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With Trump in office, Meadows reinvented himself as one of the Presidents most outspoken defenders. He was entranced by access to the Oval Office, and he even showed off the call log on his iPhone to a reporter to prove that he was speaking with VIP POTUS. Meadows called Trump so often, in fact, that he later claimed to have discovered he was No.14 on the White House switchboards list of approved callers to be put through to the President. By late 2018, he claimed to have made it up to No.7. When Meadows quit Congress and Trump hired him as his fourth chief of staff in as many years, Meadows planned to avoid what he saw as the mistakes of the previous three.

Trumps first chief of staff, the Republican Party operative Reince Priebus, had tried, with little success, to manage Trump before being dumped, via tweet, in the summer of 2017. The second, the retired Marine General John Kelly, had a reputation for trying to block Trump. Mick Mulvaney came to the office as acting chief, vowing to let Trump be Trump. Meadows, however, appeared to be more Trump than Trump, not only enabling but actively facilitating and orchestrating the former Presidents most reckless pursuitsand connecting with Trumps disruptive approach in a way his predecessors did not.

To many of his new colleagues, Meadows quickly came across as duplicitous and untrustworthy. He would lie to peoples faces, a fellow White House official told my husband and me. Stephanie Grisham, whom Meadows ousted from her position as White House press secretary, called him one of the worst people ever to enter the Trump White House. Grisham said that on a scale of awfulness, with a five being the worst, Id give Mark Meadows a twelve. Joe Grogan, the Presidents top domestic-policy adviser, described Meadows to colleagues as someone who thought he was a genius but, in fact, did not know what he was doing. Meadows was an absolute disaster, Grogan would tell others, who played to all the Presidents worst instincts.

Meadows did not think much of Grisham or Grogan, either, or of many other staffers he inherited. He was particularly disdainful of the doctors, such as Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, who advised Trump and the White Houses COVID task force during the onset of the pandemic. Theyre inept, theyre idiotic, theyre a bunch of scientists, Meadows told people in the White House at one point, referring to the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even the most loved Dr. Fauci, he said, still has no clue on a whole lot of stuff.

In the days immediately following the 2020 election, before the race was even called for Joe Biden, Meadows began entertaining pitches from Donald Trump, Jr., and various Republicans suggesting a plan to overturn what they saw as Trumps impending defeat. They proposed having Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won set aside the actual election results and substitute in pro-Trump electors. Its very simple, Don, Jr., texted. We have multiple paths, he added later. We control them all. (A lawyer for Don, Jr., said this message likely originated from someone else and was forwarded.)

Trumps eldest son was already looking ahead to January 6th, the day when by law Congress was supposed to formally count and certify the Electoral College results. Don, Jr., suggested that, if they could swing enough states by then, they could prevent Biden from winning a majority of Electoral College votes, thereby sending the decision to the House. The Constitution states that, in such a circumstance, the House would vote by state delegation, and although Republicans did not hold a majority of House seats they did control twenty-six of the fifty state delegations. We either have a vote WE control and WE win OR it gets kicked to Congress 6 January 2021, Don, Jr., wrote to Meadows.

Meadows apparently did not reply to that text message, but other texts from him suggest that he was encouraging those who wanted Trump to pursue the plot to overturn the election. For instance, Representative Andy Biggs, of ArizonaMeadowss former House colleaguewrote Meadows to propose what he admitted was a highly controversial strategy of getting Republican legislatures to appoint alternate electors for Trump in states that he lost. I love it, Meadows wrote back.

Over the next two months, as Trump pursued his rigged election claims, Meadows further consolidated power in the White House, eventually excluding Vice-President Pence from meetings he had once attended as a matter of course. Meadows really tried to separate Pence from Trump for the last couple months, a White House official noted. Meadows again actively played both sides. He reassured Barr that Trump would leave office while personally pressing to overturn results in key states and pressuring Cabinet officials. On December 21st, he attended a meeting with his former colleagues from the Freedom Caucus at the Oval Office, where the lawmakers strategized with Meadows and Trump over how to block Pence from carrying out his constitutional duty to preside over the counting of the electoral votes that would finalize Trumps defeat.

On January 6th, Meadows was bombarded with text messages and calls urging him to stop the storming of the Capitolan action that he helped foment. Even Don, Jr., who had also promoted the election lies, frantically urged Meadows to get his father to turn down the temperature. Hes got to condemn this shit Asap, he texted the chief of staff. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.

Im pushing it hard, Meadows responded. I agree.

How hard, though, was not clear. Alyssa Farah, the White House communications director who had quit in disgust over the post-election campaign to overturn the results, texted Meadows, who had been her boss for years on Capitol Hill and at the White House: You guys have to say something. Even if the presidents not willing to put out a statement, you should go to the sticks and say, We condemn this. Please stand down. If you dont, people are going to die. Meadows did not reply. Farah then texted Ben Williamson, Meadowss senior adviser. Is someone getting to POTUS? she asked. He has to tell protestors to dissipate. Someone is going to get killed.

Williamsons reply suggested that neither Trump nor Meadows was reacting with urgency: Ive been trying for the last 30 minutes, he wrote. Literally stormed in outer oval to get him to put out the first one. Its completely insane.

Meadows and his two different personas are at the center of many of the controversies lingering since Trumps tumultuous exit from office. The January 6th committee has discovered this duality. Meadows at first agreed to coperate with the panel but then abruptly stopped after Trump castigated him for publishing a memoir, The Chiefs Chief, which airbrushed their historythough not sufficiently for Trump. The former President was furious with Meadows for revealing his lies, which Trump dismissed as Fake News, to the public about the seriousness and timing of his October, 2020, bout with COVID.

Meadowss remarkable ability, even for a politician, to do one thing while saying another has also been the subject of running news reports. My colleague Charles Bethea disclosed, in The New Yorker, that Trumps chief of staff was publicly alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election while apparently committing voter fraud himself. Meadows registered to vote by absentee ballot in September, 2020, from a mobile home in North Carolina which he had never visited. North Carolinas authorities have removed Meadows from the states voter rolls and are investigating his actions.

In many ways, Meadowss skill for obfuscation has delayed an inevitable reckoning about his role in enabling Trumps post-election conduct. But the evidence is now much clearer that Meadowss actions in the White House at this crucial moment not only mattered but might well have been decisive. Its very possible, in fact, that the tragedy of January 6th might never have happened had it not been for Trumps final chief of staff.

One of the most persistent themes my husband and I found in our reporting was the moral struggles of the people around Trump during earlier stages of his destructive Presidencytheir justifications and rationales for working for a man whom many of them considered reckless and loathsome. They could make things better, they told themselves. They could stop bad things from happening. They would be replaced by people who would be far worse. There was always a measure of self-aggrandizing or self-justification. But there was also a measure of truth, as well.

There is little doubt that the situation in the White House after the 2020 election would have been different had John Kelly still been chief of staff, instead of Mark Meadows. Kelly might not have been able to persuade Trump to concede, or stop Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and the MyPillow guy from getting into the Oval Office and feeding Trump wild lies about crooked voting machines and foreign intrigues while urging the imposition of martial lawbut its hard not to think that Kelly would have thrown his body on the grenade in trying.

Original post:
Without Mark Meadows, January 6th Might Never Have Happened - The New Yorker