The unrelenting torrent of condemnation—from the media, from celebrities, from the left, even from members of his own party—made Trump value those all the more who were dependable and subservient, those he could count on to advance his interests and defend him at all costs. Nobody had learned this better than Mark Meadows.
After the beating he took from Trump during the first, failed health care push in early 2017, the Freedom Caucus chairman groveled his way back onto Trump’s good side. He stayed there by acting as the president’s spy on Capitol Hill, reporting back the latest gossip and spinning everything he and his friends were attempting to do as benefiting the White House (as opposed to betraying the MAGA agenda, as Ryan and his leadership team were doing). The permanent perch Meadows earned atop Trump’s shoulder was annoying even to the congressman’s allies in the West Wing. Staff would regularly see Meadows walking the hallways uninvited and unannounced; White House phone logs from one month in the summer showed Meadows calling Trump at least twice as frequently as any other lawmaker.
This represented the apex of Meadows’s ascent—from obscure freshman, to Defund Obamacare leader, to Boehner slayer, to Freedom Caucus chairman, to Trump whisperer—in just five years. The advantages were abundant. The North Carolina congressman, an avowed enemy of “the swamp,” bought himself a lovely condo inside the Beltway and began living full-time in the DC suburbs. Rare was the exclusive party not attended by the congressman and his wife, sudden starlets of the capital’s cocktail circuit. Meadows had made it.
Interestingly, despite all his earned goodwill, Meadows would not spend it standing up for one of his own members.
In late June, after Mark Sanford’s loss in his South Carolina primary, Trump looked out over a meeting of the House Republican Conference and asked if Sanford was present. When members replied that he wasn’t, Trump began taunting the congressman, calling him “a nasty guy” and saying sarcastically, “I wanted to congratulate him on running a great race!” Groans filled the room. Sanford had become a popular figure, especially among conservatives, for his policy knowledge and his plainspoken approach. Nobody appreciated Trump’s routine.
The next day, however, Trump tweeted: “Had a great meeting with the House GOP last night at the Capitol. They applauded and laughed loudly when I mentioned my experience with Mark Sanford. I have never been a fan of his!”
Of course, nobody had laughed or applauded. The president was lying about an event to which there were more than two hundred witnesses.
Several of Sanford’s colleagues in the Freedom Caucus came to his defense. Amash rebuked Trump in a tweet, calling out his “dazzling display of pettiness and insecurity.” Labrador said it was “just wrong” what Trump had done to Sanford. But there was no such condemnation from Meadows. Despite Trump’s continued insults of his colleague—including another shot at him while the Freedom Caucus was meeting one night—the group’s chairman would offer no rebuke of the president, saying only that Trump was acting on “bad political advice.”
Amash could no longer stomach the group’s collective cowardice. Soon, he stopped attending the Freedom Caucus meetings and distanced himself from the organization he had cofounded.
“These guys have all convinced themselves that to be successful and keep their jobs, they need to stand by Trump,” Amash said. “But Trump won’t stand with them as soon as he doesn’t need them. He’s not loyal. They’re very loyal to Trump, but the second he thinks it’s to his advantage to throw someone under the bus, he’ll be happy to do it.”
Amash added, “It could be Mark Sanford today and Mark Meadows tomorrow.”
THE SUMMER OF 2018 WASN’T EXACTLY A DAY AT THE BEACH FOR PRESIDENT Trump. The family-separation crisis and the Helsinki disaster already promised to be legacy-defining blunders, and a surge of energy on the left was building what political pundits called a “Blue Wave” that appeared increasingly likely to wipe out the House GOP’s majority in the fall elections.
There was also continued turmoil in his administration. In July, the embattled chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, resigned. This marked the seventh departure of a cabinet official in eighteen months; for watchdogs in Washington, it was the longest overdue. Pruitt had insulted taxpayers in ways that would make Tom Price blush, spending tens of thousands of dollars on a twenty-four-hour security detail; renting a DC town house from an industry lobbyist’s wife for pennies on the dollar; taking private and first-class flights without approval; and building a soundproof phone booth in his office that cost $43,000, among other abuses.1 It was fair to consider the swamp not yet fully drained.
Meanwhile, Trump was growing more preoccupied with the Mueller probe with each passing day, grousing to anyone who would listen about the alleged “deep state” and flying into profanity-laced rages about the orchestrated sabotage of his presidency. In the months of June, July, and August alone, Trump sent hundreds of tweets and retweets regarding the special counsel’s inquiry, more than three dozen of them mentioning Mueller by name.
In one tweet, the president called the former FBI director, a decorated Marine Corps veteran who led missions in Vietnam before and after being shot in the leg, “Disgraced and discredited.” He compared him to Joseph McCarthy. He described him as “totally conflicted” because of the registered Democrats working under him on the investigation. (Mueller, a Republican, had served presidents of both parties.)
For all the talk of a “witch hunt,” Mueller proved incredibly skilled at finding hats and brooms. By the middle of July, according to a Washington Post tally,2 the special counsel’s team had collected “187 criminal charges in active indictments or to which individuals have pleaded guilty,” while “another twenty-three counts against President Trump’s former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates were vacated when he agreed to cooperate with Mueller.” Additionally, thirty-two people and three businesses had been named in indictments or plea agreements, and Mueller had extracted “six guilty pleas from five defendants.” Among the charges: “52 counts of conspiracy of some kind . . . 113 criminal counts of aggravated identity theft or identity fraud . . . Four guilty pleas for making false statements.”
The biggest threat to Trump, it was becoming clear, was Michael Cohen. At first, the president’s lawyer seemed unlikely to flip. Trump described him as a “good man” in the aftermath of the raid on his office. The two men talked by phone soon after. And Cohen said he would “rather jump out of a building than turn on Donald Trump.” Yet, as the summer wore on and Trump playfully evaded questions about a pardon, the building jump was looking more and more appealing.
In mid-June, Cohen fired his existing legal team and brought on a new lawyer known for his deal-cutting prowess. A week later, Cohen resigned as the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, taking the opportunity to criticize Trump’s family-separation policy at the southern border. Any remaining doubts about his allegiance were erased in early July, when he told ABC News that his first loyalty was to the country—not the president.3
On Tuesday, August 21, Cohen stood in a Manhattan courtroom and pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes: five counts of tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a financial institution, and two counts of campaign finance violations. On the latter two charges, Cohen testified that Trump—“Individual 1, who at that point had become the President of the United States,” in court parlance—had directed him to make payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal during the 2016 campaign to prevent them from disclosing past sexual relationships.