It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and thanks to Bridget Bergen and

Amina Serna for filling in the last few shows. We're watching the Trump transition, including his coming

policies with pros and cons, and how much he actually plans to undermine democracy. Washington

Post columnist Ruth Marcus has been watching the rollout of the cabinet nominees with an eye

on both tracks. We'll talk to her in just a second. One nominee announced over the weekend, maybe you miss

this if you weren't paying attention to the news on Friday night. One nominee who Ruth has

written about on both tracks, policy and democracy or authoritarianism, is Russell Vote,

who would be Trump's budget director. He had that job in Trump's first term, too.

Trump announced his nomination. As I say, on Friday night, there was his whole flurry on

Friday night while you were probably out at dinner or the theater or hanging out with friends

or whatever. Trump was announcing nominee after nominee. The Washington Post headline

on votes nomination calls him

a key figure in Project 2025, which, of course, Trump has tried to distance himself from.

Here is a clip of Russell Vote obtained by the news organization ProPublica.

This was from a conference that was by invitation only, they say, of the pro-Trump

think tank, the Center for Renewing America. It's his villainize and inflict trauma method of trying to

weaken climate and other environmental rules.

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.

We want, when they woke up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because

they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our

energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

...