It was in 2023 that I began hearing stories from sources in direct contact with Joe Biden about the president occasionally needing family members and close aides to finish his sentences and his problems walking down staircases. I learned that at pre-event briefings the Secret Service began requesting that no women should be sitting in the front row for any presidential speeches at any venues: the fear was that he might slip on being introduced and be rescued by a woman. The senior aides in the White House didn’t want that sort of photograph on front pages around the world.
Old friends from his days in the Senate soon realized that Biden was not always able, or permitted, to return cell phone calls. But it wasn’t until the Wall Street Journal published a major front-page expose on Biden’s serious condition on June 4, 2024, that I understood the extent to which I had censored myself.
One reason to dwell on the issue now is that Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, the authors of Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the new bestselling book on Biden’s failings as masked by his family and staff, had every reason to know something—if not more than what the Journal published—long before the election season. As a broadcaster with a national audience, Tapper did no reporting for the public on that issue when it mattered—when there was still time for the Democratic leadership to pressure Biden to withdraw and hold an open convention to pick a new candidate.
We are now in a crisis of integrity and leadership in Washington—a badly depleted and demoralized official Washington. After the election but before the confirmation of the most inept Cabinet in modern history we in the press missed another chance to warn America about one of the bizarre advisers President Donald Trump has put in charge of funding and revamping the federal bureaucracy.
The crucial point man for Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE assault on the federal workforce and the many federal agencies that sponsor research into every aspect of the well-being in America has been Russell Vought. He is an extreme conservative who was the architect of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 blueprint that called for the all-out dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. In the view of the far right, that bureaucracy had morphed into an all-powerful and unelected fourth branch of the US government and the president no longer had control of the administrative state. Although this was a major issue in the 2024 campaign—Trump, under pressure, would disavow any connection to Project 2025 during the campaign—many in America, including some who supported Trump, were stunned when the president did what he said he wouldn’t do.
Vought was nominated by Trump to run the Office of Management and Budget, which controls the flow of money throughout the federal government; the appointment was approved by a straight party line vote in the Senate. OMB is the office that drafted most of Trump’s array of executive orders that called for immense federal cutbacks. Agencies were shuttered, and thousands of federal works were dismissed or reassigned to minimal tasks. Among the victims was the US Agency for International Development, whose ten thousand employees were responsible for distributing food and essentials to the needy around the world. The agency was committed to promoting agricultural development and improving food security and the quality of life in vulnerable communities in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.
Vought’s nomination was a shoo-in at the Senate, since the Republicans have a fifty-three to forty-seven advantage and none of the Republican members dared to cross the president. The cowed Democrats, who were unable to stop any of Trump’s shockingly unqualified Cabinet nominees, offered little more than a tepid response to the tsunami that was before them.
If the Democrats, or their staffers, had done their homework, they could have raised a spirited debate about Vought’s disturbingly paranoid view of America. The usually closed-mouth Vought, who for two years served with little publicity as OMB director during Trump’s less radical first term, gave what was for him an astonishingly informative interview two months before Trump’s inauguration to Tucker Carlson. I found no evidence in the Vought confirmation transcripts that any senator or their aides had seen or read transcripts of the interview, although a few Democrats posed sharp questions that received no direct response. There was, as all seemed to know, no chance that any of the cowed Republican senators would dare to defy Trump by not voting for Vought, unless Vought, as Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards famously said of himself decades ago, had been caught “in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”
Here are a few of Vought’s assertions from the Carlson interview transcript that have become conservative Republican dicta over the years, with one new fact: radical Republicans, led by a president with revenge and profit high on his agenda, are now in charge, and it will be the end of independent agencies throughout the government:
“The left has innovated over one hundred years to create this fourth branch of an administrative state. You and I might call it the regime— this administrative state that is totally unaccountable to the president that lets it move in the direction that it has been going. . . . They have essentially taken authority. . . . They have no legitimate authority in the Constitution. . . . [The president says:] ‘I am fully aware of the tools at my disposal and I’m going to use them on behalf of the American people . . . I’m going to go do what I said I would do. . . .’ It will certainly read in the papers like chaos. That’s good.
“Yeah, you’re going to have to kick over peoples’ paradigms. You’re going to have to kick over people’s turfs. You’re going to have to change peoples’ understanding of things that they have invested their whole life into. . . . That’s going to cause a lot of turmoil into these bureaucracies, and you got to fight through it . . . the aspect of ‘Oh my gosh, you guys are racist and you guys don’t care about us as people. . . . One of the arguments they’re using in the press against me right now, as they say, ‘He called for trauma inside the bureaucracies.’ Yeah, I called for trauma within the bureaucracies.
“The bureaucracies hate the American people. . . . So, yeah, I would want to provide trauma against that bureaucracy in a way that frees the American people from the people that have assumed the type of power that the Constitution in no law, no public debate ever gave them. Does that mean we dislike everyone working at federal agencies and want them to have a bad life. No, of course. . . . We want to turn over the bureaucracies that [are] traumatizing the American people. . . . I think [Trump is] so unique in terms of being an historical transformational person that can actually save the country. . . . We’re put here for a reason. We’re put here because God has given us a particular purpose for a particular time, and it’s incumbent to us to be responsible with those moments that we’re given.”
Invoking God is a standard political practice, but Vought’s message—and Trump’s—is one of enormous destruction. America has thrived because of the work done by independent agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which gives US citizens—whether Democrat, Republican or independent—a strong voice against abuses by banks and other financial institutions.
Vought thinks otherwise. He told Carlson:
“We have to solve the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch. . . . The president has to move executively as fast, as aggressively, as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle the bureaucracy in their power centers. . . . There are no independent agencies. . . . And it’s always not just about firing [federal] workers, although there’s certainly going to be massive layoffs and firing, particularly across some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist. But what I found was you get better staff work when people are now in their mind realizing, ‘Okay, I’m not immune.’ . . . Why are the people that we pay with our tax dollars immune to the pressure that the rest of us feel?
“You have a president who steps in and says, ‘You know what? There is no constitutional amendment for me to take control of the administrative state. I am going to do in reverse everything that you have done.’ I think that is the great hope. What you need is people who are able to absorb political heat. They don’t have fear of conflict. They can execute under withering enemy fire. They are up to speed. . . . They are unbelievably committed to the president and his agenda and truly believe in their bones that they’re not there for their own agenda. They’re there for what President Trump was elected to do.”
As these comments make clear, we are in the hands of a small group of political zealots, who want to return to an America that no longer exists. But their leader was elected by the American people in a free and open election. I am not sure that, as the polls suggest, that everyone who cast their vote for Trump remains committed to his policies, as articulated by Russel Vought.
The next few years will be difficult.
If you haven’t yet, you may want to check out Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”, and perhaps some related articles.