Trump is too stupid and narcissistic to even vaguely understand or care what this man is up to. But it’s where the real action is going to be taking place. If he gets away with it the federal government will be turned into the corrupt patronage system that the oligarchs have always dreamed of. I wrote this about Vought many months ago: Over the weekend, the Washington Post’s Beth Reinhard published an excellent article about one of Donald Trump’s most visionary advisers, an obscure figure named Russ Vought. He was a boring Republican bureaucrat who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 until Trump left office. He previously served as deputy director and acting director at OMB and prior to his stint in the White House worked at Heritage Action, the activist arm of the Heritage Foundation, where he was budget director for the Republican Study Group in Congress. In other words, for years Vought was a numbers cruncher providing far-right Republicans with their specious arguments about the government going broke and the need to drastically cut the safety net. Who knew that such a person also had big ideas about how to destroy the U.S. government from the inside? Vought is a self-described Christian nationalist who is spearheading plans for a rapid expansion of executive power under a theory he calls “radical constitutionalism” (an oxymoron, but it sure sounds snappy.) He has been working for a right-wing network called the Center for Renewing America, which is full of…