Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, DC, hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.
Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term, expected the meeting would help his think tank secure a substantial contribution. For nearly two hours, he talked candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policy for former President Donald Trump, his expansive views on presidential power, his plans to restrict pornography and immigration, and his complaints that the GOP was too focused on “religious liberty” instead of “Christian nationalism.”
But the men Vought was talking to actually worked for a British journalism nonprofit and were secretly recording him the entire time.
The nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, published a video of the meeting on Thursday – offering a window into the thinking of one of the top policy minds of the MAGA movement, who’s been floated as a possible White House chief of staff.
Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
A Centre for Climate Reporting journalist, under the guise of the fake donor’s relative, also secretly recorded a separate conversation with one of Vought’s aides, who went into more detail about the process. Micah Meadowcroft, the research director for CRA, said the drafts the group was preparing would be provided to an incoming Trump administration in a way that would protect them from ever being publicly disclosed.
“It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period,” Meadowcroft said in the video – while noting that “you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” in order to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
He described Vought’s work preparing executive orders and policy playbooks as “the second phase” of Project 2025.
NOTE No mention of DOGE, which is interesting.
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