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.

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

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