Column By John Young
It’s that time of year when news outlets across the country admit they’ve had enough of it.
They’ve run out of words. They’ve run out of gas.
So they engage in what editors since time immemorial have called “filler” – with useless things like “top stories of the year,” “person of the year,” “sports person of the year.”
You know: Choose that which was most overexposed and — revisit it.
Not here.
We will do something useful. We are going to name the 2025 Hypocrite of the Year and bathe the winner in coconut cream pie.
And what a deserving recipient he is.
Admittedly, competition was stiff. But amid all the usual suspects, he was the most hypocritical.
The winner of this year’s prize is White House budget director Russell Vought.
Before giving him his due and his just desserts smack-dab in the kisser, let’s explain our criteria.
Why not the president? Simple. A hypocrite is someone who acts against their principles. This president has no principles. None. Ask Ukraine. This president does what his reptilian brain decrees – and what his donors say.
House Speaker Mike Johnson would be a good candidate for award-worthy hypocrisy. He talks a great Christian game and yet rationalizes taking health coverage away from millions.
What eliminates Johnson from Hypocrite of the Year consideration is that he and the House did so little otherwise.
But Russell Vought? He did a lot. Way too much.
Vought can’t stop talking about his Christian faith and how it directs his every action.
However, as a key architect of the hyper-destructive Project 2025, it was clear that this dangerous man was out for blood, and not just metaphorically.
Among the destruction designed by him, Vought will forever be known for sentiments like these:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.”
Those terrible bureaucrats who make sure our food and workplaces are safe, our drugs are effective—those people.
The Food and Drug Administration is down 4,000 people. Well done, Mr. Vought.
In the first term of this president, filling the same position he holds now, Vought strenuously defended family separations at the border as “necessitated to defend the rule of law.” Sell that to Pope Leo, who has denounced this administration’s cruel immigration policies in toto.
Those allowed into the country should be chosen on their commitment to “assimilation” to the “Christian Nation” Vought and other right-wing zealots foresee, an idea the nation’s founders, most of them devout Christians, rejected.
So, you’re a follower of Christ, Mr. Vought. What might Jesus have said of the Third World lives left hanging, the life-saving food and medicine left to rot, as countless children died and will die because you joyfully shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development?
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, remarking on the administration’s threat of military intervention over attacks on Christians in Nigeria, said that whatever atrocities have happened there, the loss of USAID has “killed more Christians.”
Before this administration took office, USAID was saving 270,000 Nigerian lives a year.
Don’t assume for a second that we can’t afford this. USAID’s foreign assistance accounted for less than 1 percent of the federal budget.
“For what will a man be profited if he gains the world but forfeits his soul?”
This line from Matthew doesn’t mean much to a man causing so much harm to those in need while claiming to be a follower of Christ. Mr. Vought, you are our 2025 Hypocrite of the Year.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
