Russ Vought, Trump's nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget—and a Project 2025 author—believes we are living in a post-constitutional America and that any check on Trump's power would be illegitimate. And what's really scary is that Vought knows how the government works. Meanwhile, jihadi technocrats effortlessly took over Syria's second-largest city because Assad's protectors—Russia and Iran—are a bit distracted. Plus, Ukraine prepares for Trump. Michael Weiss and Georgetown's Thomas Zimmer join Tim Miller. show notes Zimmer's piece on Russ Vought Michael's piece on the fall of Aleppo Cathy Young's latest regarding Russia's war on Ukraine
Chapter 1: What challenges did the podcast face during recording?
Hey guys, we had a few technical and logistical difficulties on this show, but the show ends up turning out great. I think you're going to love it. You're going to learn a lot. We've got two very smart guests. As I mentioned yesterday, we were going to have Mark Hertling on to talk foreign policy, but we had a scheduling snafu, so we switched that out. He'll be on again soon.
And we've got Michael Weiss on to talk about foreign policy. And then we added to that Thomas Zimmer, who is a historian who looks at democracy around the world.
And he wrote this great post on Substack about Russell Vogt and kind of about the evolution of right-wing thought towards this more post-constitutional moment and why that is particularly scary and how that's evolved from the Tea Party days. Both guys are super smart. Then as a bonus, on top of that, on top of the scheduling snafu, the power went out here in New Orleans during the pandemic.
podcast at one point. We have very, very strong, the best infrastructure here in these red states. You take the good with the bad when you go to New Orleans. So you might hear a little difference in the audio quality between this and the interview. And then after the power goes out, the audio might change again. So Apologies. We did the best we could. The content, though, the content is A+.
So stick around for the content and appreciate you. We'll be seeing you on the other side with Thomas Zimmer. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to be here today with a new guest, visiting professor at Georgetown. He teaches 20th century U.S. and international history with a focus on transatlantic history of democracy and its discontents.
We have many discontents right now. He writes Democracy Americana on Substack and the co-host of a podcast, Is This Democracy? It's Thomas Zimmer. How are you doing, man? Welcome to the pod.
I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
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Chapter 2: Who are Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer?
As people might notice, you're German. Yes. That is not a Kansas accent. So I welcome you to our great country, land of the free, and our late constitutional republic. Welcome.
As of yet, still, I guess, right?
Still barely. Hanging on by a thread. I had reached out because you wrote a piece for your substack about Russ Vogt called Meet the Ideologue of the Post-Constitutional Right. Right. And in it, you had an insight that I think some people, particularly on the left, miss.
It's kind of like this distinction of kind of this evolution of the right and the change of how they kind of see the world now versus maybe how the Tea Party right did or how, you know, the religious right may have in the 80s. So I kind of want to talk about that in an academic way. But first, you're also going to go into Vogt's background.
So for people who aren't familiar with him, let's talk about Russ Vogt, this super nerd, and why... Well, you might not think that the office and management of budget director would be the person to be most concerned about, but you make a strong case for it. So talk to us about vote.
Yeah, I mean, in many ways, I think he's had a fairly normal, if you want to call that, career path as sort of a career operative. He had positions at almost every level inside and around the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. over the course of almost two decades. I think he's in his late 40s now, I believe. And he went from low-level staffer to high-level...
person who is pulling the strings in the background. He was a congressional aide, a part of the think tank and the lobbying machine, a campaigner, and then a member of the Trump administration. I think in terms of where he comes from, people used to see him as a fiscal hawk, that sort
Small government conservative who's looking for ways to, you know, cut the budget and maybe cut departments or whatever.
Cut red tape. Yeah, singing my language.
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Chapter 3: What is Russell Vought's role in the post-constitutional right?
But because in their understanding, the left, the progressives, the socialists, honestly, he uses all those terms interchangeably. It's all kind of the same. They have, in this understanding, completely taken over. They've taken over government. They've taken over all the major institutions of American life. They are in charge. And so now there is nothing left to conserve.
So this kind of a conservatism of limits, a conservatism of preserving and conserving, that's just not good enough anymore. What you need now is counter-revolution data. talk about this constantly. They call themselves counter-revolutionaries, right? So again, not at all in the idiom of conservatism.
So what he will say is basically, look, what we did 20 years ago was the right thing to do at that point, but because this leftist revolution has already happened and it has succeeded, now what we're left with Nothing short of a proper counter-revolution will now suffice to save the nation and save real America and whatever they talk about.
And I think that is how they make sense of their own trajectory and how they would tell you this is not just hypocrisy or it's not just there is no tension. It's just a reaction to the fact that the leftist revolution has succeeded. And so now they have adapted to that.
There's nothing left to conserve is really the key line there, right? And I think you wrote that they believe that the natural order, the natural order itself has been destroyed, right? And so if you put yourself in that view, right, where then you are the counter-revolutionary that needs to tear everything down. And in a weird way, they've positioned kind of the democratic establishment as
as the small c conservatives in the traditional sense not of like you know pro-life or whatever but in the sense of like conserving the existing uh institutions conserve conserving you know the the american republic right and like that they no longer see that as an important goal
And it's not just the Democratic establishment, it's the Republican establishment as well. And it's even like, Volt will tell you that he thinks what the Federalist Society is doing is completely misleading, and that's just not good enough. Because they also, that type of originalism...
It's also not good enough because it pretends we still have a constitutional order that you can preserve, but you can't. I think it's really important. He constantly says we're in a post-constitutional regime now. He doesn't just mean a kind of formalistic view of how, say, the different constitutional actors relate to each other.
It's this idea of a natural, quote unquote, natural order or divinely ordained order that was supposedly enshrined in the constitutional order, supposedly enshrined in the nation's founding documents. And that has been destroyed. So it's a much more fundamental, a much more, the stakes are so high, so existential for these people, right?
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Chapter 4: How has the Republican Party's ideology evolved?
And then his other favorite line on the favorite line of all these radicals is the hour is late to justify their actions. You know, it means the collapse of America is imminent.
This idea that there's so little time left is just pervasive in these circles. They will constantly say this. This is our last chance. This is the one chance we got now with Trump coming back to power. If we can't reverse course now and make this counter-revolution happen, it's not going to happen. I think the fact that he says Marxist, I think this was a lengthy post on ex-Twitter or something.
what you just quoted, that is so revealing. He really doesn't make any difference between socialism, Marxism, communism, liberalism, progressivism. It's all the same. It's all this kind of subversion of the quote-unquote natural order. You can't come to an agreement with those people. This is not
This is not someone who thinks about the political conflict in like democratic, small d democratic terms, right? Oh, you have a political opponent, you disagree with them and you kind of, you know, you kind of work it out. No, this is a fundamentally illegitimate, fundamentally anti-American project that he sees on the quote unquote left that doesn't need to be like bargained with.
It needs to be destroyed.
I want to play a clip from that secret video. The video of these undercover journalists, they're at the Center for Climate Reporting, where he talks about some of his plans, and then get into that. So let's listen to it. This is Russ Vogt talking to some undercover journalists.
80% of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. And we are working doggedly on that, whether it's
destroying their agency's notion of independence, that are independent from the president. Vote has also been preparing documents based on fringe legal theories, arguing the president has the power to use the military against protesters.
George Floyd obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration. We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has... you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military.
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Chapter 5: What is radical constitutionalism?
And he absolutely sees it as a kind of position where you can bend the entire machinery to the will of Donald Trump. And that is, I mean, to be clear, he really sees Donald Trump as a gift from God. That's how he describes him, literally a gift from God, someone who is precisely the right kind of radical figure to lead this counter-revolution.
He is entirely devoted to, again, bending the entire machine to Trump's will.
It's important to add to that because he also is a radical on cultural issues. He specifically says, I think in another clip from that interview which I didn't play, about reinvigorating Christian nationalism and infusing the administration with Christian nationalist views. I think the budget will also have views on that. This ties to your point about how they know it's unpopular.
There are ways that they... might be able to reduce access to contraception and change rules via HHS in ways that advance their religious and cultural agenda without having to pass unpopular bills through Congress.
This is another reason why vote is important or interesting, because he is competent, right? He knows how government works. And I think, you know, in the first Trump administration, there was this saying, oh, malevolence of tempered by incompetence, right? As we're once again, sort of looking at... What we're in for with the second Trump administration.
And we see a lot of fundamentally incompetent people because Trump insists on nominating them. But then on the other end of the spectrum, there's people like Russell Vogt who he knows how government works and he knows how to make it work. I mean, I think people tend to think that's of the extreme. Extremists, the nutty MAGA people are also incompetent.
And conversely, when you go up on the competence scale, you tend to go down on the nutty ideology scale. But that's, again, if you look at someone like this, this is a truly committed ideologue. He really means this kind of stuff. He's fundamentally not on board with any kind of ideology.
pluralistic vision of a democracy in which people have disagreements and they kind of, you know, try to come to some sort of, I don't know, consensus or understanding. No, he's not on board with that. He's a truly committed ideologue, but he's also very competent. And so these are the more, in that sense, I think these are the more dangerous people that we need to worry about.
It is tough to find people that are both competent and radical. That's what makes them so noteworthy. You had one other post on your subsector that I just wanted to talk about a little bit. It was from about a week or so ago now. And so the news has changed a little bit. But it was partially in response to President Biden's kind of smiling face.
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Chapter 6: How does Russell Vought plan to reshape government agencies?
This sort of signals normalcy to people, right? It signals to people it can't be that bad. If Trump really was, I don't know, a fascist, whatever, or like a fundamental acute threat to American democracy, Joe Biden and Jill Biden wouldn't be doing that, would they? So this is signaling normalcy. It signals a kind of accommodation to power, a kind of acquiescence.
And the best example, honestly, is the way the kind of Musk-Ramazwami joint, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has been treated, where you have sort of Democratic governors go on Fox News to say, oh, this is really interesting. We really need to do something about government waste or whatever, as if this was kind of a good faith effort at government reform. Come on.
It's not, right? It's not.
A real organization or something without a Paw Patrol logo.
Yes. Or you have Bernie Sanders, just a few days ago, praising Musk for supposedly pushing back against the military industrial complex. What are we doing here? This is the kind of legitimization and normalization of these people that we... No, we shouldn't do this. We should be very clear that this is not a department, first of all. It has no legal or constitutional authority.
And these people are not good faith actors actually concerned about, you know, government efficiency. So we shouldn't be sort of normalizing it in that way because we will at some point, right? I believe things could get potentially really bad in the Trump, in the second Trump administration. And at that point, we will need people, the American public to actually not look at Trump as,
as a totally normal president, a totally normal administration. But we will need them to be clear about, no, these are dangerous, fundamentally anti-democratic forces that are in charge of American government right now. And we need to think clearly and grapple seriously with how do you deal with that?
And I don't think the right way to deal with that is just signal normalcy and pretend, oh, we're in a normal transition.
Yeah, and particularly for no gain, is I guess what comes down to it for me. It's one thing if, you know, who the hell knows what the future holds. You get into the fall, and they really do want to cut government waste. There's some of the program that Bernie and Eli, they agree on, and you work together on a bill that goes through the normal process.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Vought's policies for the FBI?
I mean, there was a point at which it looked fairly credible that Damascus could fall to a consortium of different rebel groups, including those backed by the CIA, backed by some Gulf Arab states, backed by Turkey, and even backed by Jordan. CIA ended its program several years ago under the first Trump administration. We have no assets in place here except in one base in southern Syria, Al-Tanf.
So former Free Syrian Army rebels we recruited and are stationed there. And mostly they're there to kind of monitor things. Iranian shenanigans in that part of Syria. But we have no skin in the game except in eastern Syria where we are there strictly in a counterterrorism capacity to fight ISIS. So we have this group called the Syrian Democratic Forces.
They are led by Syrian Kurds that are aligned with the PKK, which is a Designated terror organization, but we like to pretend that it's not because they're really good at fighting ISIS.
What has happened now is a former al-Qaeda franchise, and I'll get into why we know it's former, which has spent the last several years creating a state apparatus in northwest Syria, Idlib province, and a state apparatus that does things like controls the traffic, electricity grids, had a COVID relief plan, jihadis who do sort of technocratic governance, believe it or not.
They have been champing at the bit to go on the offensive against Assad because they realize he has never been weaker than he is now. As I mentioned, his – not his strategic partner, his patron, the Iranians, are a busted flush more or less. The Russians are, as you may have noticed, preoccupied elsewhere.
And so they have been asking their patron, the Turks – the Turks control the border crossings in northern Syria and this – at least in this part of the country. They pay the salaries of HTS, the group I alluded to. They give them weapons. They have garrisons in Idlib, including with artillery that are there to protect HTS from Russian and Syrian onslaught.
The Turks have kept them at bay for several months saying, no, we don't want you to go on the offensive.
Can you talk to us about why the Turks are sponsoring them? Can we get just a brief aside on the Turkish perspective here?
So the Turks have absolutely no problem lying down with Sunni Islamist radicals, particularly those who will advance. Turkey has one overriding national security concern in Syria, and that is the aforementioned PKK. And for many years, since our counter ISIS mission got underway 2014, Turkey has been pissed off at the United States for partnering with
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Chapter 8: How is the Democratic establishment responding to Trump's rise?
Yeah, except to protect, again, the SDF in the East and ensure that ISIS remains down and out there.
The tie to Russia here, as you've alluded to a couple of times, obviously, that Russia being distracted, shall we say, in Ukraine, but also weakened, I think relates to the Assad weakening. So I'm curious your view just on the other news out of Russia recently is the crashing of the ruble and kind of their economic stability teetering.
And so I'm curious your view on just that, the domestic status in Russia, and as well as the status and the latest in the war in Ukraine.
Look, everybody I ask, how long can Russia sustain this war? Let's start with their losses in manpower and materiel. British intelligence estimate that over 700,000 Russian forces have been taken off the chessboard. This is... Unbelievable. Extraordinary. I mean, it dwarfs what they lost in Afghanistan, which, of course, helped precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And yet it's Russia has this sort of we have this conception of it like Mary Poppins handbag. You just keep pulling stuff out. You know, it's just a disproportionate level. Is it true?
You can never trust what's on the Chinese planet, but I saw some TikTok videos of the Russians conscripting people at clubs.
I have no doubt that's true. Also, they're offering them ever greater incentives in terms of salaries. You could live like a king on the money that you would get, except for the fact you're going to be sent to a front and turned into hamburger. To underscore their manpower problem, you don't go recruiting North Koreans if you're doing well and winning a war, right?
So 10,000 plus North Koreans now in Kursk, possibly already deployed to Ukraine. They're tricking Indians into becoming mercenaries for them. They've recruited Cubans. They've recruited now Houthis, according to the Wall Street Journal. So they're trying to throw as much into this meat grinder as possible. And their losses are staggering at the equipment level too. I mean, I've lost track.
There are people who study this stuff on an hourly basis, but it's, again, you would think that this is not sustainable. And yet, and yet, Putin doesn't care. They are pressing ahead in Donbass, making more gains in the last month, maybe two months, than they have since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
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