Coral Davenport

He teaches adult Bible study at his church.

And before joining the first Trump administration, he actually thought about kind of leaving the world of Washington policy and going to seminary and studying to be a pastor.

Roosevelt doesn't curse.

President Trump has a foul mouth.

He refers to Christians in the third person.

I think just culturally, there was some discomfort with that fit.

But in the end, the call of the White House won out and he joins the first Trump administration.

He's there from the very beginning.

So he enters the first Trump administration as deputy budget chief.

By the end, he's running the whole office.

During that time, he argued that the president had the power to block federal spending that Congress had approved.

And he tried to do that in a number of really memorable cases.

Breaking news, President Trump reportedly ordered to hold back military aid for Ukraine for at least a week.

He was part of a group of White House officials who froze military spending for Ukraine in defiance of Congress.

Listeners will probably remember that that essentially paved a way to the president's impeachment.

He also helped come up with the idea of using emergency powers to redirect Pentagon spending to build a border wall, also without congressional approval.

Essentially saying, you know, the president can do what he wants with this money.

And he pushed an executive order that would have enabled the president to easily fire tens of thousands of career civil servants.

And the idea of that was both saving money by eliminating employees, but also...

This idea that the bureaucracy, the people who work in all these federal agencies, remain here regardless of who is president.