Good morning. It's Saturday, October the 11th. I'm Ali Velshoon to begin this hour with a man named Russell Vote, one of Donald Trump's top aides, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the architect of Project 2025. Now, at the moment, Vote is busy overseeing the mass firing of federal workers.

But back in 2023 and 2024, he was thinking and talking quite openly about how Trump would

seize power more effectively if he were to return to the presidency.

The big problem, as Votes saw it in the first Trump administration, was all the guardrails,

all those pesky lawyers hanging around the White House refusing to do Trump's bidding, just because it was illegal.

Russ Vote literally said this in a private speech to supporters, video of which was obtained by ProPublica.

We would put forward some policy solution, and then we'd have the lawyers come in and say

it's not legal. You can't do that. That would overturn this precedent. There's a state law

against that. Super annoying, right?

To be told all your ideas are illegal, so you can't do them.

But Russell Vote was not deterred.

In that very same speech, obtained by ProPublica,

vote noted that his think tank was working on building a shadow office of legal counsel

to get around the legal community or the defense community. He also laid out

how his think tank was crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that

gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. Vote even held

up the unrest following George Floyd's murder as an example of when Trump should have been

able to deploy the armed forces, but was, in votes view, stymied. That was the stated plan of the

architect of Project 2025 in the run-up to Trump's return to power, use the Insurrection Act

to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens. Do it even if the lawyers

say it's illegal. So fast forward to today. National Guard troops are now patrolling the streets of the

nation's capital in four American cities. In Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, they are there over

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