Inside
the Trump Plan for 2025
A network of well-funded
far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White
House.
July 15, 2024
The founders of the Conservative Partnership Institute,
someone close to the organization said, “have thought deeply about what’s
needed to create the infrastructure and the resources for a more
anti-establishment conservative movement.”
One evening in April of 2022, a hundred people milled
around a patio at Mar-a-Lago, sipping champagne and waiting for Donald Trump to
arrive. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, stood in front of an
archway fringed with palm trees and warmed up the crowd with jokes about the
deep state. The purpose of the gathering was to raise money for the Center for
Renewing America, a conservative policy shop whose most recent annual report
emphasized a “commitment to end woke and weaponized government.” Its founder,
Russell Vought, a former head of the Office of Management and Budget under
Trump, and a leading candidate to be the White House chief of staff in a second
term, was in attendance, chatting amiably with the guests. He is trim and bald,
with glasses and a professorial beard. His group is a kind of ivory tower for
far-right Republicans, issuing white papers with titles such as “The Great
Replacement in Theory and Practice.” In 2021, he wrote an op-ed for Newsweek that
asked, “Is There Anything Actually Wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism’?”
The Center for Renewing America is one of roughly two dozen
right-wing groups that have emerged in Washington since Trump left office. What
unites them is a wealthy network based on Capitol Hill called the Conservative
Partnership Institute, which many in Washington regard as the next Trump
Administration in waiting. C.P.I.’s list of personnel and affiliates includes
some of Trump’s most fervent backers: Meadows is a senior partner; Stephen
Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration, runs an associated group called
America First Legal, which styles itself as the A.C.L.U. of the maga movement; Jeffrey Clark, a
former Justice Department lawyer facing disbarment for trying to overturn the
2020 election, is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America. All of them are
expected to have high-ranking roles in the government if Trump is elected
again. “C.P.I. has gathered the most talented people in the conservative
movement by far,” someone close to the organization told me. “They have thought
deeply about what’s needed to create the infrastructure and the resources for a
more anti-establishment conservative movement.”
C.P.I. was founded in 2017 by Jim DeMint, a former adman
from South Carolina who spent eight years in the Senate before resigning to
lead the Heritage Foundation. During that time, he was one of Washington’s most
notorious partisan combatants. As a senator, he attacked his Republican
colleagues for being insufficiently conservative, tanking their bills and
raising money to unseat them in primaries. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority
Leader, called him “an innovator in Republican-on-Republican violence.” With
C.P.I., DeMint wanted to create a base of operations for insurgents like
himself. “If you’re not getting criticized in Washington,” he once said,
“you’re probably part of the problem.”
Other conservative groups have defined Republican
Presidencies: the Heritage Foundation staffed the Administration of Ronald
Reagan, the American Enterprise Institute that of George W. Bush. But C.P.I. is
categorically different from its peers. It’s not a think tank—it’s an incubator
and an activist hub that funds other organizations, coördinates with
conservative members of the House and Senate, and works as a counterweight to
G.O.P. leadership. The effort to contest the 2020 election results and the protests
of January 6, 2021, were both plotted at C.P.I.’s headquarters, at 300
Independence Avenue. “Until seven years ago, it didn’t exist, and no entity
like it existed,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, told me. “It’s
grown by leaps and bounds.”
C.P.I. and its constellation of groups, most of which are
nonprofits, raised nearly two hundred million dollars in 2022. The organization
has bought up some fifty million dollars’ worth of real estate in and around
Washington, including multiple properties on the Hill. A mansion on twenty-two
hundred acres in eastern Maryland hosts trainings for congressional staff and
conservative activists. Four political-action committees have rented space in
C.P.I.’s offices, and many more belonging to members of Congress pay to use
C.P.I.’s facilities, such as studios for podcast recordings and TV hits. The
House Freedom Caucus, a group of three dozen hard-line anti-institutionalist
Republican lawmakers, and the Steering Committee, a similar group in the
Senate, headed by Lee, hold weekly meetings at C.P.I.’s headquarters. Senator
Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, called the organization a “gathering
site” that offered “regular contact” with the power brokers of the conservative
movement. He told me, “You walk into the building and you can talk to Mark
Meadows or Jim DeMint if they’re there, or Russ Vought.”
At the time of the event at Mar-a-Lago, in the spring of
2022, right-wing political circles were in a state of charged anticipation.
Trump had not yet announced his reëlection bid, but inflation was high, Joe
Biden was unpopular, and pollsters were anticipating a Republican rout in the
upcoming midterms. “The left tried to drag America further into a dark future
of totalitarianism, chaotic elections, and cultural decay,” C.P.I.’s leaders
wrote. Those in attendance knew that Trump would soon enter the race. The
question was what, exactly, they might get out of it.
Shortly after 6 p.m.,
Trump strode onto the patio, wearing his customary dark suit and a blue tie,
and launched into a stem-winder. “It was so fucking funny,” the person close to
C.P.I. told me. “Almost nothing was related to the Center for Renewing America
other than a reference to how good Russ was. He was riffing on whatever was on
his mind.” Trump recounted a trip that he’d taken to Iraq as President, but he
kept digressing to complain about a thirteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier
that he’d commissioned. At one point, he turned to the culture wars but
couldn’t remember the phrase “critical race theory.” Vought, standing nearby,
had to prompt him. “He was burning down the house,” the person told me.
“Everyone was loving it.”
Still, one aspect of the speech caught the attention of
C.P.I.’s executives. Ever since Trump was acquitted in his first impeachment
trial, in 2020, he has threatened to purge the government of anyone he
considered disloyal. His defenders are united in the belief that career
bureaucrats foiled his first-term plans from inside the government. C.P.I.,
which has spent years placing conservative job seekers in congressional
offices, is now vetting potential staffers for a second Trump term. One of its
groups, the American Accountability Foundation, has been investigating the
personal profiles and social-media posts of federal employees to determine who
might lack fealty to Trump. “The key throughout the speech was that Trump
complained about his personnel,” the attendee said. “He said he had these bad
generals, bad Cabinet secretaries. That was a big signal to the people there.”
Six years earlier, on a Monday in late March, cars ferrying
some of the country’s most influential conservatives, including the Republican
senators Jeff Sessions and Tom Cotton, began arriving at the Washington offices
of the law firm Jones Day. DeMint, then the head of the Heritage Foundation,
and Leonard Leo, the vice-president of the Federalist Society, entered
discreetly through a parking garage, as they’d been instructed. Newt Gingrich,
who wanted the press to see him, insisted on using the firm’s front door. They
were attending a private meeting with Trump, who was rapidly gaining in the
Republican primary but remained anathema to much of the G.O.P. establishment.
“People in the conservative movement suddenly realized that Trump could be the
horse that they could ride to victory,” a former senior Heritage staffer told
me. “He was being shepherded around the conservative policy world. DeMint was a
part of that.”
As early as January, 2016, DeMint predicted that Trump
would win the Republican nomination. It was an unpopular position among
conservatives, many of whom felt more ideologically aligned with Senator Ted
Cruz, of Texas. In a conference room at Jones Day, Trump gave a brief speech
and opened the floor to questions. Leo asked him whom he’d nominate for federal
judgeships. Antonin Scalia, the conservative stalwart on the Supreme Court, had
died the previous month. Trump replied, “Why don’t I put out a list publicly of
people who could be the sort of people I would put on the Supreme Court?”
DeMint immediately volunteered Heritage for the job of drafting it.
The Heritage Foundation was founded in the
nineteen-seventies by Edwin Feulner, a Republican operative with a doctorate in
political science. Under his direction, the think tank became the country’s
leading bastion of conservative policy, with an annual budget exceeding eighty
million dollars. When DeMint took over, in 2013, traditionalists on the
organization’s board were concerned that his rebellious style would diminish
the group’s reputation for serious research. He confirmed their suspicions by
hiring several of his Senate aides. The former Heritage staffer said, “There
were cultural differences between existing leadership and the DeMint team.”
But DeMint’s arrival reflected changes already under way at
the organization. In 2010, as the Tea Party emerged as a force in conservative
politics, the think tank launched an advocacy arm called Heritage Action, which
issued scorecards evaluating legislators’ conservatism and deputized a network
of local activists as “sentinels” to enforce a populist agenda. Vought, who’d
previously worked as a staffer in House leadership, helped lead the operation.
Under DeMint, the group became merciless in its attacks on rank-and-file
Republican lawmakers. “Heritage Action was created to lobby the Hill, but they
took it one step further,” James Wallner, a lecturer in political science at
Clemson University, who worked with DeMint in the Senate and at Heritage, told
me. “They had a grassroots army. They used tens of thousands of activists to
target people.”
After the meeting with Trump, in 2016, some of DeMint’s
staff objected to the task of drawing up a list of potential judges, arguing
that Heritage was overcommitting itself. This was typically the domain of the
Federalist Society, which was putting forth its own list of judicial nominees.
But DeMint, sensing an opportunity to maximize his clout with Trump, dismissed
the concerns. That August, after Trump became the Party’s nominee, Heritage was
enlisted to participate in the Presidential transition in the event of a Trump
victory. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey at the time, was overseeing
the effort and put Feulner, who was then the chair of Heritage’s board of
trustees, in charge of domestic policy. Feulner later told the Times that
Heritage saw a greater opportunity to influence policy under Trump than it had
under Reagan. “No. 1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes,”
Feulner said of Trump. “No. 2, his views on so many things were not
particularly well formed.” He added, “If he somehow pulled the election off, we
thought, wow, we could really make a difference.”
Heritage
was already primed. The year after DeMint took over, he had begun an initiative
called the Project to Restore America, which worked to build up a reserve of
reliably conservative personnel. The morning after Trump won, DeMint called a
meeting in an auditorium at Heritage headquarters. Many staffers had been there
all night watching the returns in a state of elation. “We were criticized by a
lot of our friends in the movement for even going to meetings with Trump,”
DeMint said, according to the Times. Then, quoting a line from the
eighties TV show “The A-Team,” he added, “I love it when a plan comes
together.”
The following day, Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior adviser,
summoned Christie to his office on the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower, in New
York. “We’ve decided to make a change,” Bannon told him. Mike Pence, the
incoming Vice-President, and Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, were
replacing him. Christie wrote in his 2019 memoir that thirty volumes of policy
and staff plans collected in large binders over several months “were tossed in
a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again.” Christie’s firing set off a
scramble to finish the job of staffing the new Administration and preparing a
slate of agenda-setting policies before Trump was sworn in. Heritage now had an
even more direct role to play. Pence was friendly with DeMint, and a former
Sessions aide, who was appointed to lead the transition’s daily operations, was
close with Ed Corrigan, a former executive director of the Senate Steering
Committee who was then a vice-president at the Heritage Foundation.
Heritage went on to fill hundreds of jobs throughout
virtually every federal agency, and some of the President’s most prominent
Cabinet officials—including Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education; Scott
Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Rick Perry, the
Secretary of Energy—had appeared on the foundation’s lists of recommendations.
“DeMint told friends and colleagues that he was proudest of his work at
Heritage in placing Heritage employees into the Administration,” a DeMint associate
told me. “That was a big deal.”
Still, Heritage’s board remained fiercely divided over
DeMint. Mickey Edwards, a founding Heritage trustee, said at the time that
DeMint had turned “a highly respected think tank” into “a partisan tool” for
the Tea Party. Wallner, who joined Heritage as its research director in the
summer of 2016, told me, “I walked into a civil war.” He recalled meeting a
board member at a hotel bar near the White House who asked outright, “Are you
on team DeMint?” Such critics had expected Trump to lose spectacularly in November,
discrediting DeMint in the process.
Before Trump’s Inauguration, DeMint requested a new
contract, but the board refused. The following spring, DeMint and his closest
advisers went to San Diego for the annual Heritage donor retreat. The night
before their flight home, they learned that DeMint was being fired. Corrigan
was there, along with Wallner; Wesley Denton, a former DeMint staffer; and Bret
Bernhardt, DeMint’s ex-chief of staff. “We had put our heart and soul into
this,” Wallner told me. “It was shocking.”
According to a study by the Brookings Institution, there
was more staff turnover in the first thirty-two months of Trump’s Presidency
than there had been in the entire first terms of each of his five predecessors.
Inside the White House, a former senior official told me, Trump was constantly
enraged that his Cabinet wouldn’t break the law for him. He wanted the
Department of Homeland Security to shoot migrants crossing the Rio Grande, the
Defense Department to draw up plans to invade Mexico, and the Internal Revenue
Service to audit his critics. Trump didn’t understand why the government
couldn’t revoke the security clearances of former intelligence officials who
criticized him on CNN. The official said that Trump “talked about firing large
numbers of the federal workers,” to eliminate any further checks on his agenda.
The tumult presented an opportunity for outsiders like
DeMint. He and his associates had started brainstorming their next moves before
their flight from San Diego touched down in Washington. “You don’t need a think
tank,” Wallner recalled telling DeMint. Their collective expertise was in
Congress, where Party leadership always seemed to have the advantage of better
and more extensive staffing. What if they levelled the playing field by helping
to recruit conservative personnel, and schooling them in how to be more
effective activists? DeMint and his group could train a new class of staffers
and place them within the system.
Conservatives in Washington also needed somewhere to
gather, share ideas, and strategize. From 2011 to 2015, a group of Republican
House members, who would eventually form the Freedom Caucus, had regularly met
in the kitchen of a Heritage executive. One night, his wife was hosting a work
dinner, so the group relocated to a restaurant called Tortilla Coast, which
became their new meeting spot. On occasion, when they tried to book space at
the Capitol Hill Club, an exclusive Republican hangout in Washington, Party
leadership made sure that their request was declined. “The thing that made
Heritage so powerful were the coalitions they could build,” Wallner told me.
“That was the stuff DeMint loved.” The sentiment on the plane, he went on, was
“Let’s do this thing that DeMint loves to do, that’s so vital. It would be like
a WeWork for conservatives.”
On May 10, 2017, DeMint and the others filed incorporation
papers for the Conservative Partnership Institute. Their lawyer, who was also
representing them in severance negotiations with Heritage, was Cleta Mitchell,
a movement mainstay in her sixties who was, as the person close to C.P.I. told
me, “the attorney for pretty much any new conservative group that was starting
in Washington.” She became C.P.I.’s secretary. The institute’s accountant was a
close associate of Leonard Leo’s. It was a lean operation at first: seven
employees and a rented office on Pennsylvania Avenue above a liquor store and
an Asian-fusion restaurant. At the end of its first year, the group’s total
assets and liabilities were less than a million dollars.
Then the White House called. The President had been
accusing his personnel of deliberately undercutting him, but his top aides
were, in fact, struggling to fill an increasing number of vacancies within the
executive agencies. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment for C.P.I.,” the person close to
the organization told me. “The White House needed staffing help. People who
joined the Administration were either R.N.C. hacks who didn’t like Trump or
they were Trump-campaign supporters who could barely get their pants on in the
morning.”
One day in June, 2018, Hill staffers working for
conservative members of Congress received an e-mail: “Interested in a job at
the White House?” C.P.I. was hosting a job fair, at the Dirksen Senate Office
Building. The director of the White House’s personnel office would be in
attendance, along with other senior officials. C.P.I. had been conceived to
help staff congressional offices, but it was scaling up. “They needed a
national figure,” another former DeMint staffer told me. “Their brand is bigger
with Trump.”
A year later, Trump was impeached for what he called a
“perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in which
Trump suggested that U.S. military aid to Ukraine might depend on Zelensky
agreeing to investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. At the
impeachment trial, two members of the Trump Administration, Alexander Vindman,
of the National Security Council, and Marie Yovanovitch, the recently fired
Ambassador to Ukraine, testified against the President. Senator Cruz, who was
coördinating with the President’s legal team, ran an impeachment “war room” out
of the basement of C.P.I.’s headquarters. Using C.P.I. equipment, he also
recorded a podcast, called “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” which he taped after each
day’s testimony, attacking the proceedings as a partisan sham. “Verdict” was
downloaded more than a million times, making it one of the most popular
political podcasts in the country.
A few
weeks after Trump was acquitted, on a party-line vote in the Senate, a C.P.I.
executive named Rachel Bovard addressed an audience at the Council for National
Policy, a secretive network of conservative activists. They’d assembled for a
board-of-governors luncheon at a Ritz-Carlton in California. “We work very
closely . . . with the Office of Presidential Personnel at the
White House,” Bovard said, in footage obtained by Documented, a
Washington-based watchdog group. “Because we see what happens when we don’t vet
these people. That’s how we got Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, O.K.? That’s how we
got Marie Yovanovitch. All these people that led the impeachment against
President Trump shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
By then, conservative activists, including Ginni Thomas,
the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, were assembling lists of
“bad people” in the government for Trump to fire or demote. Government
officials on the lists were often identified as either pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
But behavior that counted as anti-Trump could be little more than an instance
of someone obeying the law or observing ordinary bureaucratic procedure. In one
memo, in which a Trump loyalist argued against appointing a former U.S.
Attorney who was up for a job at the Treasury Department, a list of infractions
included an unwillingness to criminally investigate multiple women who had
accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, according to Axios. In October,
2020, Trump issued an executive order that was largely overlooked in the midst
of the pandemic and that fall’s election. Known as Schedule F, it stripped
career civil servants of their job protections, making it much easier for the
President to replace them with handpicked appointees.
The following month, when Trump refused to accept his
election loss, “there were people in the White House who operated under the
assumption that they were not leaving,” a former aide said. One of them was
John McEntee, a caustic thirty-year-old who’d once been Trump’s personal
assistant and was now in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office. (In 2018,
John Kelly, who was then Trump’s chief of staff, had fired McEntee for failing
a security clearance owing to a gambling habit, but Trump rehired him two years
later.) Young staffers were scared that McEntee might find out if they started
interviewing for other positions. “There was fear of retribution if it got back
to him,” the former aide said. Other White House officials, such as Meadows,
were clear-eyed about the election results but vowed to fight them anyway.
Meadows discreetly told a few staffers that, when Trump’s term was over, they
should join him at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “C.P.I. was his
ticket to be that pressure point on Capitol Hill,” one of the staffers told me.
“He wanted to be the guy who held Congress to the maga agenda.”
From the start, C.P.I. was involved in efforts to cast
doubt on the 2020 election results. One Freedom Caucus member recalled,
“Election Day was Tuesday, and we got back to the Capitol the following Monday.
Tuesday, they’re meeting at C.P.I. and talking about how to get Trump sworn in
on January 20th.” On November 9th, during the Senate Steering Committee’s
regular meeting at C.P.I., Sidney Powell, a conservative lawyer, gave a talk
about challenging the election results. “My purpose in having the meeting was
to socialize with Republican senators the fact that potus needs to pursue his legal
remedies,” Senator Lee, of Utah, told Meadows in a text. “You have in us a
group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”
By the end of December, many Republicans, including Lee,
had given up on Powell. She was citing rigged elections in Venezuela as
evidence that the voting-machine company Dominion had tampered with ballots
cast for Trump, but, despite frequent requests from Trump loyalists, she could
never substantiate the claims. Hard-core partisans came up with a new plan:
they wanted to disrupt the process by which the government would certify the
election results, on January 6, 2021. Cleta Mitchell, the secretary of C.P.I.
and a lawyer for Trump, was central in advancing this idea. She had gone into
the 2020 race believing that Democrats would attempt to steal votes. “I was
absolutely persuaded and believed very strongly that President Trump would be
reëlected and that the left and the Democrats would do everything they could to
unwind it,” she later said.
Two days after the election, Mitchell wrote an e-mail to
the legal academic John Eastman, encouraging him to craft a case that the
Vice-President had the unilateral authority to throw out the election results
in seven states, where the legislatures could then choose new slates of
pro-Trump electors. Pence, who consulted his own legal experts, was
unconvinced. But Eastman hardly needed to persuade Trump, who urged his
supporters to march on the Capitol to pressure Pence into blocking the
certification process. Eventually, Eastman would be indicted in Arizona and
Georgia on conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering charges for his role in trying
to overturn the election. (He pleaded not guilty.)
Much of the effort to turn people out for the January 6th
protest took place at C.P.I. “There were a series of conference calls,” the
Freedom Caucus member told me. “Mark Meadows was on a lot of them. Trump was on
more than one. The rally was a big thing that C.P.I. and Freedom Caucus members
were involved in. The idea was that they were going to get everybody together
on the Mall. That was all discussed at C.P.I.” (A C.P.I. spokesperson told me,
“No idea what they’re talking about. C.P.I. had absolutely no involvement in
these events.”)
On the afternoon of January 2nd, Mitchell joined the
President on an hour-long phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, in
which Trump told him to “find 11,780 votes,” the number he needed to win the
state. Later that evening, members of the Freedom Caucus, including Jim Jordan
and Scott Perry, the caucus’s chairman, were scheduled to meet at C.P.I. to
strategize about how to get their constituents to show up on January 6th.
“Meadows was originally going to participate in person, but they moved it to conference
call just to cover a wider breadth of people that weren’t in town,” Cassidy
Hutchinson, Meadows’s aide, said in an interview with lawyers from the January
6th Committee. The President also dialled in.
Even after the riot at the Capitol, Mitchell continued to
contest the 2020 returns from her perch at C.P.I. For some of the more
elaborate electoral challenges, such as audits of the results in Arizona and
Georgia, which persisted after Biden had taken office, it was important to the
organizers that the process seem legitimate and serious—and therefore
independent of Trump. According to an investigation by Documented, C.P.I. used
an accounting mechanism to hide the fact that the former President was funding
part of the organization’s recount efforts. On July 26, 2021, Trump’s
political-action committee, Save America, donated a million dollars to C.P.I.
Two days later, a new nonprofit called the American Voting Rights Foundation,
or A.V.R.F., was registered in Delaware; its direct controlling entity was
another group tied to C.P.I. The same day, Mitchell sent an e-mail to Cyber
Ninjas, a private company that a group of far-right state legislators in
Arizona had recruited to conduct an audit of the Presidential results in
Maricopa County. C.P.I. then paid a million dollars to A.V.R.F. According to
the Guardian, it was the “only known donation that the group has
ever received.” On July 29th, in an e-mail on which a C.P.I. executive was
copied, Mitchell explained that A.V.R.F. was contributing a million dollars to
the Arizona audit.
This spring, I received some friendly but unencouraging
advice from a person close to DeMint: I shouldn’t count on speaking with him or
his advisers. They were highly suspicious of mainstream attention. DeMint is
now more of a figurehead at C.P.I. than an active leader of the organization.
Meadows, who joined C.P.I. a week after leaving the Trump White House, and now
receives an annual salary of eight hundred thousand dollars from the
organization, is primarily a fund-raiser. He was indicted last year for election
interference. (He pleaded not guilty.) Being in legal trouble is often a badge
of honor in Trump’s circles, but Meadows has fallen under suspicion from some
of his old allies. ABC News reported last year that he had secretly spoken with
federal prosecutors who were investigating the former President, a story that
Meadows has since disputed. A recent Times Magazine article
called him “the least trusted man in Washington.”
The daily operations of C.P.I. are run by Corrigan, its
president, and Denton, the group’s chief operating officer. Corrigan declined
to speak with me, but Denton was eventually willing to chat. One morning in
May, we met in a coffee shop in the basement of a Senate office building. He is
genial and plainspoken, with a youthful air and a beard that hangs thickly off
his chin. During DeMint’s eight years in the Senate, Denton served as his
director of communications, and they moved to Heritage together, in 2013. With
the exception of a brief stint in the Trump Administration, where Denton worked
at the Office of Management and Budget with Vought, he has been at C.P.I. since
its creation.
“There’s nothing complicated about what we do,” he told me.
“We train staff and place staff. That’s it. There are some outgrowths of that,
in terms of supporting new groups. But, basically, we’re here to support those
who are in the fight.”
In 2021, C.P.I.’s board made a fateful and, in retrospect,
wise decision. High-ranking figures from the Trump Administration were leaving
the government and needed a place to land during the Biden years. “It’s not
hard to be a liberal in D.C.,” Denton told me. “It’s not the same for our
side.” But C.P.I.’s founders were wary of creating just another version of the
Heritage Foundation. “We had the opportunity to build a vast, huge bureaucratic
organization when all our friends were coming out of the Trump Administration,”
Denton said. “Instead, we helped them set up their own organizations.”
The structure of these groups could seem both byzantine and
incestuous to an outsider, but the idea, Denton told me, was “to insure mission
alignment.” Stephen Miller formed America First Legal, a public-interest law
group that has primarily targeted “woke corporations,” school districts, and
the Biden Administration. Vought started the Center for Renewing America, which
generated policy proposals as though the Trump Administration had never ended.
Corrigan and Denton were on the board of Vought’s group; Vought, Corrigan, and
Denton sat on the board of Miller’s group. As more organizations joined the
fold, their boards increasingly overlapped, and the roster of ideologues and
Trump loyalists grew. Gene Hamilton and Matthew Whitaker, key figures from the
Trump D.O.J., worked at America First Legal. Ken Cuccinelli, from the
Department of Homeland Security; Mark Paoletta, from the Office of Management
and Budget; and Kash Patel, from the Department of Defense, became fellows at
Vought’s group.
By the end of 2021, C.P.I. had helped form eight new
groups, each with a different yet complementary mission. The American
Accountability Foundation focussed on attacking Biden’s nominees. The State
Freedom Caucus Network helped state legislators create their own versions of
the House Freedom Caucus in order to challenge their local Republican
establishments. The Election Integrity Network, run by Mitchell, trained
volunteers to monitor polling places and investigate state and local election
officials. American Moment concentrated on cultivating the next generation of
conservative staffers in Washington.
C.P.I. connected the founders of these groups with its
network of donors and, in some instances, helped support the organizations
until they could raise money for themselves. As American Moment waited for the
I.R.S. to formalize its nonprofit tax status, for example, C.P.I. served as a
fiscal sponsor, allowing donors to earmark money for the new group by giving it
to C.P.I. The organization also offered its partners access to an array of
shared resources: discounted real estate, accounting services, legal representation.
“This all had an in-kind value of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
dollars,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. C.P.I.’s accounting firm, called
Compass Professional, was run by Corrigan’s brother; its law firm, Compass
Legal, was headed by Scott Gast, a lawyer in the Trump White House.
Aside
from C.P.I., Compass Legal’s most lucrative client to date, according to F.E.C.
filings, has been Trump himself, whose campaign and political-action committees
have paid the firm four hundred thousand dollars in the past two years. Another
major client was the National Rifle Association, which paid the firm more than
three hundred thousand dollars in 2022. Compass Legal was established in March,
2021, two months after C.P.I.’s lead lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, was forced to
resign from her job as a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner. Her
participation in Trump’s phone call to the Georgia secretary of state had
caused too much controversy. She blamed her departure on a “massive pressure
campaign” orchestrated by “leftist groups.” In a subsequent C.P.I. annual
report, the group said that a large part of its mission was helping
conservatives “survive the Leftist purge and ‘cancel-proof’ conservative
organizations.”
This was not simply the rhetoric of conservative
victimhood. Andrew Kloster, a former employee of Compass Legal who is now
Representative Matt Gaetz’s general counsel, described one of C.P.I.’s goals as
“de-risking public service on the right.” For anyone who might run afoul of
mainstream opinion, C.P.I. had created an alternative, fully self-sufficient
ecosystem. One part of it was material: recording studios, direct-mail
services, accounting and legal resources, salaried jobs and fellowships. The
other element was cultural. C.P.I. was demonstrating to Trump allies that, if
they took bold and possibly illegal action in service of the cause, they
wouldn’t face financial ruin or pariah status in Washington.
Over coffee at the Capitol, in May, Kloster, who is bald
with a bushy beard, explained the story behind a legal-defense fund that he’d
helped create, called Courage Under Fire. It supported people who’d been
“targeted for their civil service in conservative Administrations, including
those indicted for fighting the 2020 election,” he said. The fund has spent
more than three million dollars to date, according to the Washington Post,
with the money going toward legal costs incurred by John Eastman; Mike Roman, a
former Trump-campaign operative; and Peter Navarro, a former economic adviser
to Trump who has since been convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to
comply with a subpoena related to the January 6th investigation. “We started
with a lot of Trump advisers,” Kloster said. “It’s a large class.” Eastman, he
added, was a prime example: “He has been targeted for legal advice he gave in
the course of his duties consulting with former President Trump. He’s being
charged with criminal fraud. That’s for the mob lawyer in ‘The Godfather’
trying to knowingly facilitate crimes, not for someone saying, ‘Here’s what I
think the law is.’ ”
Courage Under Fire was created by Personnel Policy
Operations, a nonprofit in the C.P.I. network which, in 2022, spent more than a
million dollars on lawyers for Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark, according
to notus, an online news
site. C.P.I. maintains that the groups it has launched are independent. “We
don’t control them,” the C.P.I. spokesperson said. But Brendan Fischer, the
deputy executive director of Documented, pointed out that in 2022 nearly all
the money spent by Personnel Policy Operations came from C.P.I., and that
virtually all such spending went toward legal defense. He told me, “The most
reasonable inference is that they were routing money from C.P.I. to Personnel
Policy Operations to pay for Meadows’s and Clark’s legal fees.” (The C.P.I.
spokesperson said, “Liberal groups like these have made wild claims against the
right for years that go nowhere. C.P.I. is in compliance with all laws for
nonprofits.”)
Tim Dunn, a billionaire Texas oilman and a major donor to
C.P.I., has been tapped specifically to fund the group’s legal-defense efforts.
When Scott Perry, of Pennsylvania, the former chairman of the Freedom Caucus,
faced legal scrutiny for his involvement in January 6th—he had organized an
attempt to contest the results in his state and, after ignoring a congressional
subpoena, was ordered by a judge to turn over his cell phone to
prosecutors—Meadows arranged to pay his legal fees by asking Dunn for the money,
someone with knowledge of the arrangement told me. (Perry’s campaign and C.P.I.
both denied this account. “This is completely false,” the C.P.I. spokesperson
said. Dunn could not be reached for comment.)
C.P.I.’s headquarters is a three-story town house with a
blue door, on a leafy block near the Capitol. Inside, a warren of offices gives
way to a series of parlorlike spaces with high ceilings. There are luminous
conference rooms upstairs, each named for a prominent donor.
Last summer, I visited 300 Independence Avenue to interview
Vought. At the time, we were discussing his role in creating a congressional
subcommittee to advance a dominant Republican narrative in the House: that
Democrats had weaponized the federal government against conservatives. It was a
kind of unified theory of the deep state, which held that the Justice
Department and the U.S. intelligence community had colluded to silence
right-wing voices. It had the added utility of casting Trump as the ultimate martyr
of the conservative movement. Each of his legal travails, Vought said, proved
that Democrats were shamelessly engaged in “lawfare.”
These days, Vought has appeared in the news as a key
architect of a second-Trump-term agenda, alongside some of the other usual
suspects: Stephen Miller, Gene Hamilton, Jeffrey Clark, and Kash Patel. Trump
has been explicit about his intention to exact revenge on political enemies. “I
am your warrior, I am your justice,” he told a crowd of supporters in March of
last year. “And, for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your
retribution.” Three months later, after his arraignment in Miami for allegedly
mishandling classified documents and obstructing a federal investigation, he
added, “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt
President in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the
entire Biden crime family.”
Vought and Clark, meanwhile, have been advancing a formal
rationale to break the long-standing expectation that the D.O.J. should operate
independently of the President. The norm has been in place since Watergate, but
they have argued that Trump could run the department like any other executive
agency. Clark published his case on the Center for Renewing America’s Web site
under the title “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent.” In early
2021, while Trump was fighting the results of the election, he wanted to make
Clark the Attorney General, but the entire senior leadership of the department
threatened to resign en masse. Now, if Clark gets a top job at the D.O.J., he
is expected to use the position to try to remake the department as an
instrument of the White House.
Stephen
Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide
crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in
the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel
to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from
Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to
increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according
to the Times. The President would have to deputize federal troops
to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department
of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large
internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the
money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military.
Many of the other agenda items related to immigration that
were delayed, blocked, or never fully realized during the chaos of the first
term would be reinstated to more extreme effect in a second: an expanded ban on
refugees from Muslim-majority countries, a revocation of visas for students
engaged in certain forms of campus protests, an end to birthright citizenship.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making
a drastic error,” Miller told the Times last November. “Trump
will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most
spectacular migration crackdown.”
The overarching scheme for the second Trump term, called
Project 2025, follows an established Washington tradition. It is being
organized by the Heritage Foundation and has taken the form of a
nine-hundred-page policy tract. But the scale of this undertaking, which is
costing more than twenty million dollars, is bigger than anything Heritage has
previously attempted. The organization has hired the technology company Oracle
to build a secure database to house the personnel files of some twenty thousand
potential Administration staffers. Kevin Roberts, the current president of
Heritage, has also enlisted the participation of more than a hundred
conservative groups, as well as top figures from C.P.I.: Vought, Corrigan,
Miller, and Saurabh Sharma, the president of American Moment. “These were the
key nodes,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Roberts was paying Center for
Renewing America, American Moment, and America First Legal to do parts of the
project.” (Heritage did not respond to requests for comment.)
The fact that Heritage was helping to staff a
full-fledged maga operation,
the person went on, was a reflection of C.P.I.’s mounting influence. Two years
ago, Roberts addressed the National Conservatism Conference, an annual
gathering of far-right activists, which was hosted by an organization that is
now associated with C.P.I. “I come not to invite national conservatives to join
our movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part
of yours,” he said. Last year, Corrigan, who is on the steering committee of
Project 2025, was invited to speak at Heritage’s fiftieth-anniversary
conference. “The leadership at Heritage has brought back the C.P.I. folks even
though they got pushed out six years before,” the person close to C.P.I. told
me. “Kevin is being realistic. He needs to make peace with these guys.”
My source, who has been involved in Project 2025, outlined
a few immediate actions that Trump would take if he won. Christopher Wray, the
director of the F.B.I., would be fired “right away,” he told me. Even though
Trump nominated Wray to the position, the far right has blamed Wray for the
agency’s role in arresting people involved in the insurrection. (As Vought told
me, “Look at the F.B.I., look at the deep state. We have political prisoners in
this country, regardless of what you think about January 6th.”) The other hope
in getting rid of Wray is that, without him, the Administration could use the
agency to target its political opponents.
The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of
the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under
discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of
them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico
and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before,
during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug
cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to
Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do
if we went to war with Mexico?”
Trump’s former economic advisers Robert Lighthizer and
Peter Navarro want Trump to impose tariffs of as much as ten per cent on
foreign imports. Economists across the political spectrum have predicted that
such a policy—which could trigger an international trade war, dramatically
boosting inflation—would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy. “Lighthizer and
Navarro are fucking clowns,” the person told me.
Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests
if he wins in November. His first term was essentially bookended by
demonstrations, from the Women’s March and rallies against the Muslim ban to
the mass movement that took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, in
the summer of 2020. Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to
impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to
dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow
Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. Trump came close to doing this
in the final months of his term, in response to the Black Lives Matter
protests, but he was blocked by his Secretary of Defense and the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Something
under discussion is who they could actually appoint without Senate
confirmation,” the person added. Schedule F, the executive order from October,
2020, that enabled the purge of career civil servants, was rescinded by the
Biden Administration, but it would be reinstated by Trump. Presidents typically
take their most decisive action in the first hundred days. The plan for Trump,
I was told, was to set everything in motion “within hours of taking office.”
This was what Trump had apparently meant when he told Sean Hannity, earlier
this year, that he wouldn’t be a dictator, “except for Day One.”
The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the
most radical aspects of Project 2025. There are no benefits—only political
liabilities—to endorsing so many specifics. Trump’s supporters already know
what he stands for, in a general sense. And there is the more delicate matter
of the former President’s ego. “He wouldn’t want to be seen as taking guidance
from any other human being,” the former senior White House official told me.
“He doesn’t like to be seen as someone who doesn’t know everything already.” On
July 5th, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I
have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re
saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and
abysmal.” He said that he wished them luck.
His fortunes, though, were rising. The Presidential race
was now his to lose. By the spring, he was steadily leading in national polls,
with a larger edge in key battleground states. The Biden campaign had proposed
two debates, with a format designed to control Trump’s pugilistic impulses: no
studio audience and the microphones silenced after each answer, to prohibit
interruptions. But during the first debate, on June 27th, Biden faltered. He
stood rigidly at the podium, with a slack, vacant expression. His voice was
weak and wavering, and he repeatedly trailed off mid-thought. The disastrous
performance has since led an increasing number of Democrats to call for him to
withdraw from the race. The following week, Trump was on the golf course with
his son Barron and was caught on video summarizing the current electoral
landscape. “I kicked that old broken-down pile of crap,” he said of Biden.
“That means we have Kamala,” he went on. “I think she’s going to be better.
She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic.”
In the first year of Biden’s Presidency, C.P.I. raised
forty-five million dollars, more money than it had received in the previous
four years combined. A single donor was responsible for twenty-five million
dollars of that year’s haul: Mike Rydin, a seventy-five-year-old widower from
Houston, who in 2021 made a fortune from the sale of his company, which
developed software for the construction industry. Until then, he was a
small-time Republican donor and a relative unknown in national political
circles; in 2019, he contributed only about seven thousand dollars to the Trump
campaign, according to the Daily Beast. But Rydin told me that he considered
C.P.I.’s founder “the most honest man in America.”
While DeMint was in the Senate, he started a
political-action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to raise money for
right-wing candidates who challenged Republican incumbents in Party primaries.
“That was a cardinal sin,” the DeMint staffer told me. “He primaried his
colleagues.” Some of the candidates supported by the pac—Lee, in Utah; Rand Paul, in
Kentucky; and Marco Rubio, in Florida—defeated fellow-Republicans backed by
Senate leadership, then won their general elections. But, in other races,
DeMint’s intervention backfired. In Delaware, he championed the candidacy of
Christine O’Donnell, a conservative activist whose campaign imploded after
footage surfaced of her saying that she’d “dabbled into witchcraft.” DeMint was
unbothered. “I’d rather have thirty Marco Rubios in the Senate than sixty Arlen
Specters,” he once said, referring to the moderate Republican from
Pennsylvania, who eventually switched parties.
DeMint’s crusade reminded Rydin of his own career—the years
of financial struggles, the uncertainties, the skeptics. “I knew what it was
like to be alone,” he said. “It’s tough to be alone, to fight battles alone.”
When a representative from the Senate Conservatives Fund reached out to him, in
2009, Rydin agreed to donate a thousand dollars. “That was, like, the most
money I’d ever donated to anything,” Rydin said. Afterward, he told me,
“someone calls me and says, ‘Senator DeMint wants to talk to you.’ And I said,
‘A senator? Really?’ ”
Rydin is polite and unprepossessing, almost droll. In our
conversations, he was guarded but firm in expressing his commitment to ending
illegal immigration, cutting government spending, and getting foreign countries
to deal with their own problems. Rydin admitted that when Trump, as President,
threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico “it scared the hell out of me.” But, he
added, “everything Trump did turned out wonderfully. I’m not going to
second-guess him anymore.” In the end, Rydin’s attraction to extreme figures
seemed more personal than ideological. In 2015, he met Mark Meadows after
Meadows, then a congressman from North Carolina, attempted to oust the
Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, a radical act for which Meadows
was later described as “a legislative terrorist.” “He was absolutely terrified
to do that,” Rydin told me. “He got no support whatsoever.”
Shortly after DeMint started C.P.I., in 2017, he and a
colleague flew to Houston to meet with Rydin and other potential donors. Rydin
had donated to Heritage while DeMint was there but stopped after his departure.
(He has since resumed his contributions.) “It wouldn’t have bothered me if I
never contributed to them again,” he said, “because they were firing Jim.” Now
DeMint told him about his plans to create a conservative community in
Washington, a place where members of Congress could confer before and after
votes. “I’m on board,” Rydin told him. “You don’t have to say anything else.”
Rydin was ready to donate to C.P.I., but his wife, who
avoided politics, was uncomfortable with him giving more than twenty-five
thousand dollars. “To get her to twenty-five thousand dollars was a big deal,”
he said. By the time she died, of cancer, in 2020, he’d increased his donation
to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The next year, “I sold my company
and had a lot of money,” he told me.
C.P.I. used part of Rydin’s twenty-five-million-dollar
donation to buy, for seven million dollars, a lodge with eleven bedrooms on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland, which it named Camp Rydin. The property has a
shooting range and a horse stable. (“It’s rustic but luxurious,” the person
close to C.P.I. told me.) To date, C.P.I. has held some two dozen trainings
there for congressional staff and conservative activists, according to
travel-disclosure forms filed with the government. Rydin has also donated to many
of the groups in the C.P.I. network, including the Center for Renewing America,
American Moment, and the American Accountability Foundation. In July, America
First Legal sent out a preëlection fund-raising pitch: through August 15th, all
donations up to two million dollars would be matched by “Houstonian patriot and
generous AFL supporter Mike Rydin.”
As a nonprofit, C.P.I. is forbidden to engage in partisan
spending or certain kinds of lobbying. Its network of associated organizations,
however, has allowed it to do both of those things through a legal back door.
America First Legal, like C.P.I., is a nonprofit. But it has a related entity
called Citizens for Sanity, which can spend money on political advertising with
minimal restrictions. In the last six months of 2022, Citizens for Sanity spent
more than ninety million dollars on ads, including one that ran during the
World Series. It laid the blame for crime, high inflation, and low wages on
illegal immigration and warned viewers that Biden was leading the country
toward “World War Three.” Other ads have decried “the woke left’s war on girls’
sports” and the “woke war on our children.” The group’s spending eclipsed that
of both C.P.I. (which spent twenty-three million dollars in 2022) and America
First Legal (which spent thirty-four million dollars). It’s impossible to know
who donated the money, but the address listed on the tax documents for Citizens
for Sanity is 300 Independence Avenue.
C.P.I.’s
pitch to donors is also predicated on its close relationships with legislators
in Washington. One member of the Freedom Caucus told me that House lawmakers
were directly involved in C.P.I.’s fund-raising efforts. “When they made donor
phone calls, they talked about how C.P.I. was the home of the Freedom Caucus,”
the member told me. “The idea was ‘You should give to us because we support the
real conservatives.’ ” When House members are in Washington to take votes,
C.P.I. often arranges donor events at 300 Independence Avenue. “The presence of
the members was to help raise money, and they were requested to mingle with the
donors,” the lawmaker said.
C.P.I.’s association with the Freedom Caucus raises
questions about whether the organization can credibly claim to be a nonprofit
that steers clear of actual lobbying. In January of 2023, members of the
Freedom Caucus met at C.P.I.’s headquarters to strategize about their attempt
to block Kevin McCarthy from becoming the House Speaker. Meadows joined and
advised them on how to proceed; he was regarded as someone with expertise,
having tried to oust Boehner in 2015. “It’s pretty extraordinary that Meadows
was sitting there talking about how to deny McCarthy the Speakership and how to
negotiate concessions,” the member told me. C.P.I. also exerts an unspoken
power over lawmakers because of its ties to the House Freedom Fund, the
caucus’s political-action committee, which is also registered at 300
Independence Avenue.
Since 2021, Rydin no longer appears to be C.P.I.’s biggest
donor. His foundation gave the group $1.5 million in 2022, but, according to
C.P.I.’s tax filings, an unnamed donor contributed $15.5 million that year.
Among C.P.I.’s most recent donors are the Servant Foundation, a fund backed by
David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby; Donors Trust, a fund associated with
Leonard Leo and the Koch family; the Bradley Impact Fund, an offshoot of a
Wisconsin-based philanthropy where Cleta Mitchell serves as a board secretary;
and the Ohio food-packing magnate Dave Frecka and his wife, Brenda, who have a
conference room named after them at 300 Independence Avenue. “The previous
dark-money political-influence operations tended to be run by more old-school
billionaire, polluter, right-wing interests,” Sheldon Whitehouse, the
Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told me. “C.P.I. represents
the maga move into this
space.”
On a bright, warm day in May, I visited Saurabh Sharma, the
twenty-six-year-old head of American Moment, which describes its mission as
“identifying, educating, and credentialing” a new generation of conservative
staffers. Dressed in a blazer and tie, with round glasses and brown bit
loafers, he greeted me in front of a small door on Pennsylvania Avenue that was
wedged between a Sweetgreen and a Dos Toros. A narrow staircase led to a small
office suite that the group had rented from C.P.I.
Between February, 2022, and March, 2023, C.P.I. bought
seven buildings and a parking lot along this stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. It
made the purchases through a web of more than a dozen limited-liability
companies, taking out at least twenty-five million dollars in mortgages. What
helps the group cover the monthly payments is the rent that it charges its
network of affiliated nonprofits. Behind the buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue,
C.P.I. plans to close off the back alley and create a nine-thousand-square-foot
“campus” called Patriots’ Row. It already has a property next to the Senate; by
expanding its footprint closer to the House, it hopes to insure that staffers
from both chambers, as well as the lawmakers themselves, have places to
congregate within walking distance of their daily business.
Sharma led me past a counter with a tap for cold brew and
into a room filled with chairs and a lectern. He is originally from Texas,
where he was the youngest-ever chairman of the state’s Young Conservatives
association, and carries himself with the aplomb of someone twice his age. “No
one else is as obsessed with finding young people and making them into
extremely influential political actors within bureaucratic government life,” he
told me. “No one cares as much about doing that as I do.”
Four years ago, Sharma stayed up late one night reading an
essay by Senator J. D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, who was then a
venture capitalist and a best-selling author. The piece, titled “End the
Globalization Gravy Train,” was a statement of principles for a branch of the
conservative movement ascendant in the Trump era and known as the New Right:
economic nationalism, foreign-policy isolationism, hostility to immigration.
Sharma was struck by a portion of the essay in which Vance argued that personnel
at every level of government in Washington were not up to the task of
responding to the demands of the moment. It was something that Sharma had heard
gripes about before, during a summer internship in Washington. For too long, he
said on a recent podcast, government offices were staffed by
“twenty-three-year-old shitheads” sent to D.C. by their parents to keep them
“as far away from the family business as humanly possible.” He put it to me
more soberly: “The personnel pipeline needed to be rebuilt from scratch. Who
are the fifty twenty-year-olds we should be looking at? There needs to be a
white-glove process by which they’re brought into the fold.”
In the winter of 2021, C.P.I. convened a meeting of its top
donors in the ballroom of a Miami hotel. Sharma pitched the donors on his new
venture, alongside Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Ben Carson, the
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Trump. “It was a very risky
thing for them to do,” Sharma told me of C.P.I. “Most groups in Washington
don’t want to share their donors. It shows a great deal of confidence on the
part of C.P.I.” At the gathering, Sharma met Rydin, who immediately took to
him. Later on, while Sharma was speaking to another donor, Rydin approached the
pair. “Isn’t this guy so impressive?” Rydin said to the donor, pointing to
Sharma. “Well, are you going to help him?”
Sharma considers C.P.I. a “fraternity” devoted to, in his
telling, creating a new and lasting culture in Washington. “The right and its
people are almost like sedimentary rock,” he said. “It’s like the Grand Canyon.
You can see the layers in it. Who the President is in any given year defines
what kind of people choose to get involved in center-right politics.” He ran
through some history, starting with Barry Goldwater, in the nineteen-sixties,
and ending with Trump. “President Trump getting elected brought in an entirely
new generation of people,” he said. The problem was that most Republicans in
Washington had initially detested the former President. As a result, Sharma
said, “no one was interested in elevating a young kid that came to them and
said, ‘I’d really like to get involved in politics because President Trump was
right. We got lied into Iraq. We should shut down the border. And we’re getting
sold out by China when it comes to trade.’ ”
American
Moment, he went on, was correcting the “injustice” of the fact that, for the
first few years of Trump’s term, the views of such young people were
“artificially suppressed” in Washington. “The way that the Trump legacy will be
immortal, the way that Trump himself will be immortal, is if there’s a
corresponding generation of people that are drawn to politics based on his
vision,” Sharma said. Some conservative ideologues tend to see Trump as a wild
but ultimately necessary means to an end. In Sharma’s view, Trump is the “alpha
and the omega of the conservative movement.” He told me, “The only reason these
opportunities exist is because Trump ran and won. The only reason these
opportunities exist today is because Trump hasn’t left the scene.”
Sharma had to leave to host a book party at C.P.I.
headquarters, which was across the street, and we strolled over together. While
we waited at a crosswalk, a young congressional staffer stopped to shake
Sharma’s hand. A few other people were making their way to C.P.I.’s town house.
At the party, there was a full bar and pulled-pork sandwiches. In a few days,
American Moment would be hosting a Hawaiian-themed bash called the Lawless
Lawfare Luau, where attendees would wear leis. “I don’t know a D.C. without
C.P.I.,” Sharma told me. “But those who were around before say it was a
wasteland.” ♦
Published
in the print edition of the July
22, 2024, issue, with the headline “Inside the Trump Plan for 2025.”
