our nation’s Founding principles.”
Think about that. He’s bragging about building a nationwide network out of people whose purpose, a priori, before all else, is the neutral interpretation of the law. Now, trust me, I am highly cynical about our current justice system in the West. Its flaws are abundantly visible. Nevertheless, we still need people who commit to leaving their biases, as much as they can. When you approach being a judge or prosecutor or district attorney with an ideological viewpoint that includes sweeping definitions of your political enemies, you break whatever system we have left.
Leo’s philosophy centers, with monumental hypocrisy, on so-called originalism and textualism. In a 2018 NPR interview, he explained: “A judge should interpret the laws as it’s written; should apply the original meaning of the Constitution.” In 2017, he elaborated: “You have to interpret the text as a whole. All of its parts have to be consistent when viewed as a whole.”
Jeffrey Toobin, legal analyst for CNN, described Leo’s comprehensive strategy in 2017: “He’s very open about that and very proud of that. And, you know — and he says, look, this is what we want to do. We want you, when you’re a law student, to go to Federalist Society events, listen to our guest speakers. We want you to then clerk for a judge who had been a Federalist Society member. And then after you’ve been practicing for a few years, maybe one of your colleagues will get a job in government and he or she will bring you in. And then ultimately, we will, you know, have a president who will be sympathetic, and that president may appoint you to the bench.”
A deep investigation by ProPublica sheds light on his strategy: “Decades ago, he’d realized it was not enough to have a majority of Supreme Court justices. To undo landmark rulings like Roe, his movement would need to make sure the court heard the right cases brought by the right people and heard by the right lower court judges.” ProPublica’s investigation revealed Leo built an entire ecosystem — not just placing judges but creating the cases, plaintiffs, and lower court infrastructure to ensure conservative outcomes.
Trump’s 2016 campaign promise was explicit: “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.” This wasn’t exaggeration. White House Counsel Don McGahn testified to Congress in 2019:
“I was in charge of judicial selection as the White House counsel. I only hired Federalist Society members to work in my office. They needed to demonstrate loyalty to the team. I needed to know that we were on the same page. Secondly, it meant that judicial selection was run by the vice President of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo, who was working for the White House, and it was exclusively through Leo and McGahn that judges were selected.”
The New York Times described Leo as playing a “critical role” in reshaping the judiciary, first contacting then-appellate-judge Neil Gorsuch about potentially nominating him to fill Scalia’s seat. Leo’s CRC Advisors then coordinated “a months-long media campaign” supporting Gorsuch including “opinion essays, contributing 5,000 quotes to news stories, scheduling pundit appearances on television,” plus television and radio advertisements.
Leo maintained intimate personal relationships with conservative justices. ProPublica documented: “Leo has dined and traveled with Alito, displaying in his office a framed photo of himself, Alito and Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, standing outside the Palace of Versailles. Antonin Scalia, Leo has said, became ‘like an uncle.’ Thomas is a godfather to one of Leo’s daughters and keeps a drawing by Margaret [Leo’s deceased daughter] in his chambers.”
Conservative lawyer George Conway explained Leo’s role: “There was always a concern that Scalia or Thomas would … quit the job and go make way more money at Jones Day or somewhere else. Part of what Leonard does is he tries to keep them happy so they stay on the job.” Leo served as what allies called a “den mother” to Supreme Court justices.
Leo’s political hardball extended to state courts. In a 2007 email to Missouri Governor Matt Blunt’s chief of staff, Leo threatened: “If this happens, there will be fury from the conservative base, the likes of which you and the Governor have never seen... Your boss is a coward and conservatives have neither the time nor the patience for the likes of him.” Short months after Blunt ignored Leo and appointed the judge anyway, Blunt announced at age 37 he wouldn’t seek reelection.
In 2021, Leo received an unprecedented $1.6 billion donation to Marble Freedom Trust from conservative donor Barre Seid — the largest known political donation in U.S. history. Leo’s statement to the New York Times positioned this as leveling the playing field: “It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals.”
But Leo’s vision extended far beyond law. In an internal video obtained by ProPublica, Leo explained: “I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement. And, at some point or another, I just said to myself, well, if this could work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?”
In September 2024, Leo told the Financial Times his goal bluntly: “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident.”
When NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Leo about this quote in November 2024, Leo confirmed without hedging:
Inskeep: “ProPublica obtained a video of you promoting this project and saying you wanted to, quote, ‘crush liberal dominance.’ Is that what you want to do?”
Leo: “Yes (laughter). And the reason, Steve — and I would really call your attention to the words I used. I want to crush liberal dominance. In other words, I want to make sure that there’s a level playing field for the American people to make choices about the lives that they want to have in our country.”
In an internal letter to his 85 Fund network, Leo wrote: “Conservative philanthropy is too heavily weighted in the direction of education about conservative ideas and policies. Vastly insufficient funds are going toward operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies to crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.”
Leo’s religious worldview shapes his entire project. In an October 2022 speech accepting the John Paul II New Evangelization Award at the Catholic Information Center, Leo positioned himself as embattled defender of Christianity:
“Current-day bigots, the progressive Ku Klux Klan, spread false and slanderous rhetoric about Catholic apostolates, and institutions like the one represented here tonight. They mock our practices and devotions. They repeat the KKK canard that Catholics want this country dominated and controlled by a theocracy, which no well-informed Catholics should ever support.”
Leo described opponents as “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who “are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of.” These “barbarians” are “conducting a coordinated and large-scale campaign to drive us from the communities they want to dominate.”
Leo has somehow convinced himself that the religious rule he is advocating is something other than religious rule. ProPublica found a quote from him describing this:
“‘That’s not theocracy,’ he recently told a conservative Christian website. ‘That’s just natural law. That’s just the natural order of things. It’s how we and the world are wired.’”
Katherine Stewart, author of “The Power Worshippers,” analyzed Leo’s convictions: “Leo’s primary conviction is that democracy will not deliver the kind of conservative-values-based government that he believes America must have. He is therefore committed to building an oligarchy of the religious and the wealthy.”
Leo’s dark money network, with legally untraceable sources, funds nearly half of Project 2025’s advisory board organizations. An NBC News investigation found: “Project 2025’s board of more than 80 conservative organizations includes nearly 40 that have received funding from dark-money groups linked to Leonard Leo.” Accountable.US documented that “Since 2021, Leo’s network and groups that have gotten funding from it have funneled over $50.7 million to the groups advising the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”
Between 2014 and 2020, groups in Leo’s orbit raised more than $600 million, with donors including hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, and the Koch family. Leo’s Teneo Network is a member of Project 2025’s advisory board.
The alliance dynamics: Why the bargain works
This cynical alliance succeeds because short-term goals align perfectly even as ultimate motivations diverge:
Christian nationalists need:
Political power to implement religious transformation
Willingness to sign radical executive orders
Someone immune to establishment resistance
Mass political appeal to win elections
Trump needs:
Policy expertise and infrastructure
Vetted personnel (10,000+ database)
Pre-drafted executive orders (350+)
Intellectual justification for autocracy
Fundraising networks and organizational support
Both benefit from the arrangement. Religious figures get unprecedented opportunity to reshape government toward a Christian nationalist vision. Trump gets competent staff executing his instincts while avoiding policy work he finds boring.
Steve Bannon and JD Vance: The connective tissue
Steve Bannon serves as intellectual godfather and media coordinator. His War Room podcast functions as the coordination hub where Roberts made his “bloodless revolution” comment and Vought appears as “frequent guest.”
JD Vance integrates the network into Trump’s core team. Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’ book, calling Heritage “the most influential engine of ideas” for Republicans and declaring: “Time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. These ideas are an essential weapon.” Roberts said of Vance’s VP selection that he had “a broad smile on my face” and admitted “privately, we were rooting for him.”
Vought described “regular contact” with Vance’s Senate office, stating: “We probably have one of the closest relationships with [Vance’s] office that we do with any Hill office.”
The tension: Theological patience versus autocratic impulse
The fundamental tension remains: Religious figures pursue long-term Christian transformation through institutional capture, while Trump seeks immediate personal power and revenge. Vought’s 2050 timeline and Roberts’ 2033 celebration plans extend far beyond Trump’s presidency. They’re building permanent infrastructure that survives any individual, including them.
Trump, conversely, operates in the now. His vendetta against perceived enemies drives immediate policy. His narcissism requires constant validation. His attention span is famously short. Yet the bargain holds because Trump doesn’t care about ultimate religious goals. If Christian nationalists want to reshape America toward “God’s law,” fine — as long as Trump gets loyalty, praise, and power.
The religious architects practice strategic patience. They accept Trump’s affairs, pornography appearances, and moral failings as irrelevant to providential purpose. When Trump publicly denounces Project 2025, they continue working privately. When Trump takes credit for their ideas, they accept anonymity. Vought’s statement “I’m not worried about it” regarding Trump’s denials captures their long game.
The alliance works because neither can succeed without the other, and both are willing to compromise tactics while pursuing divergent strategic objectives. Together, they’ve created the most comprehensive plan to transform American government since the New Deal — but with diametrically opposite values, seeking not to expand but to dismantle federal capacity, not to promote pluralism but to enforce religious nationalism, not to constrain presidential power but to make it absolute.
In my view, they have succeeded — not because they’re done yet, but because they have demonstrated already just how easily such a takeover can be effected. They’ve shown just how inadequate the so-called checks and balances are. Most importantly, they have confirmation of just how many Americans back their kingmaking. Is it a majority? No. But for their purpose, and with their level of conviction, there are more than enough.
And that brings us to the end. I had to cut it off short, and I’m only scratching the surface. I’ve reviewed the main characters
