JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Well, let's go to this - - we come back to this and let's talk about Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Here, I want you to listen to Senator Mike Lee and then Speaker Johnson discussing Russ Vought and what he's aiming for.

SEN.

MIKE LEE (R-UT): Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing this moment since puberty.

Russ Vought has a plan, and that plan is going to succeed in empowering, further empowering Trump.

This is going to be the Democrats' worst nightmare.

REP.

MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA): Russ takes no pleasure in this.

Russ wants to see a smaller, more efficient, more lean, effective federal government, as we do, but he doesn't want people to lose jobs.

He doesn't want to do that, but he has -- that's his responsibility.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I can only speak for myself.

Look, puberty was a long time ago for me, but I remember when I was undergoing puberty, I wanted to slash the workforce at Medicare and Medicaid myself, personally.

I know that was my big thing.

But, all right, so this is a guy who wrote -- a key architect of Project 2025.

Something that was disavowed by the president during the campaign and now he's embracing it again.

Andrew, I'll stay with you just for a minute.

Russ Vought, what is motivating him here?

And I guess the pertinent question is, how important is he actually in this drama?

ANDREW DESIDERIO: He's really a central player, probably the central player in the executive branch, aside from the president himself.

He has an immense amount of power.

And Senator Lee is correct that this is something that Mike -- that Russ Vought has wanted to do for a very long time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But can you adjudicate?

Is he getting pleasure from it or is he not getting pleasure from it?

ANDREW DESIDERIO: I think he's definitely getting pleasure from it.

Because I think we've seen even before the shutdown, they were canceling projects, they were rescinding funding, right?

And that's part of what Democrats are saying in response to this, you know, this targeting of blue states, is that, yes, it's bad, but he's been doing it whether we're in a shutdown or not.

And that is part of actually what's motivating Democrats to fight harder right now because their whole view right now is why would we vote to fund the government, they say, some of them say it's Trump's government, which is being so lawless and doing so many terrible things, and then they're going back on these deals that we strike here on Capitol Hill?

I mean, we haven't seen that before where there's a bipartisan deal reached on Capitol Hill and the administration just completely either ignores it or tries to rip it apart.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Ashley, who is Russ Vought?

What does he want?

ASHLEY PARKER: I mean, he wants, as I mentioned in at the beginning, sort of the deconstruction of the administrative state of the federal bureaucracy.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What are the ideological roots of this?

ASHLEY PARKER: He's -- I mean, he's incredibly conservative.

He worked in Trump's first admin.

So, there are some people, including Stephen Miller, but there are not actually a ton of people who worked in the first Trump administration and then came back for a second tour of duty, but Russ Vought is one of them.

And he came back, like the president himself, sort of stronger, bolder, more empowered, more creative with his interpretations of laws and what's acceptable than ever.

And he used his -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Russ Vought, faster and furiouser.

ASHLEY PARKER: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

ASHLEY PARKER: And he used those years out of power to basically create this document that you mentioned called Project 2025, that -- it's a dense, dense policy document.

That is sort of his wheelhouse, his actual policy.

And it tell sort of all the ways you can, first of all, just utterly minimize the government, tear away at it, tear it down and use it to push through deeply conservative priorities.

And I also, based on my reporting, agree with Senator Lee, that this is squarely in his erogenous zone.

And that when he said what he wants to do, I mean, to use a phrase that was popularized by one of our colleagues at The Atlantic, cruelty is the point.

Now, that was in reference to Donald Trump.

But Russ Vought also, he said, I want to terrorize the federal bureaucrats.

So, some of these choices, the fork in the road email of should you choose to basically resign or risk losing your job, I mean, the way these things were structured were deeply humiliating and devastating and financially devastating to hundreds of thousands of people, and that was an intentional choice by people like Russ Vought.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: And there's -- I just want to add one thing to what you said is where this comes from.

There has been this philosophy called a unitary executive that conservatives have been pushing very quietly on the fringes for decades.

But Russ Vought is a huge believer of that.

And what that is, is a massive expansive -- expansion of the president, of the powers of the president and weakening the other branches of government and the administrative state.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let me ask a dumb question then, Toluse.

If you want to expand the power of the presidency, why would you fire everyone who works in the executive branch?

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA: Well, it is a good question, but -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I recognize that you're not his spokesman.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA: Well, Trump and Russ Vought are aligned on the idea of expanding power within the executive branch.

They're not necessarily aligned about what you do with that power.

Russ Vought wants to get rid of these bureaucrats.

He wants to fire people.

He wants people to be out of their jobs.

Trump not necessarily in favor of all of that all the time.

He knows that there's going to be blowback.

And I think what you've heard from Speaker Mike Johnson was some of the political maneuvering, saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't be so gung ho about firing thousands of people, Americans who work for the government, who generally are, you know, polled pretty well or seen in a sympathetic light because of the people who, you know, make sure that Social Security checks go out and make sure that the government is working the way that it's supposed to.

Those people losing their jobs is not necessarily a political benefit for a president who calls himself a populist.

And so there is a little bit of misalignment there.

We did see Russ Vought and Donald Trump meet on Thursday, and they talked about, you know, potentially getting rid of certain agencies or cutting certain people from the government.

We didn't see a big announcement right after that meeting.

It's a sign that maybe there's a little bit of disagreement there, and Trump may not be ready to pull the trigger on what Russ Vought wants to do, which is use this government shutdown to get rid of thousands of bureaucrats.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Andrew, I mean, Russ Vought is a true believer.

Donald Trump believes in polls and in winning 2026.

The question is, for both parties, what's the end goal apart from not being blamed for something bad that happens in the next couple of weeks?

ANDREW DESIDERIO: Well, I think the goal for Republicans right now is to, A, reopen the government and get the sort of political, or, in their view, maintain the political upper hand over Democrats, because they truly -- they are truly very comfortable -- I think Leigh Ann can speak to this too, they're extremely comfortable in their position right now.

Like they're saying essentially like you have to reopen the government right now.

We are not going to negotiate on any of these side issues until that happens, which, again, reminds you of the posture that Democratic leaders had during previous shutdowns.

Democrats, on the other hand, you saw Chuck Schumer as recently as a few hours ago here, saying that he believes that public pressure will build on Republicans to eventually allow a deal on these Obamacare premium tax credits.

And, frankly, Schumer's right?

He's right in the sense that Republicans know that this is a political vulnerability for them.

At the same time, there's very little support for extending that policy within the House Republican Conference and the Senate Republican Conference.

The only way you actually get a deal and get Republicans to support something like that is for Donald Trump to pick up the phone and call them, and which, by the way, he's shown he's been able to do in the past.

Why has every single Republican in the House of Representatives this year voted for a C.R., for example.

There are Republicans who said in the past, those same Republicans, over my dead body will I vote for a C.R.

or a stopgap funding bill, they voted for it because Donald Trump told them to, exactly.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

One of -- the Democrats are structurally incapable of, quote/unquote, winning in the sense that they don't control Congress and they don't control the White House and obviously the Supreme Court that doesn't generally lean in their direction.

Put that aside for a minute.

Why are they doing this?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Well, they are actually relatively comfortable in their position too.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Their base is happy?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Their base is happy.

They are returning the issue -- they're returning the conversation to an issue that is good for them.

Healthcare is like the one remaining issue that Democrats are still popular with voters on.

This is very reminiscent of 2018, a midterm election, which was focused in large part over Obamacare after Republicans tried to repeal it and failed, et cetera, et cetera.

And so this is getting them to an issue -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's interesting, Obamacare is kind of popular.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: It is popular.

People use it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I mean, that was not always as an assumption.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: And it's popular also because people get help from the government to pay for it too with these tax subsidies, which is central to this debate.

And so there's multiple, so there's that.

The party is, for the first time and quite a while, we've seen united on a message.

They usually have been so bad at message discipline talking about, you know, cost of living, immigration, the border, climate change, all sorts of things.

And so the party feels very good right now that they are in a spot.

You look at all of the polling, there hasn't been a lot, but there's been three or four polls that have come out on who is to be blamed for a government shutdown.

And in every single poll, Republicans are currently being blamed right now.

And so they -- you know, Democratic sources tell me that they're watching the polling extremely closely.

Democratic groups have polling coming out of their own twice a week now.

And once those numbers start to crater for Democrats, we might see a shift, but right now, they feel good.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA: It's also important to know that Democrats are also looking at how Trump is weaponizing the shutdown against their constituents.

I talked to Senator Mark Warner earlier this week, and he talked about how, right now, his constituents, he's from Virginia, a lot of his constituents are federal work workers, he said, right now, they're telling him to keep fighting, but he didn't know if in two weeks, three weeks, if this government shutdown goes on and they don't get their paychecks, if they're going to still want him to fight and hold the line on this government shutdown.

So, they are watching to see the various projects that are being taken away, the people who are potentially going to be laid off, and whether or not they think that this fight is worthy.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to shift the conversation to pushups and sit-ups for a moment.

I want to talk about the extraordinary meeting -- it's hard to believe that this was also this week -- extraordinary meeting that the secretary of defense, what he calls himself, secretary of war, though Congress has not approved that change yet, Pete Hegseth had with basically the entire corps of generals and admirals.

Let's watch one of -- one moment from his speech to that group.

PETE HEGSETH, Secretary of Defense: If the secretary of war can do regular, hard P.T., so can every member of our joint force.

Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops.

Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.

It's a bad look.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There's nothing wrong with physically fit generals and admirals and high grooming standards, correct?

Why was this so controversial?

ASHLEY PARKER: Well, he -- in what essentially could have been communicated via an email or perhaps a secure video conference call or maybe a tweet, he used tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to fly in top military brass, millions maybe, who arguably should have been in their theaters in case something happened to fat shame them, among other things.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, okay.

I see you have an opinion on that.

ANDREW DESIDERIO: It's red meat for conservatives too, what he just said.

I mean, the conservative cultural right, I mean, they eat this stuff up.

They love this.

I talked to a Republican senator this past week who said, you know, he joked that basically we've been trying to get explanations out of him for illegal justifications for these strikes on drug cartel boats off of Venezuela but he's going there and giving speeches like this instead.

I mean, it's about how are you using your time, right?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Do we have -- TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA: It's also important to remember that Pete Hegseth is a former Fox News personality.

He does not have a lot of military philosophy background.

And so he's focusing on the thing that he can, physics and the physical look of things and the optics.

And he serves a president who cares about people looking like they come out of central casting.

And so he's playing to the president's strengths.

He's also playing to his own strengths, maybe trying to cover up some of his own weaknesses, speaking before three and four star generals.

He may have a little bit of insecurity there and focusing on something that he can talk about, which is, you know, I can do pushups and I can do pull-ups, as opposed to talking about the intricacies of war.

That may be an area where he feels a little bit more comfortable.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Leigh Ann, last word to you.

I mean, does this performance -- and, again, you have to separate some of the aspects of it out.

Of course, physical fitness is important.

Of course, grooming standards are important.

But to Ashley's point, it did seem like a strange cause to gather the nation's top military leaders.

Does this undermine his position with the generals and the admirals?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: You know, my colleague, Julia Ioffe had a great piece about this where she spoke to a current and former members of the military who, who said, look, this is fine, a fine message, but this is not the priority of the military right now.

There's a lot of issues to deal with.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We're going to have to leave it there for now.

I do want to get back to this subject because his leadership of department is fascinating.