In January 2013, after an unsuccessful attempt by Tea Party conservatives to overthrow House Speaker John Boehner, a rookie congressman from North Carolina slinked into the speaker’s office complex inside the U.S. Capitol. Mark Meadows had not voted against Boehner on the House floor. But he had participated in the plotting—and word had since leaked out naming him as one of the conspirators. Frightened that he would be exiled to the hinterlands of the House, the freshman sought an audience with the speaker.
“He’s on the couch, sitting across from me in my chair, and suddenly he slides off the couch, down onto his knees, and puts his hands together in front of his chest,” Boehner recalled to me. “He says, ‘Mr. Speaker, will you please forgive me?’” (This incident was witnessed by several people, including Boehner’s chief of staff, Mike Sommers, who described it as “the strangest behavior I had ever seen in Congress.”)
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The two men carried on fine over the next couple of years—until Meadows surprised his colleagues by voting against Boehner’s reelection in 2015. “And then he sends me the most gracious note you’ll ever read, saying what an admirable job I’ve done as speaker,” Boehner recalled. “I just figured he’s a schizophrenic.”
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Friends would describe him as a respectable player—calculating and slippery but decent to a fault. Enemies would liken him to a political sociopath, someone whose charm and affability conceal an unemotional capacity for deception.
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What wasn’t clear—and still isn’t clear—is
why Meadows said what he said [contradicting Dr. Sean Conley's rosy report of Trump's condition on Saturday morning]. (I tried to get him to explain but he did not respond to messages seeking comment.)
Here again, there are competing theories among people who know him. One is that Meadows was concerned that Americans weren’t getting the full picture on the president’s health and wanted to offer a more realistic assessment.
Politico
Not buying that one.
Another is that Meadows, a lover of political drama, wanted to seed a narrative of the president on the ropes and fighting for his life, setting up the storyline of a triumphant comeback.
I could believe that, but it wasn't sanctioned, apparently, as reports are Trump was furious about it.
Whatever the case, Meadows erred not only by stepping on the doctors’ statement with his own, but by doing so anonymously, piling enormous confusion on top of an already chaotic moment. That the reporters in the pool agreed to the chief’s ground rules at such a critical time, on such a sensitive subject matter, is bad enough; what’s unfathomable is the top staffer at a White House that regularly disparages anonymous sourcing as “Fake News“ requesting the cover of background to deliver news the entire world was waiting on.
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What came next, however, was all the more bizarre: Meadows told Reuters, late on Saturday afternoon, “The president is doing very well. He is up and about and asking for documents to review. The doctors are very pleased with his vital signs. I have met with him on multiple occasions today on a variety of issues.”
The last thing Trumpers are concerned about is truthfulness and contradicting themselves.
Nobody could have predicted, when the chief of staff took over in March, that his own personal track record of unreliability would intersect so serendipitously with the Trump administration’s inability to shoot straight.
Seriously?
The combination of Trump and Meadows—a pair of known embellishers, two men who fancy themselves expert negotiators but have never sealed a major deal in Washington—struck some people in the capital city as a disaster waiting to happen. When Meadows moved into his new role, one of his former allies in the House Freedom Caucus, a personal friend, told me his biggest concern wasn’t whether Meadows would hold Trump accountable; rather, it was whether anyone in the administration would hold Meadows accountable, reining in his constant freelancing and inflated sense of himself as an operator.
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Many was the meeting of the House Freedom Caucus from which members walked away uncertain if what Meadows was telling them matched what he was telling reporters in background conversations, or what he was telling House GOP leadership in their private meetings. For his part, Paul Ryan, who clashed repeatedly with the Freedom Caucus during his time as speaker, developed a unified theory of how to deal with the group. Of its co-leaders, Meadows and Jim Jordan, Ryan believed he could deal with Jordan; strident and hard as the Ohio congressman was, Ryan always felt their communication was straightforward. Meadows, on the other hand, was always up to something, always playing the angles, always dealing in smoke and mirrors.
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Meadows has a nose for opportunity and a bottomless appetite for fame. (In my book, American Carnage, I wrote that Meadows is the only politician I’ve encountered who stacks up to a real-life version of Frank Underwood, the cunning main character in the show “House of Cards.”)
Once, in 2015, Meadows pulled aside his North Carolina colleague, Mark Walker, on the House floor. A former minister, Walker was new to Congress and eager for guidance. “You voted the wrong way,” Meadows told him about a bill up for consideration. Walker was perplexed; he had sided with Heritage Action, the arch-conservative group. And yet Meadows, a known ringleader of the right, was voting the opposite way. After some persuasion, Walker changed his vote. He later found out that he’d been duped: Meadows had personal reasons to vote against Heritage on the bill, but he didn’t want his colleague earning a better grade on the group’s scorecard, so he made sure Walker earned a demerit with him. Their relationship never recovered.
Despicable on Meadows' part (and probably part of the reason Trump hired him), but I'm not impressed with Walker. He should be voting what he believes his constituents want, not submitting to someone else's demands.
Back in 2016, when [Trump] was closing in on the Republican nomination for president, Meadows told anyone who would listen that Trump constituted a threat not just to the GOP but to America and the Constitution itself. In the weeks leading up to the party convention, he repeatedly declared to his Freedom Caucus colleagues that he might not travel to Cleveland for the affair, despite being a delegate, because he feared living with the legacy of having voted to nominate Trump. Soon after going to Cleveland, however, and taking that vote, he got to know the nominee when Trump visited North Carolina. Before long, Meadows was a fixture on the Trump campaign plane; he would often hold up his cellphone around friends to show them when Trump was phoning him.
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Just before that 2016 convention, [Meadows] admitted Trump wasn’t his first choice—or even close to it. But, he added, there was something strangely endearing about the man.
“You know the funny thing? Donald Trump is actually a lot like me,” Meadows said. “He’s going to tell you the truth, whether you like it or not.”
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