As Congress and the Justice Department continue to investigate the events of Jan. 6, Trumpworld is desperate for a legal scapegoat — and it looks like former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows could be the chosen one.
Media reports say Trump’s inner circle views Meadows as a likely fall guy for the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump’s legal team has reportedly begun strategizing around Meadows’ downfall, while Trump himself has privately denied knowing that his former aide was up to no good.
“Mark is gonna get pulverized ... and it’s really sad,” one of Trump’s current legal advisers told Rolling Stone. “He was obviously just trying to perform for Trump, and now he’s maybe screwed himself completely.”
Sad may not be the right word for it, but it’s certainly ironic that even the president’s biggest sycophant isn’t safe from a Trump betrayal. Meadows’ undying loyalty to Trump led him to forsake his country — and now the man he sold his soul to is willing to forsake him, too.
So was it worth it, Mark? Did you get what you wanted?
In his 2021 memoir, “The Chief’s Chief,” Meadows wrote that a critically important duty of any chief of staff is to “tell the most powerful man in the world when you believed he was wrong.”
Unfortunately, that was not something Meadows often did himself. Unlike some of Trump’s other advisers, Meadows was far more of an enabler than a dissenter when it came to his boss’s increasingly desperate attempts to claim victory in an election that he obviously lost.
Meadows unexpectedly showed up in Georgia in December 2020 and attempted to “observe” an audit of ballot signatures. He also raised the possibility of bribing state election investigators with “a sh**load of POTUS stuff.”
He happily allowed members of “Team Crazy” to feed the president false conspiracy theories about nonexistent election fraud and stood by as they suggested illegal plots to overturn the results.
He kept looking for loopholes that might keep Trump in office, despite assuring Attorney General William Barr and White House counsel Pat Cipollone that Trump would concede after the Electoral College met on Dec. 14.
Worst of all, Meadows knew of the potential for violence on Jan. 6 before it happened, and did little to encourage the president to intervene once it began. With democracy on the line, Meadows wasn’t thinking about his country. He was thinking only of himself.
Most accounts of Meadows depict him as a calculated, deceptive status seeker who regularly played both sides. Colleagues have said he is “one of the worst people ever to enter the Trump White House” and an “absolute disaster” who played to “all the president’s worst instincts.”
“Mark told so many people so many different things,” Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, testified last month.
To be clear, Meadows does shoulder a lot of the blame for what took place during the final months of Trump’s presidency. He took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he violated it a hundred times over. But Meadows is hardly the only person guilty in this scenario. He was not, after all, a rogue adviser acting of his own accord — Trump was the kingpin, and, as one New Yorker article put it, Meadows was the matador.
He isn’t exactly the picture of innocence now, either. He reportedly sought a pardon for his actions on Jan. 6. He has refused to comply with the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoenas. He may have attempted through an intermediary to influence the congressional testimony of his top aide, who testified under oath before the committee.
In March 2020, when he accepted the job in Trump’s White House, Meadows likely thought that it would buy him a ticket to power. Instead, it might be his downfall.
