Good morning. It is Sunday, October the 5th. I'm Alec Valsy, and I want to begin this hour with a little time capsule.

It's May of 2023. Joe Biden was the president of the United States. Donald Trump was out of power.

Trump's indictment on 34 felony counts of falsifying

business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money cover-up scheme had just been unsealed a month

earlier. But Trump and many others in his orbit were already plotting his comeback to the White House.

One man in particular was busy drawing up extremely specific plans for a second Trump presidency.

That man and his team were literally writing out executive orders and legal memos to justify

some of those plans, some of which were based on shaky legal foundations.

That man, let's call him Russell, was working up a blueprint for deploying the American

military against American protesters,

defunding major government agencies and specifically targeting civil servants as part of a

slash and burn plan to dismantle the government.

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 to put them in trauma.

Russell Vote, the architect of Project 2025, and now the director of Donald Trump's Office of

Management and Budget. Those remarks you just heard were

delivered in May of 2023 at an invite-only annual gathering of his organization called the Center

for Renewing America. He was laying out a goal for a second Trump term to defund and destroy

the federal workforce. At the time and throughout his campaign, Donald Trump

pretended he didn't know Project 2025 and he had nothing to do with it. Now he openly brags that

vote. He of Project 2025 fame, as Trump called him this week, is deciding who gets fired.

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