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- [00:01]
Narrator/Announcer
Support comes from Dakota State University. What happens when you unite dynamic minds with one revolutionary vision? A rising force on the cutting edge of everything from a little university on the prairie to a cyber powerhouse of the plains. We're proving the nation's best cyber can come from where you least expect it. Now we're molding the future of cyber, AI and quantum computing one graduate at a time. See what Dakota State University is building next@dsucyber27.com. This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoodoo.com that's o d o o dot com.
- [01:08]
Susan Glasser
Here we are. Somebody tweeted the other day it's their sixth shutdown of their life as a journalist covering Washington. And I thought, my God, I've been here for all of these shutdowns, too. Going back to the Newt Gingrich shutdown. But that's when people found it shocking. I don't even know how to, like.
- [01:28]
Jane Mayer
An annual dance, practically. I mean, it seems almost meaningless.
- [01:32]
Evan Osnos
Yeah. There's.
- [01:33]
Jane Mayer
The only question is, okay, how long is this one gonna last for?
- [01:37]
Susan Glasser
Right. Except for, of course, the poor people who aren't getting their paycheck. I have to say, flying back into Washington hours after the shutdown started, I thought, well, it's not optimal to have those air traffic controllers at work without getting paid.
- [01:51]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, they're working essentially for the love of the game right now, not to.
- [01:55]
Susan Glasser
Mention for all of us. I hope they have a lot of love for.
- [01:58]
Jane Mayer
I mean, there is a difference, though, this year, and we can talk about this a little bit, but one of the differences is that they're not just talking about furloughing these workers. They're talking about laying them on forever.
- [02:07]
Evan Osnos
That's a huge difference. I agree with you.
- [02:09]
Susan Glasser
This has never happened by then.
- [02:10]
Jane Mayer
Never, never. This is a war on the government, not just an interregnum.
- [02:15]
Evan Osnos
Good point. That's what this show's about.
- [02:22]
Jane Mayer
Welcome to the Political Scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane May, and I'm joined by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Evan Osnos. Hi, Susan.
- [02:35]
Susan Glasser
Hey there. Great to be with you.
- [02:37]
Evan Osnos
Hi, Evan, great to see you guys. 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 to put them in trauma.
- [02:58]
Jane Mayer
That is Russell Vogt, a name most Americans had never heard of before this week. But he's been central to the Trump world for years. He is Trump's budget chief, directing the White House Office of Management and Budget. He's a longtime fiscal hawk, Christian nationalist, and co author of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. If you want to understand the choices and tactics coming out of this White House, you really need to understand what's happening inside Russell Vote's mind. And this week, his influence has been impossible to ignore. On Thursday, Trump announced he'd speak with Vote about which so called Democrat agencies should be cut during the shutdown. Vogt's fingerprints are all over the strategic decisions that brought us here. And he appears to be guiding what's next. So who is Russell Vogt? How did he become such a powerful force in shaping policy in the second Trump administration? And what is his vision for America? So, Susan, before we dive into Russ Vote's rise to power and in particular his role in the shutdown, let's step back a bit. What kind of figure is Russ Vogt in Washington?
- [04:22]
Susan Glasser
Well, you know, I'm so glad we're taking on this subject today because the shutdown, I think is one of those stories that makes perfect sense somehow here in Washington in our convoluted politics, but actually makes no sense if you step back. And, you know, Vote is one of the reasons why we keep having these serial crises because he is part of a cadre of, you know, very ideological hardcore Republican Christian nationalists who have figured out how to push the levers of power in Washington over the last decade or so in ways that was never envisioned before. And I think the key point for people to understand here is that it's not six months into Russ Votes tenure atop the Trump administration, but he was a key adviser in Donald Trump's first term. And it's those experiences in the first term that are shaping, I think, the very aggressive effort to expand executive power coming out of the White House. So for me, it's Russ Votes experience at Trump's side in Trump 1.0 that's really shaping this second term. And one of the things he learned relevant to shut down politics is he learned that Congress can be rolled. What's happened in the sort of erosion of our checks and Balances is that Congress no longer really plays the role envisioned for it. And these shutdown fights are a way of sort of calling Congress's bluff. And that's what you're hearing from Donald Trump. Just the other day you mentioned on Thursday, Trump said he'd meet with Vote to decide the fate of agencies. Of course, that's not really how it's supposed to work, that the president sits down with one of his staffers and decides whether to ax a whole agency that's been created by Congress. But in this day and age, you have people like Vote advising Trump essentially, that he has unlimited executive power. Back in 2019, they had a shutdown fight. Vote was Trump's budget director then, just like he is now. Donald Trump demanded billions of dollars to build that wall. Remember the wall on the southern border? Congress said no. And actually, after the longest shutdown in US History, they had to back down. Donald Trump backed down without winning. But it wasn't actually the loss people portrayed. Literally hours later after that, he just said at votes advice, I'm going to declare an emergency at the southern border and take my money anyways from the Pentagon budget and other places. And he did that. And for me, that's this like, aha moment that Vote and Trump had. And it shapes everything. Now everything is an emergency. And Donald Trump claims unlimited powers as a result of that moment.
- [06:57]
Jane Mayer
I mean, maybe we should bring people up to date with just what he's been doing in this most recent moment, which is in a way, torquing up the shutdown and exploiting it to do things that actually have not been tried before. He's doing things right, Evan, as cutting off funds, $18 billion or so from New York that was already earmarke, already approved by Congress. It's not related to the government shutdown. He's using the crisis that he's created to claw back money that Congress has already appropriated to New York. And in addition to that, $8 billion that was appropriated for clean energy. Correct?
- [07:36]
Evan Osnos
Right. I think. And before we talk about that, which I think by now most people have picked up some of this from the news, let's actually describe for a second where he fits into the ecology of Washington. Every once in a while, there is a person who comes along who is a kind of not just a policy entrepreneur, but somebody who sees gaps, sees loopholes or vulnerabilities in the very nature of how the state is arranged and exploits those. So you had Newt Gingrich, for instance, in the 1990s who figured out that there were ways that you could change politics fundamentally. Then you go and you had the. The neocons. We now know of people in a way that we didn't know before. People like Richard Pearl remember these names that at the time were, in a way they felt like second tier figures, but were in fact the designers, the architects of a whole generation of how to use American power. In the neocons case, it was about how to use it overseas. In the Christian nationalists or nationalist conservatives case, it's about how to use power at home. And the key insight, as Susan was suggesting a moment ago, is that Russ Vote figured out that when you are the executive branch, you can take steps, you can do things that are fait accompli. You can put facts on the ground that are much faster than the legal system can respond and certainly much faster than an opposing party in a minority position can respond. So as a result, what's really important to know about this guy is we all know. And the kind of meme out in the culture is that the Trump administration has all of these guys who don't really know what they're doing in their jobs. People like Pete Hagseth who stands up there, as we saw just in the last few days, and sort of cosplays around on the stage pretending to be somebody who actually has the respect of those generals. Russ Vode is a different person. He knows exactly what he's doing. He has spent years training himself to exploit these wormholes in the state and is now using it in a way that is really transforming the power of the president.
- [09:48]
Susan Glasser
Just to the point about spending years. I don't know if you guys saw the comment the other day by Mike Lee, the conservative senator from Utah. He said basically, Russ Vote has been dreaming since puberty of making these cuts. And specifically Jane talking about taking advantage in the way that you pointed out, we've had many shutdowns before Newt Gingrich. Evan, one of the contributions, I put that in scare quotes that Gingrich made was really to inaugurate this modern era of shutdown politics. But one of the things that Vote has done here sort of take us to a whole different level of shutdown politics is to seize the shutdown, to basically make further transformations in government that aren't a part of the shutdown. Now there's a dubious questions of legality involved and maybe if he does succeed in firing thousands of workers, which he and Trump have threatened to do, we'll see that these projects in New York that Jane alluded to, not only is he Seizing on the pretext, going after basically blue states and huge amounts of money that benefit all Americans, red or blue. He's talking about axing subway project in New York City. Hudson River Tunnels urgently needed. But this really gets me. I don't know if you guys noticed this. His pretext for doing that, that he stated in his social media post announcing these cuts was because the Hudson River Tunnels might have been unconstitutionally influenced by dei. So can you. Is there such a thing as a woke tunnel?
- [11:19]
Jane Mayer
It's basically a flex. It's basically everyone can see it's a pretext. It's a threat to the leaders of Congress, the Democratic leaders, that is, it's a threat to Schumer from New York and Jeffries from New. And it's kind of a way of saying, kind of nice subway you got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. Too bad, cuz we're gonna cut off the funding. I mean, but the thing about this is, yes, it does violate the Constitution, which designates Congress as the body that is supposed to appropriate the funds and has in this case. But the thing is he knows that there's not going to be action that stops him. That's what he's figured out. And that if there is, it'll be so late that everything will be busted by then. And to your point, Evan, I think the idea of him being as kind of a Washington character, he's so prototypical in that he's got tortoise shell glasses and a trimmed beard. This is not a superhero with a cape in Washington. How do you have superpowers? You learn how to use the budget. And that's what this man has done. And he learned it from his mentor, who was Phil Graham, a senator from Texas, Republican budget hawk who said the budget is everything. And that was decades ago. As to what Susan's saying and Mike Lee saying he's been salivating to do this since he was, you know, an adolescent. This is a long, long gestating plan that we're now seeing unfolding. It may have been frustrated and Trump won. Now he's got the running room, but this is something they've been going at for a very, very long time.
- [12:58]
Susan Glasser
And to your point, about sort of years in the making. I think this gets at something that I'm constantly on the lookout for, which is what is difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. And part of it actually just is the four years of experience of those surrounding Donald Trump and figuring out what works and what the system will bear, and especially because they have, with Trump, a very radical partner who's willing to take pretty destabilizing actions. Trump is willing to go places that people like Vote want to take them and remember. So they figured out this emergency declaration thing in Trump 1.0 and that shutdown that I mentioned. Another thing that they figured out is basically Congress won't stand up for itself if we take money that they've appropriated for one purpose and use it for another. One of the things that Vote has written about, has spoken about, has talked about is not only the very vast powers he ascribes to the executive, but the idea that I don't care that Congress has passed these laws or appropriated this money, I basically think it's unconstitutional. The post Watergate act passed by Congress in 1974 that says you can't just impound money if you're the president, you have to have a process behind it. He just says, yeah, I don't think we should follow that rule. And this is really at the heart of why it is. You've seen Donald Trump in the second term do what he didn't do in the first term, which is just go after the federal government en masse.
- [14:33]
Evan Osnos
Yeah. I think people out there know about Project 2025. Right. They know that Russ Vote was the arch architect, in a sense, of this. It's worth actually just drilling down for a second, though, on a really key detail in section one of Project 2025, which is called Taking the Reins of Government. Vogt outlined this process in which it was a theory of the case that the Executive office of the President should be heated. Above all, as he wrote here, it is the President's agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority. That right there is a very kind of subtle, bland way of making a giant claim, which is that the Congress's power to appropriate and to designate where money is obligated is, by this reading, less important. And this is where we get into something really significant, is that he has, in effect, come up with this idea that it was, in fact the conservative establishment that was part of the problem because they were too timid, in his view. They were not going far enough to dismantle independent agencies, to incapacitate them. So he was very publicly critical of people who we think of as, you know, fundamentalist conservatives, like the originalist judges or the Federalist Society. He was the one who was saying they are, in fact, perpetrating and propping up this fiction that Congress has any ability to contain the powers of the President. And so, in a way, you know, this is what we recognize from. If you've studied any revolutionary movement, any kind of movement that is an ideologically driven phenomenon, there will always be people who find their lane, the way to operationalize their ambition by becoming what's known in China as being redder than red. It happens to work in the conservative context, too. He figured out that the way you win is by being redder than red.
- [16:34]
Susan Glasser
An ultra partisanship is really the key to understanding both Vote and Trump. They found a way to turn everything into a partisan fight this summer. And I found this fascinating, actually. He said at another event this summer, and we played that shocking quote of him saying he wanted federal employees to feel the trauma. He said he took after Congress and he said it's too bipartisan, this appropriations process.
- [16:59]
Evan Osnos
Exactly.
- [17:00]
Susan Glasser
They want everything to be Republican. And so when they put out to bring it back to the present day and the shutdown, boom. Let's attack New York. Boom. Here's a list of Democratic dominated states that are going to have their climate projects cut. Just this morning, before we began taping, they put out more things that they were going to cut. Where are they doing it? In Chicago. Democratic run Chicago. They want to take everything in this country that benefits Americans, whatever their political party, but they want to turn it into everything being about red America versus blue America.
- [17:33]
Jane Mayer
You look at his think tank, the center for Renewing America, there is a memo there that is about how to weaponize the Justice Department. They're unabashed about it. They want to break the norms that we've had since Watergate about not using the government in corrupt ways that put them into the hands of the President so that he can help his friends and punish his enemies. I mean, in many ways, I think if you go back and you look at the origins of this, it's not just Russell Vogt, there's a group of conservative thinkers and legal thinkers, thinkers that rejected Watergate. They felt that.
- [18:11]
Evan Osnos
Meaning what? When you say rejected Watergate, they felt.
- [18:14]
Jane Mayer
That Nixon was unfairly brought down. It sounds crazy, but if you go look carefully at the Claremont Institute's writings, you will see that there are people there, scholars there. It's kind of the brain center for Trumpism who think Nixon was wronged, the presidency was too weakened. We need a strong man in this country. It's very sort of Carl Schmittian thinking about how the checks and balances are yesterday. And so you actually have Russell Vogt having written in 2022 an essay about how we are in what he calls a post constitutional moment.
- [18:54]
Evan Osnos
What does that mean? Janet Post constitutional moment, the Constitution, with.
- [18:57]
Jane Mayer
All of its checks and balances, it's too quaint. It weakens the strongman too much. We need an Orban in this country is what it means. If you read carefully and sort of the paper trail is and a handful of other people who put a lot of their plans together in these think tanks that were funded and running during the years that Biden was in the White House, they were planning and plotting their next step.
- [19:26]
Susan Glasser
You know, it makes you nostalgic for the years when Republican legal thinking was dominated by originalism because or limited government.
- [19:35]
Evan Osnos
Remember that idea?
- [19:36]
Susan Glasser
In the original formulation of not only the Constitution, but how American government worked, it was Congress that was the dominant branch. That's the thing that I find so remarkable about this sort of takeover by the sort of strong executives here. Basically, they have views of the presidency as sort of kingly institution. And for the rest of us, that's the part that rings the most off.
- [20:02]
Jane Mayer
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more on Vogt's rise to power and how his Christian nationalism shapes his politics. The political Scene will be back in just a moment. If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. It really helps. Thanks so much for listening, Katie.
- [20:40]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.
- [20:43]
Evan Osnos
I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [20:47]
Susan Glasser
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [20:48]
Katie Drummond
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired, and.
- [20:50]
Susan Glasser
Our show, Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [20:56]
Katie Drummond
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [21:06]
Evan Osnos
Right? So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you.
- [21:17]
Katie Drummond
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [21:24]
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- [22:39]
Jane Mayer
So Evan Russ Vogt calls himself a Christian nationalist. What does he mean?
- [22:47]
Evan Osnos
Well, what's interesting if you think about it just stylistically, by the way, how curious it is that a Christian nationalist would be very close to Donald Trump, who is a profoundly unbiblical person. And you know, there is a way in which Vogt kind of according to people who are really around them a lot, he's just statistically odd next to Trump. And yet Trump understands fundamentally the value that he has to the operation. I mean, vote is interestingly when you look at how he was raised. I mean, he grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut, in a kind of generally fairly prosperous area from a huge family, many kids. His dad was an electrician, his mom was a teacher. Religion was a part of his life from a very young age. He talks about the idea that he sort of took God into his life at the age of four. And you know, let's remind ourselves what we're telling you. This frame of being redder than red, it's like he took what was the old fashioned Ralph Reed form of Christian conservatism and has amped it up. And so what does a Christian nationalist mean? In a sense, it means the fusion of the affairs of American civic life with the fundamental ideas of Christian and mostly white Protestant life. And in his view, this is something that is in fact part of the design of the United States, that this goes back to the original. I mean, this is where they're sort of taking the originalism idea of how the courts have been re engineered to look at the literal language of the Constitution and He's applying that in a sense to the Old Testament. I mean, he quotes from Deuteronomy. He sort of imagines these are operational documents for how to imagine government in the year 2025. So what does this. So take, for example, deportation and immigration. There's a moment caught on a hidden camera, a journalist undercover, and he said, if we're going to have legal immigration, can we get people that actually believe in Christianity? He said, in an ideal world, I think we could save the country in the sense of the largest deportation in history. That's how you end up in a situation where you have ICE out on the streets in all the ways that we now know and see every day. It's coming from this deeply seated conception that the future of the country is fundamentally at risk because it is unchristianizing the nation. And that's where the ferocity, what would seem to, I think a lot of people a sort of immunity to sympathy to people who are vulnerable. Where does it come from? It comes from the fact that he believes he is in this messianic struggle to protect the nation.
- [25:27]
Susan Glasser
And there's another form of messianism that he has, which is an almost religious fervor of anti governmentism. And that comes from Jane mentioned his sort of apprenticeship, if you will, in a very important figure who, you know, isn't talked about as much these days. But Phil Graham, Republican, actually famous party switcher back in the day, Democrat to Republican, really dominant figure in the 1980s in Washington. And the religion that he preached was the religion that government is bad. He was the co author, author of a proposed balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Right. And I think it's this fusion of this belief about Christian nationalism and this idea of who is really an American. Right. But then it's fused with the idea that government itself is somehow anti American. And I think that's why we're having this conversation now during the shutdown. Because, you know, what is the shutdown about? It's about the nature of what role does the federal government play in America. And historically, Democrats have been the ones who've been very resistant to shutdowns because they believe government is the American people. It's providing services for the American people. It's what helps to make the country work. It's the air traffic controllers, it's the government economists who help the economy run by showing us how it really works. It's the public health, it's the, you know, and on and on. You can go there. And Republicans have had this ideology over decades. Phil Graham being a great example of, of how four, five decades ago, this project first took shape and took flight, and now you have Vote and this vessel of Donald Trump basically fulfilling this decades old project.
- [27:08]
Evan Osnos
This is such a great point about a vessel like this actually ties these two themes together, which is how does somebody who is so religious, like, vote kind of break go after Donald Trump? And the answer is that they have come to believe that Trump is an artifact of God's plan, and that is how they explain all the inconsistencies.
- [27:26]
Jane Mayer
And I think actually if you drill down even more, there's almost a kind of a coming together of a mindset in a way between Trump and somebody like Russell Vote, which is they're brought together in their mutual sense of being disrespected and resenting the establishment. You've got Trump from the outer boroughs who's always feeling looked down upon. And you've got Russell Vogt, an evangelical Christian. They always feel that the rest of the world doesn't respect their work worldview. And if you look at what Russell Vogt says about his upbringing in Trumbull, Connecticut, there's some kind of deep wound there. I don't feel like it's been fully explained, but he talks about how his parents worked so hard and they could have been so much more if not for the government taking so much out of them. What is he talking about? His father was a union electrician. His mother was a public school teacher who then went and started a Christian school. He has some kind of deep resentment against the. And then it surfaces again. Where we started this podcast today, when you hear him talking about putting public servants into trauma, that's like violent rhetoric. There's an anger there that I don't feel is fully explained. But Trump obviously has this great anger also at the establishment. And the two kind of movements have come together maybe in this.
- [28:50]
Susan Glasser
Well, and Jane, to your point, that's an excellent point, because remember, Trump is also. These are the kinds of people he collects around him, people who have a grievance, people who are attracted in some way to the darkness of his message. American carnage here, destruction. Trump, you know, he's the mirror for other people's souls in many ways. And if you look at those around him, Right, you will find that as a common theme. And so I think it's really important also that they have taken the battles and the battle scars of that first term. And, you know, this is their vengeance. Right. This is their chance to, to do it over, to get it right.
- [29:31]
Evan Osnos
And I think also we're reminded that he took an idea which was present in the ether. Phil Graham used to talk about wagon riders and wagon pullers, that there were people who pulled the wagon in American life, and then there were these free riders who just rode on the wagon and somebody like Vogt, who was personally ambitious. We know when he was working for Graham, when he was getting started in his jobs on the Hill, that he would. He was sort of celebrated as the guy who would go further and farther. And this is where it ties into what I think of as I've come to see this as like a pattern in Washington, that an idea that is birthed at some point in the 80s or 90s gets refined over time through personal ambition, where somebody figures out they can take it and make it more orthodox and that that will eventually reward them with power. And here he is now at this sort of Olympian heights of being able to do these things.
- [30:27]
Jane Mayer
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about whether this will work for Trump.
- [30:41]
Katie Drummond
America is changing and so is the world.
- [30:45]
Susan Glasser
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [30:53]
Katie Drummond
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [30:56]
Susan Glasser
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [30:59]
Katie Drummond
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [31:05]
Susan Glasser
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [31:19]
Jane Mayer
You talk about how they've refined this ideology to its essence. Now that Russell Vogt has, and he's got his shot at enacting it, is this going to be popular with the American public and a winning strategy for Trump? Because Project 2025, we remember, polled miserably and Trump had to disassociate himself from it during the campaign. He claimed he didn't know what it was, he didn't want to read it, he didn't know anything about it. It had nothing to do. Now, he's tweeted this week that Russell Vogt, the man who was Project 2025 man, is helping him decide who gets laid off. So is this going to be any more popular than Project 2025 was? How do you think it's going to play?
- [32:04]
Susan Glasser
Well, I mean, remember, there are the political advisors surrounding Donald Trump. There are the Republicans on Capitol Hill. There are different MAGA interest groups here, and I don't think votes interest in this is about helping shore up Republicans in vulnerable districts. In the midterm elections. And that's why you hear increasingly up on Capitol Hill you hear senators publicly expressing squeamishness. They would like to have just a straightforward shutdown fight with the Democrats, cuz that's what they know how to do. Right? This is I think one of many shutdown fights we've had in recent years. And up on Capitol Hill it looks very different because they say, well this is the Democratic Democrats shut down since they could just go ahead and vote with us on a clean CRO. They're trying to make it about health care and Obamacare subsidies and things like that. And so it's the Democrats choice to have this shutdown. That's the way Republicans on Capitol Hill look at it. And they think there's this remarkable quote, in fact the other day from Kevin Kramer, Republican from the Dakotas, who said Russ is less politically in tune than the President. We as Republicans have never had so much moral high ground, interesting proposition, moral high ground on a government funding bill in our lives. I just don't see why we would squander it. Which I think is the risk of being aggressive with executive power in this moment. I love this observation because there's so much to unpack there. Number one is the squeamishness about Republicans on the Hill because they just want to have this shutdown fight and they think they can pin the shutdown on Democrats. Well, it's really hard to pin the shutdown on Democrats and say they're against the government when you have Donald Trump in the Oval Office and Russ vote weaponizing the shutdown to cut the government even more. And so they're muddying the messages as the political types see it. But that's not what Russ vote, that's not what Donald Trump care about. I think that this whole second term is like a process of breaking Congress. They have shown that the Republicans control both chambers of Congress and they don't care about the institutional prerogative of Congress anymore.
- [34:12]
Evan Osnos
And not just Congress. I think this is important to point out. When he was out of government in between the first Trump term and the second term, one of the big ideas that he had at the center for Renewing America was about creating in effect shadow apparatuses within the executive branch, within the presidency. Meaning in a sense. And he talked about it explicitly, he said we wanna build a shadow office of legal counsel, a shadow office of Management and budget. What that means in practice is, remember he's talking about, about even when they're in power, he's not talking about doing it out of government in the shadow sense of like in Parliament, where you have the out of power party with its own apparatus. He's saying that we're doing this in order to stop the process that he once described, as the lawyers come in and say it's not legal. So they've come up now with these ways of, in a sense, declaring things to be legal and then letting the ordinary process of legal objection play out, which, of course, is long and contested in all the ways that we know. The question will be, does this offend some basic American sensibility about how government is supposed to work? Is there some vestigial piece of the conservative instinct that says, hold on a second, I was into this because I want limited government. I don't want an imperial president. In fact, I want government to be a smaller part of my life. I don't want it coming in and throwing out thousands of people from their jobs just for the sake of owning the libs. If you tie a lot of these pieces together, Russ Vote has figured out how to operationalize not just partisanship, but actually the partitioning of the country. I mean, none of the projects that he has stalled and frozen and withheld funds from are in states that Trump won, none of them. $25 billion of money that's been taken entirely from states that Trump lost. That is taking this process to a whole new level.
- [36:10]
Jane Mayer
It's hardball in a whole new way. The question is whether people out in the country will object and whether the courts will object. And, you know, the problem is both of those things are going to take time, and a lot of furniture is going to be broken in between. And we're watching it happen.
- [36:26]
Susan Glasser
I bet there's a lot of Trump voters from Staten island and Queens and Long island who take the subway every day, who have construction jobs in New York City. That's the thing about this partitioning of America, is that actually America is not partitioned. And despite the incredible polarization of our politics, Americans still do live together. And red Americans and blue Americans and purple Americans. The vision that's being articulated here in Washington is fundamentally at Oxford, odds with how millions of Americans live. And to Jane's point, what, if anything, are they going to be able to do about it? There was a survey that really was like a gut punch to me. The percentage. I'm going to get the numbers wrong, so I won't say it, but the percentage of Americans that believe that our political system can solve the problems that we have, it has plummeted in the last few years and it wasn't all that high to begin with, but it's absolutely plummeted. People are losing confidence in part because of crises, self imposed crises like this shutdown. They're losing confidence in the basic self correcting principle of our politics.
- [37:37]
Jane Mayer
Just as we've been having this conversation, evidently, President Trump has now posted another message online. And it's a little sort of music video that shows Russell Vogt in costume as a grim reaper, his scythe over his shoulder. Russ, food is the reaper.
- [37:58]
Susan Glasser
He wrote the pen, the thumbs and the brain. Here comes the reaper.
- [38:08]
Jane Mayer
I guess, you know, here we are. This is the level that the White House works on these sort of adolescent juvenile music videos. Hahaha games. As they cut the funds for things like research for people's very sick children. But anyway, I guess they think it's funny and this is the image that they would like to have for Russell Vogt. The man of the moment.
- [38:31]
Evan Osnos
These are your tax dollars at work is what they say.
- [38:33]
Susan Glasser
The man of the moment indeed. I think it sums up where we are.
- [38:36]
Jane Mayer
Well, they're having Halloween early this year.
- [38:39]
Evan Osnos
I have to say, watching it though, I think that Will Ferrell and the more cowbell video from Saturday Night Live did a much better job with the Grim Reaper song. So I'd prefer that to be my mental go.
- [38:51]
Jane Mayer
Evan. He is our cultural critic. All right, this has been incredibly interesting, if somewhat alarming show. I'm so glad to be together with you guys until next week.
- [39:03]
Evan Osnos
Until next week, indeed. Thank you, Jan. Great to see you guys.
- [39:06]
Susan Glasser
Oh, so great to be with you.
- [39:11]
Jane Mayer
This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Jane Mayer. We had research assistance today from Alex Del. Our producer is Nora Richie, mixing by Mike Kutchman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of Global Audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening and we'll be back next week.
- [39:46]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [40:13]
Evan Osnos
I want a shark that, that eats.
- [40:15]
Katie Drummond
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [40:18]
Evan Osnos
So in a lot of ways I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [40:27]
Katie Drummond
Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from from me. One day, at some point as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False.
- [40:45]
Jane Mayer
Tell me more.
- [40:46]
Katie Drummond
Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [40:57]
Susan Glasser
From. PRX.