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This week has confirmed that the abject corruption of Donald Trump and his administration has reached a level beyond anything anyone could have imagined.

As bad as it is, though, the facts make it clear that the real damage Trump is doing to our country is not his corruption.

It’s all happening because of Trump, but the person with the most direct hand in the damage being done is Russell Vought, Trump’s Director of Management and Budget.

Behind-the-scenes Vought, guided by plans laid out in the Project 2025 handbook, is leading and directing an attack on the ability of the federal government to function as it has in the past, causing enormous pain and suffering on every American who is not wealthy that will only get worse unless he is stopped.

Here is the historical context that explains what Vought is doing.

When the stock market crashed in 1929 that resulted in the Great Depression, President, Republican Herbert Hoover held firmly to two fundamental convictions shared by his Republican Party.

The first was that it was NOT the government’s role to help people directly. That was the job of volunteer charities.

The second was his belief in a Laissez-faire economic philosophy that called for minimal or no government intervention in the free market. In other words, no government regulation of businesses.

Hoover’s approach to the Great Depression was essentially “wait and see.” He believed private charities would be sufficient to help people in need until the free market turned things around.

At the time, some 15 million Americans were unemployed, compared to 3 million before the stock market crashed. Bread lines were common all across the nation. The entire banking system was teetering on total collapse.

Hoover and the Republicans held firmly to doing nothing to help people directly and refused to do anything to regulate business practices that helped create the crisis and were making it worse, right up to their landslide defeat in 1932 by Democrats led by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The first thing FDR did was to declare a bank holiday followed by several steps to regulate the banking industry that saved it from total collapse.

He then began proposing a series of legislative initiatives to help the American people directly – the Works Progress Administration that employed millions of Americans to build public infrastructure like roads, bridges, and schools, the Civilian Conservation Corps that hired young people to work on environmental conservation such as building parks and improving rural land, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration that provided direct cash grants and immediate relief funds to state and local governments to feed and clothe the needy.

Then came Social Security, Workman’s Compensation, Unemployment Insurance, Fair Labor Standards, the National Labor Relations Board.

Every major federal social program that now exists either emerged under Roosevelt or under the leadership of New Deal Democrats after him.

The Roosevelt presidency changed the way Americans thought about government. They now understood that the role of government was and is to help the American people have a better life directly through social programs that lifted them out of poverty.

Democrats have been advocating this view of the role of government ever since. Republicans have fought them every step of the way.

Vought’s primary goal as Budget Director is to end all of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid that came later.

Knowing House and Senate Democrats will stop efforts by Republicans to eliminate the departments themselves, Vought is using funding cuts to eliminate jobs, reduce staff, so the work of those departments cannot be done.

USAID, education grants, environmental protection programs, disease research and control, Social Security services, IRS auditing, homeland security, state department diplomacy, veteran administration services, weather forecasting, disaster relief, government regulations, have all been significantly reduced, to name only some of the effects.

Ronald Reagan laid the foundation for the modern assault on New Deal programs when he famously said that government was not the answer to the problem, government was the problem.

But a direct attack on the way government actually functions has only come under Donald Trump. There’s a reason why.

The authors of Project 2025 knew Trump had no interest in governing. His focus was on acquiring power and money, leaving the actual job of governing to Vought and other Republicans wanting to change the relationship between the government and the American people.

By choice, Trump knows few details about what is happening. As long as he holds ultimate authority and is making money on the side, he doesn’t want to know.

Little did Republican anti-tax strategist Grover Norquist imagine that his words, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” would become actual policy until Trump won a second term.

Under Vought, the air government breathes is being shut off and the damage is mounting by the day. Sadly, some of it cannot be undone.

The 750,000 people who’ve died because of the elimination of USAID cannot. The thousands of Americans who’ve been choosing to eat rather than buy medicine because of cuts to Medicaid cannot. The rapid spread of Ebola now occurring because the CDC withdrew from the World Health Organization cannot. The families struggling to rebuild their destroyed homes after spring tornadoes and floods because of cuts to FEMA cannot. The list goes on.

What is inexplicable are the millions of ordinary Americans who keep voting for Republicans who then keep doing everything they can to ensure those same voters lose every benefit a caring government provides them.

Make no mistake, if Republicans could get a bill through Congress that eliminated Social Security and Medicare and every other social program that now exists, they would do it in a heartbeat.

Yet, the very people who would suffer most if that happened keep voting for them. This must end. The only way to re-establish the government we once had that was of, by, and for the people is to vote Republicans out of office. The mid-terms offer us that opportunity.

Not only can we make Trump’s jackleg presidency accountable to the people through a Democratic majority Congress, we can stop Russell Vought from pushing American back to the pre-Great Depression days when government did nothing directly to help its own people.

We don’t need to go back to the New Deal days of Franklin Roosevelt to do that. We only need to make sure we have congressional leaders who will give us a better deal than what Republicans are offering or ever will offer.