Shortly after the 2022 midterm elections, Russell Vought — a former director of Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget — sat down in a makeshift podcasting studio in Matt Gaetz’s Longworth office and aired his grievances with House Republicans.
Trim and bearded, wearing a blue-and-white checked shirt and tortoiseshell glasses, Vought explained that the problem with people like Kevin McCarthy was that they had been too afraid of brinkmanship to leverage the party’s potential power on Capitol Hill. They were too hesitant to verge on blowing the debt ceiling, and too scared to threaten a government shutdown to extract the changes necessary to course-correct the country. The problem, in Vought’s view, was not that Republicans’ cantankerous infighting had gone too far, but that it hadn’t gone far enough.
“I loved working for Donald Trump because he ate conflict and risk for breakfast,” Vought said on the podcast, and he insisted that Republicans on the Hill needed to be willing to do the same. “When you fight, you become more powerful.”