Russell Vought is the brain behind Donald Trump’s executive order blitz. The now-director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) spent months before the election drafting plans in secret as part of Project 2025.
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of [federal] bureaucracies,” Vought said in a recording published last summer. “We are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
Trump is, by all accounts, executing on Vought’s blueprint. Which raises an obvious question: Why does Vought believe so deeply in expanding presidential power, and how much further is he willing to go to achieve it?
In 2022, Vought published an essay in the American Mind, a publication of the arch-Trumpist Claremont Institution, that provides an answer to some of these questions. Read properly, it serves as kind of a Rosetta stone for the early days of the Trump administration — explaining the logic behind the contemptuous lawbreaking that has become its trademark.
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The essay argues that the US government has been quietly replaced with a “new regime,” a dethroning of the democratic Constitution in favor of a technocratic system of rule by executive agency experts. The only way to counter this is what Vought calls “radical constitutionalism”: a sweeping unilateral assertion of power by the executive that retakes the reins of power from unelected bureaucrats.
This is exactly the logic by which one might, for example, unlawfully attempt to abolish birthright citizenship or impound billions in agency funding. It’s not a stretch to link these early Trump actions to Vought’s essay — some of America’s leading legal experts have concluded that it is, in fact, part of the thinking behind them. If we wish to understand what’s happening, we need to grasp the mindset behind Vought’s “radical constitutionalism” — and what it augurs for the remainder of Trump’s time in office.
Vought’s regime change nightmare
Vought is a longtime Republican hardliner: an open Christian nationalist who served as acting OMB director for the last two years of Trump’s first term. In that position, he played an important role in implementing Trump’s 2019 plan to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating Joe Biden — which, as you may recall, led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Out of power, he founded a think tank called the Center for Renewing America — an outfit designed to develop a policy agenda for a Trumpified GOP. The 2022 American Mind essay is, in part, a succinct and high-level statement of what Vought and his allies were ultimately trying to accomplish.
The essay begins with a stark premise: that “we are in a post constitutional moment in our country.” Vought doesn’t mean that the Constitution has been formally repealed. Rather, that liberal machinations have quietly rendered its provisions moot — effectively accomplishing regime change while keeping Americans in the dark.
“The Left quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change that left the constitutional system of separate powers in place but radically perverted how they operated, their incentive structures, and their responsiveness to the American people,” he writes.
The left accomplished this, he argues, through three separate institutional mechanisms. First, liberal justices reinterpreted the Constitution in radical ways (which he does not specify). Second, Congress delegated significant amounts of power to executive agencies whose leadership had power independent of the president. And third, the permanent civil service became staffed with left-wing activists who worked to make their ideas law.
The end result, he argues, is that the presidency is a ceremonial office, an American equivalent of the English monarchy. Real power, he argues, rests with the heads of executive agencies and the handful of committee chairs in Congress who set their budgets.
“The agencies care more about the congressional appropriations committees than they do about their president. They draft rules according to the authorizing committees’ interests. And they are all influenced by the values and milieu of a permanent ruling class in a capital city divorced from the everyday concerns and wishes of the American people themselves,” Vought writes. “This is the new Constitution.”
“Radical constitutionalism” as a remedy
It is worth pausing here to explain how absurd Vought’s narrative is.
The presidency, far from being a ceremonial monarchy, has become exponentially more powerful in the 21st century. The Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies all built on their predecessors’ expansions of presidential powers, successfully usurping Congress’s authority in areas like trade, student debt, immigration, and war. That these presidents used their powers in very different ways, even directly overruling each others’ prior decisions, only underscores how much presidents (and not executive agencies) are calling the shots.
Vought leaves all of this (well-documented) history out of his essay. As a result, he is able to say with a straight face that the problem with American democracy is that presidents are not powerful enough.
So what’s the remedy to the alleged deficit in presidential power? An approach that Vought calls “radical constitutionalism.”
The essay does not provide a straightforward definition of what the term means. But it seems to consist of two parts — a novel theory of separation of powers and a radical disdain for constitutional precedent. Understanding how they fit together can help us understand why the Trump administration has felt so emboldened to break the law.
Vought believes in the separation of powers. But he has a novel idea about how the boundaries should be enforced — one in which each branch flexes enough muscle that the others are scared to cross it.
To Vought, the ruling is notable in part because Chief Justice John Marshall shied away from ordering President Thomas Jefferson to take any specific actions in his ruling. From Vought’s point of view, this reflected a healthy fear of the presidency, because it recognized that the Court has no mechanism to enforce its rulings.
“He [Marshall] was afraid Jefferson would…show the Supreme Court to be toothless,” Vought writes. “Marshall’s revenge was to articulate the beginnings of the Supreme Court’s authority of judicial review. “But it was Jefferson who gave us a glimpse of the posture that prevents encroaching powers.”
For Vought, it’s not troubling for the president to threaten the Supreme Court with noncompliance. In fact, it’s the president’s boldness — the will to wield power aggressively, even risking a constitutional crisis — that actually defends the separation of powers. It’s a neat bit of “you have to kill the village in order to save it” logic.
Vought pairs his fear-based view of separation of powers with an explicit call to ignore the constraints of precedent.
“The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches,” he writes.
In practice, this requires going beyond “interpreting the words in their original meaning,” as most conservatives claim to be doing. Rather, the right should attempt “to understand the logic of the original Constitution and how these authorities should be used unencumbered by the scar tissue resulting from decades of bad cases and bad statesmen.”
As an example, Vought cites an argument developed by his think tank for why governors should be allowed to deport undocumented migrants on their own. The Constitution, Vought argues, explicitly permits states to defend themselves in the event of invasion — even if the federal government does not authorize fighting it off. And undocumented migration is, in his view, an “invasion” of a sort. Therefore, he concludes, governors can lawfully “take steps to apprehend and return illegal aliens to the border without the federal government.”
As far as legal arguments go, this is absurd — indeed, the Supreme Court rejected it in a 2024 case. But Vought believed that even arguments that courts are likely to reject should be tried, because to do otherwise would be to cede power to the “regime” that currently rules in place of the Constitution.
“Our need is not just to win congressional majorities that blame the other side or fill seats on court benches to meddle at the margins. It is to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it,” he writes.
And now, finally, we can see how Vought’s logic is guiding the Trump administration.
Vought believes that executive agencies have, with Congress and the courts’ blessing, usurped so much power that the Constitution is no longer in effect. He believes that presidents have a duty to try and enforce the true constitution, using whatever novel arguments they can dream up, even if the rest of the government might reject them. And he believes that threatening to ignore the Supreme Court isn’t a lawless abuse of power, but rather the very means by which the separation of powers is defended.
Russell Vought can call this whatever he wants, but it’s fairly clear what it amounts to: a recipe for a constitutional crisis. And it’s one the president currently appears to be following to a tee.
