from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday,

November 25th. 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 missed 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.

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. We want to put them in trauma. Russell, vote the once and apparently future budget

director. The Washington Post also reminds us that he helped come up with the idea of Trump using

emergency powers to circumvent Congress's decision about how

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