Decades ago, in peak Cold War days, Soviet chess whiz Garry Kasparov noticed that his rival, Anatoly Karpov, had a paralyzing fear. Karpov, who was then the world champion, couldn’t bear to make mistakes. He’d avoid even the slightest risk if he thought it might lead to a blunder. So Kasparov exploited Karpov’s conservatism. At the 1985 championship, he drove Karpov into a defensive crouch, beat him, and took the title.
As chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative, Kasparov, now a journalist and an anti-Putin political activist, continues to pinpoint his opponents’ fears and spell out how to exploit them. He maintains that President Trump, like other autocrats, most fears democracy. It’s that anxiety that puts torque on everything he does.
Indeed, this presidential phobia makes headlines every day. Trump spends so much time and treasure prosecuting his fear of democracy—trying to crush dissent, flex as a massively incontinent monarch, fix elections, and disable rivals, including anyone who might open the Epstein files—that he neglects his stated goals. He hasn’t, after all, occupied Canada or Greenland. He hasn’t even wrapped Project 2025.
Which brings us to Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025, the administration’s blueprint for dismantling the federal government. As keeper of the administration’s Christian nationalist agenda, Vought, whom the media reliably describes as a “wrecking ball,” preens like he’s Blue Öyster Cult in 1975. But he’s afraid. It’s Q4, and 2025 was supposed to be his year. What he fears most is delays.
Vought came in hot at first, pulling the strings for Elon Musk’s helter-skelter Department of Government Efficiency and getting Trump to sign a record-breaking 142 executive orders in 100 days. During those heady shock-and-awe days, Curtis Yarvin, the fog-machine philosophe of the far right, told Politico he was jazzed about Vought’s rabid willingness to “impound” money from Congress, thereby usurping its power of the purse.
Vought has done his share of impounding, but he has lost Musk as a frontman, and the DOGE fever broke long ago. For all the shrieking and posing, Musk’s heavy-metal shtick managed to cut from the federal budget only about 5 percent of the $1 trillion in cuts that the big man promised.
Since then, Vought, with his stealthier tactics, has proven unable to fully demolish the rule of law. Of the 470 legal challenges to the Trump administration, a significant number have been filed against DOGE and OMB. Since April, Trump has signed only 66 EOs—and only one so far this month. Project 2025 has achieved fewer than half of its objectives.
As the year has worn on, Trump’s neurotic preoccupations have slowed Vought’s agenda. Having kicked off the shutdown vowing at last to slash jobs with abandon, Vought has gotten bogged down once again by judges who keep halting the layoffs in response to union lawsuits. Vought has also been busy catering to the big-spending president who insists Vought scramble to find funding for his pet projects, including the popular nutrition program WIC, which would hurt Trump politically if it were cut. All of this maneuvering is so unconstitutional and demanding for Vought that it’s distracting from—and working against—his efforts to end programs like WIC as too woke.
Significantly, Vought is working from a thesis he knows is rickety. Undergirding his mission is his conviction that the American people have been suffocated by a liberal “cartel” that produces, as Vought wrote in 2023, “the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.” On this logic, once the woke cartel is gone, Vought’s American everymen (he sometimes calls us “wagon pullers”) will breathe free, toss our hats in the air, and embrace Trump as our king.
But this liberation-by-king keeps not happening in America. Instead, six in 10 Americans blame Republicans for the shutdown, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Trump’s approval rating remains solidly underwater.
Yarvin, for his part, believes that if democracy were going to yield to Trumpocracy, it would have happened already. He’s now demoralized by the administration’s unwillingness to act more quickly—or violently—to wipe out democracy and the rule of law altogether. Earlier this month, he wrote dejectedly on his blog that the Trump administration is now “failing because it deserves to fail.”
Trump has spent too much energy “getting rid of one liberal judge,” Yarvin complained, when he should have been “getting rid of the whole legal system” and “the whole philosophy of government.” Yarvin is now so panicked about Democratic victory in Congress and the coming liberal vengeance that he has plans to leave the country. The moment for the Dark Enlightenment revolution has passed.
Into the vacuum has indeed poured MAGA’s opposition. The delays in Vought’s project have opened up avenues of attack by the administration’s opponents, whose numbers are now huge: Democrats, progressives, mass mobilizations of protesters, and rank-and-file Trump disapprovers, meaning at least 50 percent of us. More surprisingly, GOP showfolk are now gunning for the administration. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene won’t stop hammering the Republican Party.
On Tuesday, Asawin Suebsaeng reported in Zeteo that, last year, Trump talked obsessively about getting Vought laid at Mar-a-Lago. According to Suebsaeng’s source, “Trump spoke to Vought … about the ‘gorgeous’ and ‘beautiful ladies’ who roam Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, so often that it ‘weirded out’ some of his advisers.” So Vought, the Christian nationalist, was entertaining sex-coaching by the onetime best friend of Jeffrey Epstein? These would-be revolutionaries keep getting distracted. No wonder Yarvin considers their effort to checkmate democracy a bust.
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