Of lux planes, executives' soft corruption and the vision behind the man
- sciart0
- May 16
- 1 min read
Excerpt from 2nd link: " The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed “Big Balls” whom he’d hired to help slash the government. The performance had a certain improvised quality—pink slips dispersed and then hastily withdrawn, entire agencies mothballed overnight—and after a while, it started to feel like a torqued-up sequel to Trump’s first term: governance replaced by chaos and trolling.
But that version of the story misses a key character: Russell Vought.
Behind all the DOGE pyrotechnics, Vought—who serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget—is working methodically to advance a sophisticated ideological project decades in the making.
If Musk is moving fast and breaking things, as the Silicon Valley dictum goes, Vought is taking the shattered pieces of the federal government and reassembling them into a radically new constitutional order.
“I’m not going to say it’s a misdirection play, but they’re the trauma-inducing shock troops,” Steve Bannon, who worked with Vought during Trump’s first term and remains in touch with him, told me of DOGE. “Russ has got a vision. He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer.”