Propublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates power abuse. This story originally appeared in Dispatches Newsletter. Sign up to receive notes from journalists.
In late October, Propublica published one of the most prophetic stories in our history. If you missed it at the time, you can be forgiven. A lot was happening a few days before the election, and the headline was dominated by seemingly consequential issues like the racist humor of the comedian who addressed Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.
But if you weren’t among the hundreds of thousands of people reading our stories, you might have seen Trump being referenced in real time since taking office in January, “‘put them into trauma’: in the plans of key leaders on the new Trump agenda.”
This story will be portrayed in private recordings of a series of speeches obtained by Russell in 2023 and 2024 by his colleagues, and would prefer that news sites with a surprising knack for revealing the powerful interests he gained by his colleagues remain secret.
Vought, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who served as Director of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term, was known for his provocative public declarations. But he went even more private, assuming that regulators would be shut down and that career civil servants would be too calm to get out of bed.
“We hope that bureaucrats will be affected by trauma,” Vought said in one recording. “When they wake up in the morning, they are considered villains and they want them not to go to work. We want to close their funds so that EPA can’t implement all the rules for our energy industry because they don’t have financial bandwidth.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought spoke openly about his ongoing plan to refund independent federal agencies and demonize government scientists. “We have a detailed agency plan,” he said. “We’re writing actual executive orders. We’re writing actual regulations now, and we’re sorting out legal authorities on everything that President Trump is running.”
Vautu argued that radical steps were needed as Trump’s enemy was in itself trying to end democracy. “The harsh reality in America is that we are in the late stages of the country’s full Marxist acquisition,” he said in one speech. “Our enemy already holds the weapons of government equipment, and they are aiming for it on us, and they will continue to aim for it until they no longer need to win the election.”
It’s hard to imagine more visionary journalism. The story, like a few, captured the breadth and ferociousness of the coming attacks on the federal government. Vought has returned to his post as director of the Budget Office. And his plan to separate the entire agency and destroy the morale of federal workers has turned into reality. Trump 47 looks very different from Trump 45.
So why didn’t this story promote more national conversation when it came to it?
As a news organization seeking to drive change by revealing new facts, we have a lot to think about this question. Our job at Propublica is to get the story and put it in the minds of the critical masses of citizens and elected officials.
I have been an investigative reporter and editor for nearly 30 years and still struggle to predict which of our stories will catalyze national conversations. A 2018 story about the record of a young girl at an immigration detention center urged the Trump administration to end the policy of family separation at the border. Many other powerful stories cannot be broken through.
Of course, part of the problem is media spread. Every day, dozens of important stories fight for readers’ attention, along with a flood of posts about texts from friends and colleagues. And not to mention all the podcasts and multi-part dramas on Netflix and HBO.
What we see
During Donald Trump’s second presidency, Propovica will focus on areas that need scrutiny. Below are some of the issues reporters watch, and how to safely communicate with them.
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This has been a problem long before Trump and his allies adopted the “zone the zone” strategy with multiple standard challenging actions, but it seems even more serious now.
It is often said that we write rough drafts of history about journalists. But our work is different from historians in important respects. Scholars usually record events after the results are revealed. As journalists, we face tougher challenges as we try to find a dissonant story of everyday events that tell us where we are heading.
Much of what we do as reporters is like going around opaque windows at events that unfold in very dimly lit rooms. We can see who is inside and how it works, but our lack of context often prevents us from realizing what is actually happening. By default, we assume that the future will be roughly the same as the past, for example, the Trump 47 will be like the Trump 45 with fewer guardrails.
Vought couldn’t make it clear that this was not the case. After all, Vought was the author of Trump’s first term plan to make it easier to fire a large number of civil servants. He is a key member of Project 2025 and is the Heritage Foundation project, which provides a detailed explanation of how the second Trump administration will unfold.
Still, there was at least one data point, which probably prevented readers from viewing their speech as predictive. As our story reveals, Vought is dimming the Federalist Association for Law and Public Policy Research. We cited him as claiming that “the proud so-called Federalist Association and Originalist judges” serve as Democrats’ “Praetorian Security Guard.”
That view appears to be something like the Fringe thinker of the Magazine world, where he relied on the Federalist Association to select the judges that would make up the conservative supermajority in the High Court.
It looks different today. Viewed against the background of recent events, Vought’s neglect to the scrunching of federalist society appears to be in perfect agreement with Trump’s recent posts suggesting that federal judges have no authority over his administration.
How Propublica uses AI responsibly in research
Just a few weeks ago, one of the bright lights of the Federal Association, Daniel Sasson, a Yale Law graduate who scribed for conservative icon Antonin Scalia, resigned as a US lawyer for the Southern District of New York, instead of issuing an order from the Trump Department of Justice. When he refused to withdraw the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, he wrote that he understood his duty as a prosecutor.
Years ago, investigative reporters for the New York Times and I were discussing stories we had worked on, which were keenly and justly criticized when new facts emerged. “I can be fair and accurate,” he said. “But fair, accurate, and visionary is beyond me.”
The worldview he described has proven to be very accurate, so it seems appropriate to give Vought the final words. What sounded grand in the era of the previous elections today seems like a reasonable summary of the paths Trump and his allies chose.
“We will be here in 2024. [could] – And I believe it will – to us, the year in which the colony declared independence from Britain and the first state was separated by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and to us, we believe it is comparable to the complexity of military uncertainty in 1860.
“God has put us here like this.”
I don’t know about the role of the Almighty in Propublica’s work in the coming years. But we feel as strongly as we are here for “times like this.”
