Coral Davenport

In the first year that he's working there, the tax records show he's the only employee.

And he rents out this space

It's based in this kind of grungy row house near the Capitol that was actually infested with some kind of clawing animal, either rats or pigeons clawing in the walls, such that it was distracting to people who were visiting.

And our colleagues Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater wrote about this in their book Madhouse, really conveying the idea that he is very much in the wilderness in these years.

Yes.

And so during this time, he's thinking really hard about what the comeback looks like, all the puzzle pieces, how to pave the way to it.

He's writing a lot of white papers, doing a lot of research, working with a lot of...

fellow Trump alums, working with the folks, of course, also who are working on Project 2025, which was another one of these blueprints for the second Trump administration.

And I talked to a lot of folks close to him who said, you know, this really seemed to be a time of getting radicalized, getting angry, just kind of having this edge at that time.

Well, so a few weeks after the 2024 election, he goes on Tucker Carlson's show.

And there had been this clip that had circulated of him where he had talked about how he wanted government employees to be in trauma.

So Tucker asks him about it, and he leans into it.

He embraces it.

He says, yeah, I want government employees to be in trauma.

And in that same interview, he also lays out how he is going to get this done.

He's got a very specific legal strategy in mind for how to cut the government, dismantle these agencies, and get rid of these employees.

And that legal strategy is centered on this idea of impoundment.

Impoundment is the idea that the president can block spending that has already been approved by Congress.

The Constitution in Article 2 gives Congress the power of the purse, the power to say how much money is going to be spent and direct where it's going to be spent.

And essentially, Vogt's reading is that if the president disagrees, the president can refuse to execute that spending, can impound that money.