“Russputin” and the Tsar.

It’s time to name names. To talk about how they’re going to pull off the destruction of the administrative state and what the seeds of our rebellion look and sound like. We have a small part to play in all of this and it’s clear what it is. To help create the shared language of resistance. So today we’re identifying the most dangerous man in America that no one is talking about, the tool he is going to use to dismantle government agencies and what we can learn from three young Republicans who helped the GOP rise from the ashes of the Obama years.

We begin with a passage from an essay by Marisa Chappell titled, “The State, Social Provision, and American Experiments in Democratic Engagement,” published in a compendium called Democracy and the Welfare State.

“In the twenty-first century, some progressive organizers in the United States are once again pursuing majority strategies as the 2008 Great Recession and its aftermath continue to create hardship across a broad range of Americans. Yet in some ways the nation’s political identities are even more fragmented today than they were in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is true that working-class white Americans have experienced significant downward mobility and that the middle class faces rising student debt, precarious employment, and an unstable housing market. In fact, the widespread impact of welfare-state retrenchment—the gradual erosion of the social provisions that underwrote middle-class economic security in the last century-would seem to offer a propitious moment for cross-class, multiracial progressive organizing. But one need only observe the surprising political popularity of Donald Trump—a billionaire developer who promises to bring manufacturing jobs back for the white working class and rid the nation of “illegal immigrants” and Muslims—to see that the racialized and class-stratified political identities built by the New Deal/Cold War remain stubbornly powerful and continue to shape political responses to economic crisis.

An understanding of the sources and impact of these different political identities must be a central part of the conversation if the political left is to build a strong, productive, and egalitarian movement for greater economic democracy.”

Chapter One:The Rebel Alliance

There are show horses…

The onslaught of MAGA show horse appointments continues as Trump’s cabinet nears pre-confirmation completion. While it may not exactly land as is after it passes through the Senate, it’s probably a close approximation of the next two years of leadership at a minimum. But it will be leadership in optics only. The real work will be done behind the scenes and it’s already very much in progress.

And there are workhorses.

The workhorses should be our focus moving forward. That’s not to say this show horse cabinet isn’t dangerous. There are real, real beauties in there. Just understand that they’re not there to do the actual job. That’s the mistake Trump made in the first term. While claiming he was draining the swamp, he actually proposed a mix of ultra conservative GOP legislators, major donors, career bureaucrats and private industry executives. It was an unwieldy crew in an undisciplined White House with no discernible strategy to move the country in any particular direction. Everything was literally by the seat of the pants and the Trump White House ran on pure chaos much in the tradition of Andrew Jackson, seemingly Trump’s only political hero.

With two notable exceptions in Russell Vought and John Ratcliffe, the show horse appointments have little background in the agencies they’re being tapped to lead. And that’s the point. They’re there for press conferences and grandstanding only. Mere distractions. It’s the sub-cabinet level leadership positions that we’ll need to be mindful of in order to ascertain how effective Trump 2.0 will be in tearing down the administrative state and realizing the totality of Project 2025.

In my mind, the trajectory of this next administration will be easy to follow. What’s less clear right now is how the left rebuilds and gathers momentum during this term. Even a midterm rebuke of Trump policies will be too little too late to stop the bleeding as they have all the pieces lined up to dismantle key agencies and services. They have an obsequious majority in both houses of Congress and have pretty much sewn up the federal judiciary. And not only do they have multiple plans-in-waiting, they have a prescription to bring them all to fruition that just might work.

As Chappell notes in this passage, an understanding of the sources and impacts of political identities must be understood if the left is to build a productive movement. But as the recent election illustrated, the left has been neutered and silenced by a liberal establishment obsessed with chasing a manufactured version of the right wing in this country. The Harris campaign was simply the grossest misreading of the circumstances to date.

To be fair to the Democratic establishment—something I’m usually loath to do—Trump’s misdeeds are rather unbelievable. So egregious are his behavior and record that I completely understand the temptation to run a campaign in opposition to Trump, the individual. There is no historical corollary in the United States to Donald Trump, a man so preposterously corrupt and disgusting that it defies reason that a majority of the nation would ask him back for a second turn at the wheel. But Trump is the biggest show horse on the stage. The easy target. A man filled with animus, driven by power and directed toward revenge. A felon. A scoundrel. A racist. And a pig.

But as we’ve said many times before, politics is a reflection of sentiment not aspiration. Aspiration is packaging. Like hope and change. The DNC believed that Obama’s hope and change narrative was what delivered his first term mandate. Hence the theme of joy this time around. It wasn’t. It was the fear and devastation wrought by the financial crisis that drove the electorate to throw out the GOP. And it’s in the GOP’s response to this drubbing that we can find a solution.

So let’s go back to that moment in time to see what we can glean from their resistance strategy before talking about how the next two years will be cataclysmic for the American people.

Chapter Two: The Fetal Position.

You’ll recall that it was the trio of GOP House Representatives that referred to themselves as “The Young Guns” who put the GOP back on track and tapped into the white working class rage exemplified by the burgeoning Tea Party movement. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy modeled their approach in the fashion of Newt Gingrich when Gingrich effectively ran the policy agenda of the Clinton administration. If this period is a little fuzzy to you, check out our series on the Clinton years to understand how this came to be.

Long story short, Bill Clinton ran to the right of the GOP in terms of a domestic economic agenda then spent eight years moving further and further right to steal Gingrich’s thunder; playing directly into Newt’s hands and delivering on the promise of his Contract with America. The result was an administration that should now be considered the pinnacle of the neoliberal free market experiment that led to widening inequality, mass incarceration of Black Americans, destruction of the welfare state and criminalization of migrants.

Fast forward to the early days of the Obama administration and several GOP leaders were lamenting the Bush years, with many believing that the GOP might never again gain control of the White House. The Young Guns weren’t having it.

They set about to divide and conquer. McCarthy would be the inside man due to his close relationship to House Minority Leader John Boehner, who was reared at the knee of Gingrich. Paul Ryan would be the face of the group with his earnest blue eyes and projection of capability and empathy. But it was Cantor who had the plan.

In the first meeting of the GOP House caucus after Obama’s landslide victory, Cantor dismissed the party hacks and policy wonks. In their place he invited pollsters to attend. His message to them was clear: find out what people are mad about. The answer was just as clear: the economy. The masses had lost fortunes and a generation of workers were destined to make less than their parents did, a first in America. He didn’t ask who they were mad at. Just what they were mad about. Then they got to work.

He chastened the dejected House members and told them to “get out of the fetal position” and from that day forward, they would embody the opposition. Every proposal would be met with defiance and they would indignantly take to the airwaves on Fox to denigrate the incoming president. Every proposal would be treated as an affront to the masses and a giveaway to the coastal elites.

Over in the Senate, they had a willing partner in Mitch McConnell who had his own scores to settle with Harry Reid, who effectively taught McConnell how to leverage the filibuster to his advantage in the minority. As you may recall, this is when he uttered the now infamous phrase that his sole mission was to make Obama a one-term president.

I think it’s fair to say the old turtle would prove to be perhaps the most wiley and pernicious minority leader in Senate history.

However, the fallout from the financial crisis, Bush’s mishandling of the economy, and unpopular wars abroad were still too tangibly Bush’s fault to deny Obama a second term. But they did succeed in other ways. First off, they halved the popular vote lead in the subsequent election. But more importantly, they scuttled most of Obama’s domestic agenda outside of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and in doing so helped slow down the recovery.

Not only did the painfully slow recovery pave the way for a Donald Trump victory in 2016—with nearly everyone in the political class misreading the tea leaves—but they succeeded in painting Obama’s signature domestic achievement as a complete and utter failure. So much so that nearly 15 years later, Republican voters still think that Obamacare is something other than the ACA.

But the lesson here isn’t that the Democratic Party needs to become the party of no. We will need more than a wall of legislative and punditry opposition to Trump’s populism. The lesson here is that the Young Guns tapped into something more visceral: White working class rage. In coded and not-so-coded language they were able to exploit Obama’s Ivy League education and inner city upbringing to portray him as an elitist. Even more offensive to the GOP base was that he was a Black elitist, a “product of affirmative action.” The tan suit. Fan of arugula. Vacations on Martha’s Vineyard. The black tie dinners. Kennedy Center honors. While Democrats were heaping praise on Obama for having a common touch, the working class increasingly saw him as out of touch.

If we are to mount an offensive it has to be targeted. They’re going to throw the kitchen sink at us and it will be the stuff of nightmares.

Mass deportations and imprisonments.

Targeting journalists and dissidents.

Stripping away healthcare coverage provisions.

Defunding core services we’ve come to rely upon.

And they’re going to taunt us each step of the way, draw us into multiple fights and disorient us.

In response, everything we do must be steeped in populist economic rage to paint them as out of touch monsters. Every single thing they unleash on us must be reframed as an economic issue. Forget the moral and ethical outrage. Get out of the fetal position, like Eric Cantor told the House GOP. Get mad but stay focused.

Chapter Three: Russputin, Mad Cow and the 350 Club

If you include Musk and Ramaswamy in the mix, the combined net worth of Trump’s proposed cabinet is $350 billion. So call it the $350 billion boys club. Or the 350 Club. Maybe the Boy Luck Club. We have to make something stick. Suggestions are welcome.

Start referring to RFK as ‘Mad Cow Kennedy’ to remind people that he’s going to fuck with our food supply. Don’t call them deplorables, call them deductibles. Because your insurance premiums and deductibles are about to skyrocket.

Cue Max Rant in 3…2…1…

Everything this administration intends to do is to further separate the masses from their wealth. They’ll take away your healthcare and tell you they’re giving you options, choice, freedom. That they’re just taking us back to a simpler Ron Paul vision of healthcare when folks looked out for one another, with country doctors and roadside abortions and all that jazz.

When it’s too costly to deport millions, they’ll lock up immigrants until the private prisons are bursting at the seams along with their profit margins. Because American jobs are for real Americans who came here the right way, whatever the fuck that means. And when there’s no one at the drive-through window to take your order, no one to watch your kids in daycare you can barely afford, and no nurses to take care of your mee-maw and pop-pop, they’ll do what they always do—blame the working class for being too lazy to do the menial jobs that never paid enough in the first place.

When your kids graduate high school with a third grade education and zero prospects in a recklessly rolled out AI-driven job market, at least they’ll be able to recite the 10 Commandments and tell you dinosaurs aren’t real. As the jobless rate rises and income taxes decline, so too will property and sales taxes because, you see, the tricky thing about state and local governments is that they’re required to balance their budgets. They use a mixture of taxes and fees to raise revenues and if you’re in one of the 41 states that collect income tax, when that declines due to high unemployment it’s a double whammy; they have to raise revenue in other places to pay their bills, which will also increase because they share in the unemployment insurance burden.

And, heck, with climate disasters on the rise and the impending shut down of FEMA and all federal disaster response funding, it will fall on those very same states to shell out billions of dollars to repair our busted infrastructure and pay out premiums to state guaranteed insurance funds because the private insurance companies will have pulled up stakes long ago.

But at least we’ll be energy independent. Maybe ol’ Mad Cow Kennedy can whip up a new food pyramid and show us how to make soup with fracked gas and crude oil. Hope it’s alphabet soup because that’s the closest your kids are going to get to a spelling lesson once the Department of Education is defunded.

You see, that’s the hell of this whole thing. Democrats, bless their hearts, know a bit more about balance and how to keep the carrot seemingly within reach of the working class. Republicans aren’t even pretending. They’re going to take it all. The difference between the beta version of Trump and this new release is preparedness, and the best thing I can tell you about that is there will be someone to blame.

Russell Vought, who will heretofore be referred to as Russputin. Unf*ckers, this is our guy. We need to spread his name like fucking wildfire like we did for uncle fucknugget himself.

For any newbies, I’m talking about Milton Friedman.

Only worse. It’s like James Buchanan and Milton Friedman had a baby. Like his nickname-sake, Russ Vought, our Russputin, is the man in the tsar’s ear. His grimy fingerprints all over Project 2025. Now that the administration has drafted several co-authors and admitted this was the plan all along, people are finally waking up to the reality of the plan. Here’s the thing, the public document is merely the opening salvo designed to focus our attention on the broader vision. Behind the scenes, Russputin’s minions have been working diligently on individual policy implementation plans and pieces of legislation so they can be instituted day one of Trump’s second term.

How do you know this?

Because an undercover European media outlet spoke to Russputin and a bunch of his minions and they copped to it. Bragged about it even. Here’s the important thing about this guy and his position in the administration. Vought is no dummy and he’s done this job before. He was the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director at the very end of Trump’s first term so he’s familiar with the office and its powers. The OMB is the nucleus of the nation’s economic cell. It’s not as sexy as the Federal Reserve or the Treasury, but it’s the real money and budget manager of the country that works at the behest of the chief executive but on behalf of Congress.

The OMB also has the authority to move money around within reason—to limit spending in certain areas to increase it in others—so long as these moves don’t undermine the intention of the funds and efficacy of the spending. However—and this is a big “however”—Russputin spent most of his time the past couple of years creating a plan to circumvent Congress in the budget process in order to consolidate budget authority within the executive branch.

There are shades of Nixon to this whole affair, in so many ways. First, procedurally. You see, for the past few years since leaving the first Trump administration, Russputin has been touting the repeal of a Nixon era piece of legislation called Impoundment. Prior to Nixon there were certain norms that the executive branch followed when it came to appropriations. Essentially, once Congress approved a budget the necessary funds were provisioned to carry it out. But Nixon went off the rails and held back funding for key budget items that he personally despised under the power of “impoundment.” As ProPublica writes,

“President Richard Nixon took impoundment to a new extreme, wielding the concept to gut billions of dollars from programs he simply opposed, such as highway improvements, water treatment, drug rehabilitation and disaster relief for farmers. He faced overwhelming pushback both from Congress and in the courts.”

To ensure that this never happened again, in 1974 Congress passed the Budget and Impoundment Control Act. When Russputin left the Trump administration he founded the Center for Renewing America, a conservative Christian think tank that takes aim at things like Critical Race Theory and Immigration and supports economic policies such as a Balanced Budget Amendment.

The central thesis of the Russputin’s think tank is that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, despite multiple attempts to dismantle it that failed in federal court. Russputin believes that Trump has the legitimate authority to override the act to divert funding away from the Biden budget for 2025 as well as the ability to simply shutter federal agencies without seeking Congressional approval. It’s a bold stance given the legislative and judicial history of upholding the act over the years. But Russputin is banking on one crucial difference between now and all the other attempts to repeal this provision: The complete control of Congress and the higher courts.

By the time any appeals reach the conservative Supreme Court, where it certainly stands a chance of going Trump’s way, the damage would theoretically be done because they’ve packed so many of the higher courts with conservative justices thanks to the hard work of none other than Leonard Leo. In other words, good luck getting an injunction on these actions in time to save the country.

This is their government now. Russputin and Leo are the ones in charge.They are the workhorses. Look no further. Do not pass go or collect your unemployment check. They’ve seized every property on the board, built hotels and will send you the fuck to jail if you can’t pay your debt.

The crazy thing about all of it is that Project 2025 is both the most assiduously planned document and the most shortsighted. It’s going to work. They’re going to tear it all down and there’s little we can do about it. The only question is what form our resistance will take when everyone realizes what they’ve done.

Like Nixon, they’re going to run this economy so fucking hot in a short period of time through a combination of tax cuts and tarrifs it will appear to be working, until it collapses.

Like Kissinger and Nixon, Russputin and Ratcliffe will be running a shadow military operation to throw the Middle East into even more chaos, which will create massive volatility in the energy markets. That’s why Project 2025 specifically calls for the CIA and the executive branch to run autonomously without operational oversight from Congress.

And like Nixon, this will inevitably throw the global economy into utter chaos resulting in inflation and high unemployment. In other words, stagflation.

You know, we treat these conditions like ancient history but it’s only 50 years ago.

Long enough to forget how it felt, but recent enough that we should fucking know better.

There’s a lot more to come on Russputin, Leo and Ratcliffe. In the meantime, here are the key takeaways for us.

Talk about Russell Vought. Refer to him as Russputin and perhaps his tenure will end as ingloriously as the original. Don’t forget, it was mere months after his expulsion, and then death, that the Russian Revolution took hold.

In that spirit, remember that if the founders of the neoliberal movement modeled their revolution on Lenin’s theory of a vanguard, so can we.

Ignore the show horses and reframe everything they throw at us into an economic inequality issue.

Talk about the elitism of the $350 billion club cabinet. Come up with a better name if you like. Maybe the Boy Luck Club or something silly that sticks. Don’t call them deplorables, call them deductibles. Refer to RFK as Mad Cow Kennedy.

We have a small role to play in all of this but it’s an important one; to create a shared language that reframes the narrative.

It’s time for pitchforks and to remember that we are the 99%.

Here endeth the lesson.

Image Source

• Dcwonkywonk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.