PBS went there.
In discussing the White House budget chief’s plans for massive federal worker cuts during the government shutdown, a contributor to the Friday show Washington Week with the Atlantic turned a joking comment from Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) about Russ Vought into a crude putdown.
Host Jeffrey Goldberg played Lee telling Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, “Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing this moment, since puberty. Russ Vought has a plan, and that plan is going to succeed in empowering, further empowering Trump. This is going to be the Democrats’ worst nightmare.”
When he turned to the Atlantic’s Ashley Parker for analysis, she ripped Vought’s goals in the government shutdown and said “cruelty” is the goal, and that “is squarely in his erogenous zone.”
From Friday’s Washington Week with the Atlantic on PBS:
Jeffrey Goldberg: Ashley, who is Russ Vought? What does he want?
Ashley Parker: I mean, he wants, as I mentioned at the beginning, sort of the deconstruction of the administrative state of the federal bureaucracy.
Goldberg: What are the ideological roots of this?
Parker: He’s — I mean, he’s incredibly conservative. He worked in Trump’s first admin. So, there are some people, including Stephen Miller, but there are not actually a ton of people who worked in the first Trump administration and then came back for a second tour of duty, but Russ Vought is one of them. And he came back, like the president himself, sort of stronger, bolder, more empowered, more creative with his interpretations of laws and what’s acceptable than ever. And he used his —
Goldberg: Russ Vought, faster and furiouser.
Parker: Yes.
Goldberg: Yes.
Parker: And he used those years out of power to basically create this document that you mentioned called Project 2025, that — it’s a dense, dense policy document. That is sort of his wheelhouse, his actual policy. And it tells sort of all the ways you can, first of all, just utterly minimize the government, tear away at it, tear it down, and use it to push through deeply conservative priorities.
And I also, based on my reporting, agree with Sen. Lee that this is squarely in his erogenous zone. And that when he said what he wants to do, I mean, to use a phrase that was popularized by one of our colleagues at the Atlantic, cruelty is the point. Now, that was in reference to Donald Trump.
But Russ Vought also, he said, “I want to terrorize the federal bureaucrats.” So, some of these choices, the fork-in-the-road email of should you choose to basically resign or risk losing your job, I mean, the way these things were structured were deeply humiliating and devastating and financially devastating to hundreds of thousands of people, and that was an intentional choice by people like Russ Vought.
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Brent Baker, the Steven P.J. Wood senior fellow and vice president for research and publications at the Media Research Center, explained our pick: “Parker encapsulates the Washington media establishment, which sees anyone who tries to reduce the size and role of government as driven by some sort of vicious delight in the misery of others. It can’t just be a simple policy disagreement. Conservatives must be discredited for having a nefarious agenda.”
Rating: FOUR out of FIVE screams.