[Mark Meadows, Donald Trumps final chief of staff supported the
reckless pursuit of the “rigged election” fever dream which Trump
personally began laying the groundwork for months before the election
had even taken place, and still refuses to disavow]
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WITHOUT MARK MEADOWS, JANUARY 6TH MIGHT NEVER HAVE HAPPENED  
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Susan B. Glasser
June 7, 2022
The New Yorker
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_ Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's final chief of staff supported the
reckless pursuit of the “rigged election” fever dream which Trump
personally began laying the groundwork for months before the election
had even taken place, and still refuses to disavow _

Amid the tumult that followed Donald Trump’s election loss, Meadows
played a double game the likes of which has rarely been seen, even in
the swamps of Washington, Photograph by Sarah Silbiger // The New
Yorker

 

When the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021,
attack on the Capitol begins its long-awaited hearings, on Thursday
night, no witness will have been more helpful—and more
confounding—to investigators than Mark Meadows.

In recent months, Donald Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff has
emerged as the source of damning revelations that have enabled the
committee to piece together the extraordinary events which unfolded
after Trump lost the 2020 election and, rather than conceding defeat,
orchestrated an unprecedented attempt to subvert the results in order
to remain in power. Before Meadows abruptly stopped coöperating with
the panel, last year, he handed over thousands of text messages, which
show Trump at the center of the far-reaching plot to take his election
challenge beyond where any previous President had before.

At the same time, there has remained a question about just where
Meadows actually stood. Was he seeking to get the country to Joe
Biden’s Inauguration, despite the efforts of an increasingly
unhinged President, or was he a charter member of the plot? Was he one
of the responsible adults around Trump trying to land the plane
safely, as General Mark Milley had put it, or was he one of the
hijackers?

Many times over the past few months, while writing a book with my
husband, Peter Baker, about Trump’s Presidency and contemplating its
violent, hardly-to-be-believed end, I got stuck on this question.
There is no doubt that Trump himself bears responsibility for his
reckless pursuit of the “rigged election” fever dream—an assault
on the most important foundation of American democracy, which Trump
personally began laying the groundwork for months before the election
had even taken place. But the record is equally clear that Meadows
never shut down Trump’s inflammatory claims. And Meadows still
refuses to disavow them, creating a sharp contrast with several other
important Trump advisers: Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel who
reportedly served as an important internal challenge to the false
election claims; William Barr
[[link removed]],
the staunchly pro-Trump Attorney General who finally broke with him
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the election lies; or, of course, Mike Pence, the slavishly loyal
Vice-President, who did everything that Trump asked him to do for
fourteen hundred and forty-seven days before finally reaching the line
he could not cross and defying him.

In our new book, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021
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which will be published in September, my husband and I write that
Meadows played a double game the likes of which has rarely been seen,
even in the swamps of Washington. He told both sides what they wanted
to hear. He reassured establishment Republicans that he was trying to
keep the President from going too far. At the same time, he gave
conspirators access to the Oval Office to whisper their “you really
won, don’t give up” fantasies to the defeated President. (A
spokesperson for Meadows declined to comment on the record for this
article.)

Meadows acted less as a gatekeeper than as a door opener. “Meadows
was basically a matador,” a Republican involved in discussions with
the White House at the time told us. “He’s sort of just let in
anybody and everybody who wanted to come in.” A White House
colleague of his said, “Meadows admitted to people
privately . . . ‘Trust me, I’m gonna get the President there,
he’s gonna drop this issue. Just kind of give him time to mourn and
grieve, and then he’s gonna come around.’ ” But while he was
telling this to Republicans such as the Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, the White House colleague pointed out, he was also
facilitating the ongoing plot. “He was bringing crazies into the
West Wing.”

When Barr expressed alarm to Meadows that Trump was taking
“bullshit” fraud claims too far, the chief of staff soothed him.
“I think he is becoming more realistic and knows there is a limit on
how far he can take things,” Meadows replied. The next day, however,
Meadows told Ginni Thomas
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far-right activist and wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas—that the battle to keep Trump in power was a messianic
struggle. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows texted
her. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings
triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have
staked my career on it.”

Mark Meadows was a perplexing figure to many in the White House from
the minute he became chief of staff, in March of 2020, just as the
biggest crisis of Trump’s Presidency—the _covid_-19 pandemic
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onetime real-estate developer from North Carolina who had spent the
previous seven years in Congress, he was beefy and tall, with a
winning smile and an easygoing manner. But his affable demeanor
disguised a ruthless ambition, and, once he quit Congress and took
over Trump’s perpetually fractious team, his new colleagues found
him to be a cutthroat infighter determined to consolidate power.

Born on an Army base in France to a soldier and a civilian nurse,
Meadows grew up mainly in Florida, a self-described “fat nerd” and
aspiring weatherman in a family without much money. He lost weight,
married his high-school girlfriend, and moved to North Carolina, where
he owned a sandwich shop, Aunt D’s, for twenty years, homeschooled
his children, and eventually got his real-estate license. He sold the
restaurant and soon became a developer. In 2012, Meadows entered
politics and won a House seat in western North Carolina. He was one of
the original nine conservatives to form the House Freedom Caucus,
which included Mick Mulvaney, who became Trump’s third White House
chief of staff. Mulvaney had jokingly proposed calling the group the
“Reasonable Nutjob Caucus,” likely to distinguish them from even
more radical lawmakers, but Meadows and his allies appeared to relish
their roles as bomb-throwers. Meadows helped blow up congressional
deals over the budget, health care, and immigration which he argued
had sold out conservative principles.

On the Hill, Meadows quickly earned a reputation for playing both
sides. Soon after arriving in the House, he cast a vote against
Speaker John Boehner’s reëlection. Not long afterward, Boehner said
that Meadows requested a meeting with him in his Capitol office,
where, within seconds, he said, the new congressman suddenly slid off
the couch onto his knees and put his hands in front of his chest in
confessional prostration. “Mr. Speaker, please forgive me,”
Boehner recalled Meadows saying. Boehner was flabbergasted. He took an
extra-long drag on his Camel cigarette before saying, “For what?”
Boehner later wrote, “I knew he was carrying a backpack full of
knives—and sooner or later he’d try to cut me again with them.
Which, of course, he did.”

By the fall of 2015, Meadows filed a motion to open debate about
ousting Boehner as Speaker, and Boehner soon stepped down, a major
victory for the Freedom Caucus. Paul Ryan, Boehner’s reluctant
successor, had an equally jaundiced view of Meadows. A former
Republican leadership aide once told the journalists Anna Palmer and
Jake Sherman that Meadows was the most dishonest person he had ever
met at the Capitol, “convicted criminals included.”

With Trump in office, Meadows reinvented himself as one of the
President’s 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 switchboard’s 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.

Trump’s 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 President’s most reckless pursuits—and connecting with
Trump’s 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 people’s 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, “I’d give Mark Meadows a twelve.” Joe
Grogan, the President’s 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
President’s 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
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Deborah Birx, who advised Trump and the White House’s _covid_ task
force during the onset of the pandemic. “They’re inept, they’re
idiotic, they’re 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 Trump’s impending defeat. They proposed
having Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won set aside the
actual election results and substitute in pro-Trump electors.
“It’s 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.)

Trump’s 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 Arizona—Meadows’s former House colleague—wrote
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 Trump’s defeat.

On January 6th, Meadows was bombarded with text messages and calls
urging him to stop the storming of the Capitol—an 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. “He’s got to condemn this shit Asap,” he texted the
chief of staff. “The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”

“I’m 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 president’s not willing to put
out a statement, you should go to the sticks and say, ‘We condemn
this. Please stand down.’ If you don’t, people are going to
die.” Meadows did not reply. Farah then texted Ben Williamson,
Meadows’s senior adviser. “Is someone getting to POTUS?” she
asked. “He has to tell protestors to dissipate. Someone is going to
get killed.”

Williamson’s reply suggested that neither Trump nor Meadows was
reacting with urgency: “I’ve been trying for the last 30
minutes,” he wrote. “Literally stormed in outer oval to get him to
put out the first one. It’s completely insane.”

Meadows and his two different personas are at the center of many of
the controversies lingering since Trump’s tumultuous exit from
office. The January 6th committee has discovered this duality. Meadows
at first agreed to coöperate with the panel but then abruptly stopped
after Trump castigated him for publishing a memoir, “The Chief’s
Chief
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which airbrushed their history—though 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
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Meadows’s 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
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in _The New Yorker_, that Trump’s 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 Carolina’s authorities have removed Meadows
from the state’s voter rolls and are investigating his actions.

In many ways, Meadows’s skill for obfuscation has delayed an
inevitable reckoning about his role in enabling Trump’s
post-election conduct. But the evidence is now much clearer that
Meadows’s actions in the White House at this crucial moment not only
mattered but might well have been decisive. It’s very possible, in
fact, that the tragedy of January 6th might never have happened had it
not been for Trump’s 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 Presidency—their 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 law—but
it’s hard not to think that Kelly would have thrown his body on the
grenade in trying.

Not Meadows the Matador. In December of 2020, he e-mailed an
“Italygate” conspiracy theory to the Justice Department,
suggesting an investigation. The acting Deputy Attorney General called
the bizarre claim—that an Italian defense company and an officer at
the U.S. Embassy in Rome used satellites to help Biden steal the
election—“pure insanity.” Meadows even flew to Georgia and met
personally with the Deputy Secretary of State, in a bid to flip the
state’s results. This was not, needless to say, the action of a
responsible White House chief of staff. The evidence that Meadows
himself provided to the January 6th committee shows that he was
focussed on sending fake electors to Congress as early as November
7th, not long after Trump falsely claimed, “Frankly, we did win this
election,” and set the whole tragic farce in motion.

On the morning of January 6th, Trump’s son Don, Jr., filmed a short
video of the President’s family and inner circle in a V.I.P. tent at
the rally at the Ellipse. Trump was about to go onstage and urge the
crowd to march on the Capitol in order to stop the counting of the
electors. The video shows Don, Jr.,’s girlfriend, Kimberly
Guilfoyle, shimmying to the nineteen-eighties hit “Gloria,” by
Laura Branigan. The video then pans to Mark Meadows, who grins
broadly. “An actual fighter,” Don, Jr., says, of his father’s
chief of staff. “One of the few.”

_[SUSAN B. GLASSER
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writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in
Washington. She co-wrote, with Peter Baker, “The Man Who Ran
Washington
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More on the January 6th Attack

*
When the Capitol was breached, a _New Yorker_ reporter became the
sole journalist in the Senate chamber to witness its desecration
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*
Inside the chamber, Luke Mogelson captured raw, visceral footage of
the siege
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*
Should Americans refer to the Sixth of January as a protest, an act of
treason, or something else
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*
What the January 6th papers reveal
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*
How a mother of eight became one of the riot’s biggest mysteries,
and a fugitive from the F.B.I.
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*
The violence was what Donald Trump wanted
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*
If America is to remain a democracy, Trump must be held accountable
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* Jan. 06
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* Capitol riot
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* Battle for the Capitol
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* Capitol Siege
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* Right-wing militias
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* Donald Trump
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* Fascism
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* democracy
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* rule of law
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* Mark Meadows
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* Congress
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* House Committee
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* MAGA
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* GOP
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* Republican Party
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