As the mediasphere continues to process the fallout from Sunday’s MAGA hate-fest at Madison Square Garden, an equally chilling spectacle should command at least as much attention: ProPublica has unearthed videos of Russell Vought, probably the most powerful Christian nationalist bureaucrat in the country, laying out plans for a scorched-earth second-term Trump agenda.

If you don’t know who Vought is, that’s a first-order failure of our political press. He served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and has spent the past four years commandeering the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing religious think tank serving up a steady diet of demented culture-war moral panics and persecution fantasies. Vought is also by most accounts the central strategist behind Project 2025, the full-scale plan to rebuild the federal government in the image of pure MAGA grievance politics, bigotry, and misogyny; in addition, he spearheaded policy operations for the Republican National Convention’s platform committee. The chapter he contributed to the Project 2025 governing blueprint makes the case for a militantly weaponized federal bureaucracy, purged of nonpartisan career staffers, and jolted into witch-hunting form by a new cadre of true-believing Trumpist toadies. It’s a vision of the Caesarist model of a right-wing “unitary executive” on steroids, ginned up from a paranoid Christian nationalist vision of the administrative state as a rolling, demonic assault on constitutional liberties. Every effort must be expended, Vought argued there, to face down the Mephistophelian treachery of a nomenklatura “carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

In the leaked videos of Vought’s addresses before gatherings of his think tank—a group with close ties to both the Trump White House and key Trump strategists such as Steve Bannon—this rhetoric comes off as restrained by comparison. It’s long been a truism that Trumpist allegations against an infidel, America-hating opposition are raw acts of psychological projection, but Vought takes this tic to a whole new level: “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. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.” ProPublica reporters Molly Redden and Andy Kroll—working in collaboration with Nick Surgery from Documented—released videos of a pair of Center for Renewing America gatherings over the last two years showing that Vought’s plan is to entirely disable regulatory arms of the government such as the Environmental Protection Agency, while empowering the military to crush domestic dissent. Along the way, he also charts a strategy to put enforcement of immigration policy at the southern border of the country on a war footing, and declares holy vengeance against the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions” and the practice of “chemical castration”—i.e., gender-affirming medical care.

But the most disturbing element of the report is Vought’s vision for a complete MAGA-brokered ideological takeover of the federal bureaucracy. For all the agita expressed by pundits over the fascist character of Trumpian rhetoric, this is the fascist idea broken down into an HR strategem—the sort of fine-grained plan of infiltration that would be exceedingly difficult to root out if it’s ever permitted to take hold. “We have detailed agency plans,” Vought bragged in a 2024 speech. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

A key fulcrum in this strategy is the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which grants the president wide unilateral authority to deploy the military in enforcing domestic law. Right-wing state attorneys general, working in apparent coordination with Vought and his think tank, have already sought to invoke the act in disingenuous bids to declare the volume of immigration an “invasion,” and thereby trigger massive federally administered border crackdowns. In his remarks, Vought wants to use the same jury-rigged model of imperial presidential authority to quash domestic dissent writ large, citing the 2020 protests against the police murder of George Floyd as his scarifying culture-war precedent. “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 said.

It gets worse. In a 2023 speech before the Center for Renewing America, Vought argued that, in order to pull together post-hoc rationalizations for the mobilization of a federal MAGA thought police, it’s necessary to create a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel—the federal office that has notoriously sanctioned torture and other brutal extensions of executive power. For Vought, the existing OLC is potentially too great a restraint on the kind of federal power he wants Trump to hold. One former official with the OLC explained what the fallout from such a maneuver would be: “If, all of a sudden, the office is full of a bunch of loyalists whose only job is to rubber-stamp the White House’s latest policy directive, whose only goal is to justify the ends by whatever means, that would be quite dangerous.”

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Indeed, Vought’s holy-warrior impatience with the protocols of mundane governance mark him as an exceptionally power-mad MAGA apostle, even by the movement’s usual standards. In his speeches, he’s actually castigated the Federalist Society—the lavishly funded political op that Leonard Leo has captained in his successful putsch to transform the federal courts into a manufactory of right-wing ideological boilerplate—as too timid and excessively prone to pragmatic compromise. Leo and his cronies are just too lily-livered to face down the present crisis, Vought insists: “We have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.” Needless to say, he also endorses evidence-free election denialism, claiming that a “compelling case has emerged” that the 2020 balloting was rigged against Trump’s reelection, and belittles claims to the contrary on grounds of insufficient true-believing faith: “Does a Christian in China ask and come away saying, ‘You know, there’s no persecution, because I haven’t read about it in the state regime press?’ No, they don’t.” The January 6 rioters are also “political prisoners” in Vought’s view: The leaders of the woke-infested law-enforcement bureaucracy “are keeping political opponents in jail, and I think we need to be honest about that,” he said.

But the central target of Vought’s righteous fury remains the regulatory-minded federal workforce, of which the public-health official Anthony Fauci (aka “all-empowered career expert”) is the satanic totem. In his Project 2025 essay, he proposes reviving the Schedule F category of federal employment, which permits the rampant firing of federal employees in the revival of a spoils system. In one of many flourishes cribbed from the alleged Leninist impulses of the enemy camp, Vought also relishes the idea of placing federal bureaucrats “in trauma”: “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.”

As with all things pertaining to Project 2025, the Trump campaign denied to Redden, Kroll, and Surgery that it has any substantive ties to Vought and his agenda—an especially ludicrous claim about the man who oversaw the basic operations of all major government initiatives in Trump’s first term. And Vought certainly feels no such diffidence in hailing Trump as an ally—indeed, as “a gift from God.” In an undercover video made by British activists posing as relatives of a major GOP donor, Vought bragged of being recently in touch with Trump and fielding a special “assignment” from him. The former president has “been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it.… he’s very supportive of what we do,” Vought continued. Vought’s influence is indeed such in MAGA world that he’s now being bruited as chief of staff in a second Trump administration.

But like his ardent Christian nationalist allies, Vought sees the stakes as something far greater and more cosmic than a plum Oval Office gig; it is, rather, a holy mandate to prevail in a moment of high spiritual warfare. “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 said. “God put us here for such a time as this.”