—Russell Vought, May 2023.
—Russell Vought, July 2024.
—Russell Vought, July 2024
“And we cut the money off. And it was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.”
“The Consumer Financial Protection Act requires the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to transfer each quarter an “amount determined by the Director to be reasonably necessary” for the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection to carry out its authorities under law….
—Russell Vought (in his capacity as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), February 2025.
—Russell Vought, June 2017.
Colson was the most viciously partisan member of President Richard Nixon’s White House team. He described himself as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and hung a sign in his house that said “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Colson also supposedly said he would run over his own grandmother to elect Richard Nixon (though that turned out to be a slight embellishment on what someone else said about Colson). Inevitably, Colson was the first Nixon aide to go to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal (for obstructing justice).
In Colson’s day, conservatives believed you could be a hatchet man or you could commit yourself wholeheartedly to Jesus Christ, but you couldn’t do both at the same time. How quaint! Today’s generation of conservatives rejects that false choice, none so vehemently as Vought.
Christian nationalists are like that. Vought explained a couple of years ago what “Christian nationalism” means in describing the policies of his Center for Renewing America:
Vought believes in the First Amendment’s injunction that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” but only because it’s obvious to him that America already has an established religion, and it’s Christianity. Vought’s God has no patience with infidels. “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology,” Vought has written. “They do not know God because they rejected Jesus Christ his son and they stand condemned.” In Vought’s view, “We’ve been a little too libertarian on the right.”
During the Biden years, in a Newsweek op-ed, Vought wrote an essay defending Christian nationalism against its critics:
Vought’s God isn’t going to bend your ear with a lot of sentimental nonsense about the least among us. Maybe He did with Chuck Colson, but He doesn’t with Russell Vought. Instead, the Lord wishes to abolish the Agency for International Development, of which Secretary of State Marco Rubio named Vought acting administrator so he could finish the damned thing off. Eliminating USAID was billed as a DOGE accomplishment, but (as I observed in June) Vought was Elon Musk’s DOGE puppetmaster. Killing off the agency was Vought’s project, not Musk’s.
Last month I noted that the Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols projected that Trump’s AID cuts would cause the deaths of about 640,000 people, 430,000 of them children. Since then Nichols has revised upward her estimated number of deaths by about 38,000. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
As with USAID, Vought is CFPB’s acting administrator. In November, Vought ordered what’s left of the CFPB to recite before every examination of a financial institution a “humility pledge” promising “to work collaboratively,” to give “advance notice of scheduled examinations,” to encourage “self-reporting,” and to avoid enforcement actions wherever possible. As The New York Times’s Stacy Cowley pointed out, the pledge was “mostly symbolic” because Vought had already barred CFPB examiners from initiating new investigations and to close out the old ones.
To this bystander, the only identifiably Christian aspect to Vought’s worldview is its apocalyptic framing. Here lies my way and there lies (as mom taught) the way of sin, sickness, disease and anarchy. Other conservatives judge the federal bureaucracy an inconvenient obstacle to Trump’s deregulatory agenda. To Vought, it’s a “cartel working behind closed doors.” Close your eyes and you can almost see the brimstone, pentagrams, and sabbatic goats. Vought doesn’t aspire merely to hold permanent Washington at bay; he wants “to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations.” Every battle is Armageddon.
A logical Christian view of Donald Trump is that he is not a good man. Our judicial system has ruled him a fraudster and a sexual abuser. He is using his presidency to make himself rich in multiple ways. He is taking medical care away from lower-income people. He is committing murder in the Caribbean. He mocks handicapped people, blames the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner on the film director’s own “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” makes excuses for white supremacists, and sometimes gives them jobs. Is there a Christian mother alive who wants her son to grow up to be like Donald Trump? Nobody, Christianity tells us, is beyond redemption if appropriately contrite, but Trump doesn’t do contrition. Yet Vought said last year: “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country…. That is nothing more than a gift of God.”
Like Chuck Colson, Vought would run over his own grandmother to serve his president. But unlike Colson, Vought would also do it to please his Creator. If there’s an afterlife, Colson’s wondering why in hell he never thought of that.
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