The New Gold Rush for MAGA Lobbyists
Before my interview with the lobbyist Ches (pronounced “chess”) McDowell, a Republican operative called me with a prediction: McDowell would mention his friendship with Donald Trump Jr. within five minutes. In reality, it took less than two. “Don Jr. and I own a farm together where we bear hunt,” McDowell told me when I asked about the 700-pound stuffed bear that greets visitors in the lobby of his firm, Checkmate Government Relations. Next to the bear is a chess table with a sign bearing the office Wi-Fi password: TRUMPWONTHREETIMES! In case I hadn’t caught the point, he later told me, “When Trump got shot in June, my first thought wasn’t, Oh no, a candidate for president has been shot. It was like, My friend’s dad has been shot.”
McDowell is a big man with a trim beard and a slow, welcoming drawl. He wore ostrich cowboy boots (in part because they give him a few extra inches, he said), silver warthog cuff links (because he loves hunting in Africa), and a shirt monogrammed with his initials, CFM (which he jokes stands for “Ches Fuckin’ McDowell”). In his short time in Washington, D.C., the 35-year-old has earned a reputation as someone who can get the ear of the president. The son of Baptist pastors from Welcome, North Carolina, McDowell began his career as a bankruptcy lawyer before setting up a lobbying practice in his home state. In January, after McDowell’s younger brother, Addison, became a congressman amid the Republican wave that brought Trump back to power, McDowell came to Washington too. By April, he had opened an office on Pennsylvania Avenue.
His hires include Chris LaCivita Jr., the son of one of Trump’s top campaign advisers, and Jackson Hines, the nephew of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “I didn’t hire him because he was Bobby Kennedy’s nephew,” McDowell said. “I hired him because he was Bobby Kennedy’s body man.” McDowell said his firm doesn’t sell itself as a place that can “change RFK’s mind” on issues ranging from vaccines to food dyes, but rather as one that understands his thinking. This has enabled the firm to land both Eli Lilly and a company developing a kind of helmet (“a yarmulke-looking thing,” he said) that sends “electromagnetic jolts” into the brain to help with pain management and addiction. In the second quarter of this year, McDowell expects around $5 million in lobbying revenue, and that doesn’t include his work for foreign countries.
Sometimes the job can look simple, as if Ches were playing checkers. He once advised the Danish ambassador that the way to get Trump to chill about taking over Greenland would be to build a “Fort Trump” on the island in his honor (he didn’t land the Danes as a client), and he encouraged Pakistani clients to recommend Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize (which they did and which the White House tweeted out with “a graphic for it and everything,” McDowell said). When Canada’s Council of the Federation hired Checkmate to help fend off a trade war, McDowell’s advice was to read The Art of the Deal and to “take Trump seriously, but not necessarily literally.” McDowell was also able to deliver hard goods, setting up a meeting between the Canadians and a top White House official, the deputy chief of staff James Blair. For a country with billions of dollars on the line, that was well worth the $85,000-a-month bill.
The passage of Trump’s signature legislation earlier this month proved there are still plenty of Big Beautiful Billable Hours for K Streeters, but the ground game is changing fast. “Lobbying used to be Congress-focused, but they’re not driving the show anymore,” said one Republican lobbyist. “They are all now taking orders from the administration. Trump is outsize now, even compared to his last term.” To have juice in this town these days means having access to the president and his allies, and the old bulls of lobbying no longer have as much of it. “November 4 was the day K Street died,” said McDowell. “The lobby firms’ old relationships don’t work anymore.”
In his second term, Trump has remade Washington in his own image. His administration is stocked with loyalists who were forced to pass purity tests (“My desire is to help be, let’s call it, the ax murderer, to put things mildly,” Don Jr. told me late last year about weeding out insufficiently loyal applicants). Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation to carve Trump’s face into Mt. Rushmore and rename the D.C. Metro the “Trump Train.” The latest breed of influence peddlers, like McDowell, understand there’s a new meme coin of the realm, something beyond the grasp of the Establishment: blind allegiance to the cause or else. “There’s an ongoing battle right now with Trump-aligned folks in the lobbying-and-influence industry to expose and remove people who are anti-Trump from key positions in official Washington,” Breitbart’s Matt Boyle told me. “It’s going to be like the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.”
In May, I met with a Republican lobbyist in a discreet steakhouse corner booth, where he ordered his usual, a Woodford Manhattan, extra-large rock. He was armed for a shootout in the most Washington way possible: with opposition research. “There’s this dossier you should see,” he said, as he tapped his feet — loafers, no socks — beneath the table. This document, he said, would expose the “true grifters” of K Street: the heads of the major trade associations, who spent years profiting from anti-Trump virtue signaling and are now vying to do business with the man.
“These guys need to be called out,” the lobbyist said. “I just fucking hate hypocrisy.” Never mind that he was the sort of lobbyist who could take on any client, no matter how nefarious, without losing a wink of sleep. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “I’ll argue either side of any issue, whatever company gets to me first or pays me more.” Yet the duplicity of these individuals was beyond the pale. He said he’d spent years being “laughed at” by Republicans who found the whole MAGA thing gauche: “K Street is full of people who let their masks fall once Trump lost and who have gotten awfully quiet about their past statements now that Washington is his again.”
In his sights were the likes of Rob Nichols of the American Bankers Association, who called January 6 “a dark day for our democracy”; Jay Timmons of the National Association of Manufacturers, who in 2021 wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked against Trump; and Nick Calio of Airlines for America, which under his leadership celebrated Pride Month. The White House is aware of the dossier, the lobbyist said, and the vendetta campaign appears to be working.
“The whole point of this industry is to be someone who has a seat at the table,” Boyle told me. “And if you’re a Bush-globalist, Establishment-loser Republican, then you don’t get a seat at the table.”
A lot of people are vying for seats. There are currently around 12,000 registered lobbyists in the U.S. Their work can sometimes seem opaque. They throw fundraisers and ask for favors. They meet with lawmakers and their staffs, sometimes to try to persuade them on an issue and other times to bring back political intelligence to their clients. They broker meetings with White House officials and help draft legislation. Lobbyists raked in $4.4 billion last year and are on pace to crush that number in 2025.
In reality, there’s way more money sloshing around the influence industry than that. There are the Trump-aligned social-media influencers reportedly getting paid by big soda to undermine the government’s attempt to ban people from buying sugary drinks with food stamps. Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn was investigated by the Trump transition team over allegations that he was shaking down Cabinet nominees for money (Epshteyn has called the allegations, which were not criminal in nature, “false and defamatory,” and the review concluded with no apparent consequences). There are PR gurus who can get hit pieces about political and media adversaries placed in Breitbart. (“They fucking hate Breitbart hit pieces,” one consultant told me, referring to meddlesome journalists.)
Washington is also full of consultants who essentially do the job of lobbyists but are not registered and so do not have to disclose their clients or their income if they limit their lobbying work — in other words, as long as they don’t spend too much time on the phone with their friends in the government, they can keep their business private. These consultants include Arthur Schwartz, a knife fighter known for digging up dirt on journalists and blasting political opponents on social media. In one particularly nasty spat, he called for a primary challenge to Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whom he later referred to as a “literal cuck” on X. “Arthur Schwartz is a political hack that should probably just keep on being a smart guy and a billionaire because he’s a shitty political consultant,” Tillis told journalists in March. By the time the One Big Beautiful Bill was moving through Congress, Schwartz was working behind the scenes to remove an amendment championed by Tillis. He succeeded — if on a technicality. Tillis has announced he won’t be seeking reelection.
While not actually a billionaire, Schwartz — another friend of Don Jr.’s and a confidant of Vice-President J. D. Vance — has done well for himself lately, locking down contracts with companies such as Oracle, AM General, ConocoPhillips, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, according to a person familiar with the business. Other consultants doing similar work include Andy Surabian (who runs in the same circles as Schwartz) and Robert O’Brien, a national security adviser in the first Trump administration.
For those on the inside, there are, if anything, too many opportunities to make money. “I haven’t even had time to make it to the golf course since November,” a former senior official in Trump’s first administration who now works as a lobbyist told me. “It sucks. But it’s lucrative.” How lucrative? I visited the home of one Republican consultant who said he stands to make eight figures this year and rarely works more than four hours a day. “I could double my income if I was willing to work a full day,” he said. I had no way of verifying this, but I was sitting in a hulking Virginia mansion with a fleet of luxury cars in the driveway.
Still, everyone in Trump’s Washington knows there’s a fine line between being successful and being too successful. The first Trump era was filled with various hangers-on who bragged about their connections to the president only to disappear from the scene. “They all keep a low profile now,” Steve Bannon told me about the new lobbyists. “Eight years ago, they were promoting themselves. The smart ones try to stay behind the scenes.” These days, there’s an oft-repeated expression around town: “Pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered.”
Of all the pigs in Trump’s Washington, Ballard Partners may be the fattest. Since November, Brian Ballard’s firm has signed more than 130 new clients, and in the first quarter of the year his firm brought in $14 million — his biggest quarter ever, more than doubling his previous record of $6.7 million in the middle of 2020. But remaining in good stead with the administration can be tricky, and he’s now big enough to have a target on his back. When I visited Ballard in his downtown office in early June, I asked whether he’d noticed a major change in K Street since the inauguration. “It’s not like barbarians at the gate; it’s an evolution,” he told me. “Ten years from now, someone is going to take me down. They’re trying as we speak.”
A few weeks earlier, Ballard had been preparing to meet his wife and daughters in Spain for a European getaway when he got a startling text from a reporter at Politico. The site was planning to run a story about how Ballard had been iced out of the White House. The article, published soon after, went like this: Earlier in the year, a Ballard lobbyist had persuaded Trump to promote a “Strategic Crypto Reserve” on Truth Social. Trump subsequently learned that one of the tokens he listed was backed by Ballard’s client. The president felt like he’d been played and was furious. The story couldn’t have come at a worse time — between the tariffs chaos and the looming Big Beautiful Bill, there was more work than lobbyists knew what to do with.
Ballard believed the story had been planted by a competitor who wanted to deprive him of his proximity to the throne. He reached out to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who used to work for Ballard Partners, and asked for a meeting with the president. She told him he could come by the next day. He canceled his flight to Spain, much to the chagrin of his wife, and “buried the hatchet.” Months earlier, the president had told Ballard, “You’re lucky you took care of Susie. She’s the most powerful woman in the world right now.” In the wake of the Politico article, Ballard cashed in on his luck. The meeting with Trump went so well for the lobbyist that one of his competitors joked Ballard might have orchestrated the entire thing just to show the world he could have a face-to-face with the president.
Still, he has to tread carefully. Earlier this year, Ballard helped facilitate a meeting between Vance and Mathias Döpfner, the head of media company Axel Springer. Before they met, Business Insider, which Axel owns, published a report on Don Jr.’s business dealings that compared him to Hunter Biden. Knowing how the family would react, Ballard dropped Axel Springer, which had already paid him some $80,000. “It was an easy decision for me,” he said.
One especially Trumpy sideline in Washington these days is the business of pardons. Convicted tax frauds, bribers, and crypto swindlers have been offering well-connected lobbyists and lawyers as much as $10 million to help them get a pardon. Roger Ver, known as “Bitcoin Jesus” and charged with evading more than $48 million in taxes, spent $600,000 between February and April of this year enlisting the services of Roger Stone (Stone received a pardon from Trump in 2020; Ver is still hoping for his). Trevor Milton, a former billionaire who donated nearly $2 million to the president’s reelection efforts, hired Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, Brad Bondi, to advocate on his behalf and was pardoned, sparing him prison time as well as having to pay $165 million to the investors he defrauded with his electric-truck company. Todd and Julie Chrisley, the reality-TV stars known as the “Trumps of the South” who were convicted of evading taxes and defrauding banks of nearly $20 million, tapped a lawyer named Alex Little who successfully helped them with their cause. In May, Trump issued a flurry of pardons, and you could practically see the money raining down on the middlemen.
“It’s a risk, though,” one lobbyist who is hesitant about doing pardon work told me. “As soon as Trump thinks of you as someone selling GET OUT OF JAIL FREE cards and getting rich off of it, you’re in trouble.” Little knows this: He has worked on seven pardon cases under Trump and secured four of them, but he hasn’t seen any multimillion-dollar windfalls from his pardon work, he said, nor is he seeking them. The publicity from successfully helping people like the Chrisleys, however, has helped raise his profile. In June, potential clients were burning up his phone lines — most were turned down (he wanted only cases with a high chance of success). But these folks won’t have a hard time finding willing lawyers or lobbyists. “Not if they have money,” he said.
“Pardon shopping” isn’t new, but the sales season is bigger and longer than ever. It used to be that presidents would issue the vast majority of their pardons at the end of their time in office. Trump, however, appears to see pardons as a way to fight back against a legal system that was “weaponized” against him. “He’s in a unique position as a president who was treated in a unique and unfair way,” said Jim Trusty, a former lawyer for the president who currently is working on one pro bono pardon case.
There’s no playbook for getting a pardon. One person who has done pardon work with the Trump White House said there’s a “chaos theory” to the process. Sometimes all it takes to finalize a pardon is a few minutes on the phone with the president.
One benefit of creating a thriving pardons business is that the new class of lobbyists can take advantage of it too. “The Biden era wasn’t exactly prime season for me,” the lobbyist Barry Bennett told me with a giggle when I met him in the lobby of the Georgetown Ritz-Carlton. “But now it’s time to make hay while the sun shines.” His work during the first Trump administration led to an IRS audit, he said, that felt like a “proctology exam” as well as an FBI investigation into whether he had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law that requires people lobbying for foreign entities to declare that work to the U.S. government. Bennett said he spent his own money fighting the charges before entering into an agreement in which he paid a $100,000 fine and consented not to lobby for foreign governments for 18 months. Now he was just weeks away from being able to jump back into the foreign-lobbying game — and he knows how to protect himself. “At the end of this administration, if J. D. Vance isn’t the next president, the line for preemptive pardons is going to be around the block,” he said with a smirk. “And I, for one, plan on being in that line.”
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