Fascism and Project 2025: Vought caught on tape boosting 'Christian nationalism,' mass deportations

Oh lordy, there are more tapes?

We've been going out of our way to contextualize the pro-Trump, pro-MAGA "Project 2025" for what it plainly is: a roadmap for turning the United States of America into a fascist, one-party state. The Heritage Foundation-led plan envisions their far-right movement becoming the nation's defacto rulers by purging government agencies of those perceived as disloyal to Donald Trump, replacing each of those officials with movement ideologues willing to follow not-entirely-legal orders. Corporate, government, and private speech deemed movement-contrary would be banned, stricken from government documents, and in some cases criminalized, with the movement declaring it should have the right to decide which authors get thrown in prison for their work.

It is all, to use the scientific term for such things, batshit nuts—but all of that is pulled directly from fascist movements. The pseudo-religious invocations of righteousness that justify new brutality; the overarching demand for national rebirth by purging the civilian population of the "enemies within," which invariably includes immigrants, educators, scientists, and declared sexual "deviants." The calls for gargantuan deportation programs. It's fascism with only the thinnest of Americanized veneers, and experts on the subject have lost their prior reluctance to saying so.

Now we've got yet another tape documenting those connections. It comes in the form of an undercover video form the Centre for Climate Reporting, which had its reporters pose as would-be conservative investors in order to arrange a meeting with Project 2025 co-author and former Trump Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought.

What did Vought have to say? Not a lot that we didn't already know. But it's something to see and hear him lay it out bluntly as if toppling American democracy to impose broad plans of wide-ranging viciousness was just another Tuesday's work. From Joan McCarter:

“This year has been predominantly now getting ready for a year five of a Trump administration,” Vought said. “80% of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of these bureaucracies.”

Vought is referring to the last pre-election stage of Project 2025, his authorship of a closely-guarded "secret" plan known as "Pillar IV." It's the "180-day playbook" in which Vought describes the precise mechanisms a new Trump administration should use to evade the many, many federal laws that prohibit large-scale ideological purges and other plainly illegal movement plans. The reason for secrecy is that the plan is said to rely heavily on acting so swiftly that the courts don't have time to stop each act before each becomes a fait accompli—an it doesn't matter if it's illegal if the president can hand out pardons before anyone else can act plan.

“Not just, ‘Hey, we want to cut spending.’ … These are the directives on how we would go about doing it,” Vought explained. “And then you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation. What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?’” he continued. “Like, there's an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you're not, you’re having to scramble to do that later on.” [...]

“It's a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period, but not as part of the transition. Because obviously, you want as little of it to be FOIA-able … as possible,” [Vought aide Micah Meadowcroft] said, referring to the Freedom of Information Act, which allows anyone to request copies of official government documents. “So yeah, the goal is to familiarize all the transition team people with these plans. But you don't actually send them to their work emails. Because then, you know … they're FOIA-able.”

Well, now we know they're at least bright enough to not take notes on a criminal conspiracy. Sort of. Okay, they might take notes, but they know enough to not send them to your work address.

There's several things that especially stand out, as Vought boasts of his successes in turning "critical race theory" into one of the dominant conservative conspiracy theories and his continued closeness to Donald Trump. The flat-out embrace of Christian nationalism is the first.

"It’s a very revealing window into how Vought talks about it all in private. When he says, ‘I think you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism,’ that validates a lot of the reporting that TPM has been doing about the undercurrents informing Project 2025," writes Talking Points Memo's David Kurtz.

Vought's more than willing to go on about that topic, which is one of the reasons Donald Trump's campaign advisers have repeatedly warned him to shut his damn piehole until the election is over: From CNN's report:

In the conservative movement, “we’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” Vought argued – an idea he’s also talked about publicly. “Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”

He said that conservatives should push to have debates over whether to allow mosques to be built in America’s downtowns, and whether Christian immigrants should be prioritized over those of other faiths – ideas that run contrary to First Amendment protections.

“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” Vought added later. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”

I mean he just will not shut up:

And in discussing the protests and riots around the US in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Vought said that the president had the ability to use the military to restore order.

I think it may be be entirely beyond his abilities to shut up:

Vought added that the unrest following Floyd’s death “obviously was not about race.”

“It was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he claimed.

It's a pattern in the far-right. JD Vance said that the protests were Ishityounot funded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos to destroy small businesses; no matter what Black Americans say they're protesting about, the freaks in Donald Trump's closest orbits insist that no, Black Americans weren't really angry about that thing, they were just being used by conservatism's secret enemies. And that's in fact how Trump's fascist base dismisses all public anger against them. None of it's real, they say. It's all a conspiracy by their enemies.

The second especially noticeable thing from these tapes is that for Vought and the rest of the Heritage Foundation's assembled luminaries, pursuing Holocaust-scale mass deportations of immigrants does indeed appear to be one of their first-180-days plans. Repeating from above:

“Not just, ‘Hey, we want to cut spending.’ … These are the directives on how we would go about doing it,” Vought explained. “And then you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation. What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?’” he continued. “Like, there's an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you're not, you’re having to scramble to do that later on.”

That "Pillar IV" specifically includes the swift launch of the mass deportation drive, according to the man tasked with writing it, suggests that it's one of the projects that will need to be done as part of that initial scramble to evade law and oversight by simply out-memo-ing the rest of government in order to jump-start the program before courts can step in. That certainly sounds like the sort of quasi-legal fascist attack that previous fascist governments have pursued.

If you don't want to be called a Nazi, a good start might be to avoid borrowing directly from their playbook. Don't call yourself a "Christian nationalist," one of the hoariest euphemisms for violent fascism around. Don't organize plans for deporting millions of people, and especially don't do it in such a manner as to intentionally thwart the multitude of laws that previously stood in your way.

I'm as thrilled as everyone else that the shockingly competent Democratic Party switch to nominating Kamala Harris as their new presidential candidate, but I still don't see any outcome here that doesn't result in a now fully fascist Republican Party declaring that the election's results were "rigged," the proof doesn't matter, and therefore Donald Not-Yet-In-Prison-Trump is the "real" winner and will be installed by force. What happens after that is anyone's guess, but it's important to realize that these people are not above that. They've adopted every other fascist belief they've come into contact with; nobody can plausibly say at this point that they'd rebuff that one. They're already laying the groundwork to try.