The missing piece in this story is the Community Bible Church, formed in 1983 by former congregants of the First Presbyterian Church of Highlands who rejected that denomination’s tolerant view of gay rights. By the time of the Meadowses’ arrival in Highlands in 1987, C.B.C. had only a few dozen members but was already an emerging power in the community. At the church, Meadows — a 27-year-old Highlands newcomer without a college degree who had worked in customer relations for Tampa Electric Co. — found all the help he needed. Its members would provide him with building space for his sandwich shop, Aunt D’s Place; later, with a new career in real estate; and after that, with campaign donors and volunteers.

But his main benefactor in Highlands would turn out to be one of the church’s founders, an elderly woman named Ginger Glasson. “She was infatuated with Mark Meadows from their first meeting,” recalled her son, Gregory Glasson. (His mother died in 2002.) Known around town for her reflexive generosity and for cooking food that Meals on Wheels would deliver to poor residents, Glasson went further for Meadows, deeding him a lush tract of land, part of a set she had originally planned to give to her five children, which eventually became the site of the Meadows family’s residence. She agreed to incorporate a business with Meadows, Randall Burnett Investments (named after his and her middle names, respectively), through which they purchased a couple of investment tracts — presumably with Glasson’s money.

Two years after opening his sandwich shop, Meadows unloaded it to a couple from Florida. He took a job at the local hardware store while his wife worked as a salesperson for Mary Kay cosmetics, driving around Highlands in a pink car. In 1991, Glasson came to his rescue again. She acquired a local pizzeria and hired Meadows to run the place. Meadows found the work stressful, however. Just a few months after acquiring the pizzeria, Glasson put it up for sale, telling its eventual buyer, David Bee, as he recalls: “Mark’s left the pizza place. I only bought it to have something to do during the day and to help him out.”

Glasson happened to have a close friend in the real estate business: John Cleaveland, the mayor of Highlands and, like Glasson, one of Community Bible Church’s founders. In 1992, John Cleaveland Realty hired Glasson’s friend as a sales associate. As Cleaveland’s half brother, Mike Thompson, would recall: “Ginger really loved Mark. He was kind of like a son to her.” But Glasson later came to view him differently, for reasons that are still unclear. While remaining close to Cleaveland and his wife, she cut off ties with Meadows and never mentioned him again to her children, who came to hold the view that she felt cheated by her association with the young man from Tampa.

But Highlands’s new real estate agent no longer needed anyone’s charity. Meadows entered the trade just as the area was undergoing a boom, owing to the expansion of Route 441, which connected western North Carolina to Atlanta. “It was a real estate agent’s heyday,” says Stephen Gleaner, one of Meadows’s former co-workers. “Eighty to 90 percent of the people who came to me bought property.” Still, Meadows quickly distinguished himself. “He was very intuitive,” Thompson recalls. “It was a new age in Highlands, and he knew how to seize the opportunity.”

Meadows soon formed his own firm, bought and later sold a country club and relocated with his wife and three young children to a lake house in nearby Cashiers. In a highly competitive regional market, Meadows rubbed others the wrong way for reasons that can only partly be explained by professional jealousy. “He’s a con artist,” says Mitch Gurganus, a retired forestry official who surveyed a property for Meadows for $1,600, which he says Meadows then refused to pay. Another local real estate agent, Matthew Eberz, told me that he became so enraged during a confrontation after Meadows went behind his back to woo one of his clients that Eberz grabbed Meadows by the throat. “Most of the agents back then had a disdain for him,” Eberz says.

But Meadows also had numerous admirers. “When he would walk into a room,” says Steve Kerhoulas, who became the pastor of Community Bible Church in 1994 after Meadows recommended him to the other church leaders, “you sensed someone of importance had entered.”

To conservative Christian audiences in the years before he joined the Trump White House, Meadows would recall the day in 2011 when he called his wife from his car to say, “You know, honey, I feel like the Lord is leading me to run for Congress,” and then, in his telling, pulled over to the side of the road and threw up at the prospect. The folks back home knew how unlikely this story was — how Meadows in fact spent years assiduously moving up the region’s G.O.P. hierarchy: chairing precinct and county groups, cutting checks to Republican candidates and traveling to Washington to cultivate relations with national evangelical leaders like Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer.

True to form, the Republican candidate for the newly vacated and favorably redrawn 11th Congressional District styled himself simultaneously as a white-collar conservative and a Tea Partier, at one point predicting at a Tea Party event that President Barack Obama would be sent “home to Kenya or wherever it is.” As one of his campaign staff members, Carlton Huffman, would recall, “Once he got up in front of a room, he was Clintonesque, and I use that term purposefully, to appear genuine in terms of how he handled himself.” John Boehner, the speaker of the House, campaigned for him; so did Amy Kremer, the chairwoman of the Tea Party Express (and later one of the main organizers of the Jan. 6 rally in Washington at which Trump spoke). Having donated $265,000 to his own campaign, Meadows vanquished the field of eight Republican candidates and then routed his Democratic opponent in the November 2012 general election.

He arrived in Washington with no apparent intention of being a backbencher. His willingness to assert himself into the policymaking fray at times made a positive impression, as when he worked behind the scenes in 2014 with President Obama’s State Department officials, and without publicly criticizing the Democratic administration, to help win the release of a Sudanese woman who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. He spent hours alone in his office, poring over an immense volume of House rules, seeking ways in which a junior member of Congress might upend its hidebound hierarchy.

Though quick to ingratiate himself — “You look like money!” was a familiar greeting — he did not feel appreciated by Boehner and in his first month sought to have the speaker deposed. The effort failed, and as Tim Alberta reported in Politico, Meadows literally got down on one knee in the speaker’s office and begged for forgiveness. In January 2015, Meadows and Jordan formed the House Freedom Caucus as a battering ram to oppose the Republican leadership. Six months later, he exercised what was then an obscure parliamentary maneuver known as a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. Though Meadows’s rump faction was too small to oust Boehner by a majority vote, the speaker decided that four years of intransigence from the right was sufficient and resigned that fall.

Meadows, flanked by (from left) Mark Sanford, Jim Jordan, Mike Lee and Rand Paul, became chairman of the House Freedom Caucus in 2017, at the beginning of Trump’s presidency. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Meadows seemed unsure of what to do with his newly acquired notoriety. Though hugely popular back in the district and a favorite among the Christian right, in the House chamber he thrashed about ineffectively. Working to secure the top Republican spot on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, he had his efforts undone by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and an instant enemy was made. It was a source of dry amusement to Republican colleagues how Meadows would flatter someone after he had just finished stabbing that same member in the back. His staff adored him yet could not help regarding him as a human question mark: pious yet conniving, ideologically committed yet consumed by the need for attention. And whenever an aide wondered privately if there was something about the boss that did not quite add up, somehow wrapped up in that mystery was the man he chose to be his chief of staff, Kenny West.

West, from the bucolic western North Carolina town Hayesville, worked for his family’s insurance company while dabbling in local Republican politics before deciding to run for Congress in 2012 as a “fiscal conservative and a Christian man.” In the field of eight primary candidates, West came in sixth, attracting little notice even when he reportedly hinted that the front-runner, Mark Meadows, possessed a character flaw.

Meadows’s campaign aides at the time had a vague idea of what West might be referring to: rumors that Meadows had conducted an extramarital affair. (During my visits to Highlands over a decade later, I found that these rumors persisted, albeit with no evidence to substantiate them.)

Though this small-town gossip caused a mild disturbance among the aides, a far bigger surprise came just after Meadows’s victory. Though West barely knew Meadows, was not terribly familiar with much of the 11th District and did not seem to possess any skills or experience that would suit him to running a congressional office in Washington, Meadows nonetheless selected him over more qualified people to be his most senior and highest-paid staff member just after the election. Adding to the puzzle was that Meadows issued West six postelection payments from his campaign fund over a month’s time, totaling $9,600, which the congressman-elect’s F.E.C. disclosure simply listed as “compensation.”

West and his wife quickly developed a friendship with the Meadowses, and West was known to start the workday in prayer with Meadows. But to other staff members, the mystery of West’s employment deepened as his incompetence became apparent to them. Then, at the end of 2014, several female staff members reported that Meadows’s chief of staff had engaged in inappropriate behavior: touching their hair, staring down their blouses or directly at their breasts and requesting that they drive around rural North Carolina with him. Visibly disturbed, Meadows assured the female aides that he would take care of the matter.

‘It’s vintage Mark Meadows, telling whomever he’s talking to what he thinks they want to hear.’

Meadows discussed the problem with Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, who then suggested that his own chief of staff, a woman and former sex-crimes prosecutor, interview Meadows’s aides. Gowdy and his chief of staff subsequently informed Meadows that the women’s complaints were credible and that he needed to do something. Meadows suggested that perhaps he could simply move West to another office building. That would not alleviate the problem, he was told. As he had done with his aides, Meadows told Gowdy and his chief that he would handle things. “My recollection is, it’s vintage Mark Meadows, telling whomever he’s talking to what he thinks they want to hear,” Gowdy told me.

A few months passed before Gowdy learned that Meadows had not fired or even demoted West but instead had simply instructed him not to return to the Washington and district offices. Only after Gowdy confronted Meadows on the House floor was West demoted and later dismissed. Even so, Meadows continued to pay his former chief of staff a salary. The House’s Office of Congressional Ethics opened an investigation. Meadows and West refused to cooperate. Meadows was fined $40,000 (representing the amount West was improperly paid) by the House Committee on Ethics. (West admitted at the time that he touched a woman’s hair once but denied the other allegations against him.) Meadows continued to deny that he had acted improperly.

One morning this past November, I showed up to West’s house in Hayesville. He was standing in his driveway, waiting for members of his family so that they could car-pool to a great-aunt’s funeral. Though his friendly demeanor became more subdued after I identified myself, he shook my hand and then politely reflected on his time with Meadows. “I think Mark and Debbie are fine people,” he said. “I don’t have any remorse. I would work with him again.”

He denied ever having said anything that questioned Meadows’s character. “I don’t think nobody’s got character defects,” West said. “I just think when you’re dealing in D.C., people want Jesus Christ up there.”

I told West that it struck many as mysterious that Meadows had hired as his chief of staff someone who had no experience in Washington. But he had an easy rejoinder for that: “Neither did Mark.”

It was Debbie Meadows who created the first connective tissue between her husband and Trump. Meadows’s staff knew to accommodate the wishes of his wife, who kept a desk in his Washington office and occasionally sat in on meetings. She had friends in Washington, like Jordan’s wife, and relationships with right-wing religious groups like the Word of Faith Fellowship, a conservative church in Spindale, N.C., that was the subject of an investigation by The Associated Press that found the congregation had assaulted members in an effort to rid them of sin, which the church continues to deny. In October 2016, following the revelation that Trump had been caught on tape bragging about groping women, Debbie Meadows and other Republican congressional wives got on a bus chartered by Women for Trump to drive around North Carolina, a swing state, to defend him. At one event, she took pains to argue that “Donald Trump’s character is not actually what we’re voting on. We’re voting on his vision, his policy and his concerns.” Trump frequently expressed his gratitude to Women for Trump — which would become a mainstay at future Trump rallies — and to Debbie Meadows in particular.

After an awkward first few months of the Trump presidency that found Meadows, who had just become the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, opposing the new administration’s proposed evisceration of the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that it did not eviscerate deeply enough, the two men warmed to each other. Trump would call Meadows every evening after Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. Delighted by his access to the president, Meadows frequently put Trump on speakerphone — one time doing so in the middle of a speech he was giving — so that others could appreciate how close he was to the leader of the free world.

And there was one job that would bring him yet closer. Becoming White House chief of staff first required undermining the man who held the position at the time, Meadows’s friend and fellow Freedom Caucus alumnus Mick Mulvaney. As rumors swelled in late 2019 that Trump was considering a switch, Mulvaney relayed to Kevin McCarthy Meadows’s protestations: “Oh, Mick, I don’t want it.”

“He’s screwing you every day,” McCarthy warned Mulvaney. When I asked Mulvaney recently about Meadows’s connivances, he replied casually that being back-stabbed came with the territory and, in any event, that there had been an understanding with Trump that he was holding the job only temporarily. He also told me that he had recommended Meadows to Trump as a good replacement. “That turned out to be perhaps the single worst piece of advice that I gave the president,” Mulvaney said. When I asked him to explain this, he responded by saying that a chief of staff needed to be able to tell a president things that he did not wish to hear. “In hindsight,” Mulvaney said, “Mark wasn’t very good at that.”

Trump announced the personnel change in a message posted on Twitter on the evening of Friday, March 6, 2020. A few days into his new job, Meadows invited his aide Cassidy Hutchinson into his West Wing office and, according to her 2023 memoir, “Enough,” described what her first major project would be: “We’re going to start working on people we need to get rid of who are disloyal to the president, starting with the people who leak to the press.”

‘Meadows always told the president what he wanted to hear. And when he didn’t have the answer that the president wanted, he would go and try to make that answer a reality.’

Numerous Trump White House officials with whom I spoke expressed the belief that under Mark Meadows — who in speeches enjoyed ridiculing Washington politicians for having “the backbone of a banana” — the Oval Office lacked any semblance of gatekeeping and the zaniest of MAGA confederates enjoyed free run of the West Wing. According to testimony given to the Jan. 6 House committee by Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former White House communications director who previously served in the same role for Meadows in Congress, “Meadows didn’t know what was going on in 90 percent of the building.” A continued show of devotion to the boss was his focus, she added: “Meadows always told the president what he wanted to hear. And when he didn’t have the answer that the president wanted, he would go and try to make that answer a reality.”

A telling if somewhat cringeworthy moment described in Meadows’s memoir occurred when President Trump contracted Covid and was ushered off to Walter Reed hospital. Before the short walk across the White House lawn to Marine One, Trump confessed to his chief of staff that he was too weak to carry his own briefcase. Hesitating for a moment, Meadows then squirted sanitizer on his hand and lifted what he described as “the possibly contaminated briefcase.” Moved by his fealty, Trump said, “I knew you were my guy.”

Meadows, then White House chief of staff, exiting Marine One with Donald Trump in October 2020 at Walter Reed medical center, where Trump would be treated for Covid-19.Meadows, then White House chief of staff, exiting Marine One with Donald Trump in October 2020 at Walter Reed medical center, where Trump would be treated for Covid-19. Oliver Contreras/Reuters

As it turned out, this sentiment would later form the basis of Meadows’s argument in the Fulton County case that he should not be tried in state court. Everything Trump expected of him, from carrying the president’s suitcase to meddling in the affairs of Georgia election workers, was, by definition, the job of a federal official.

More than at any other time during his political career, the weeks between the November 2020 election and the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 revealed Mark Meadows’s chronic avoidance of speaking hard truths, no matter how desperately the situation called for it.

As seen in the text exchanges that Meadows turned over to the Jan. 6 committee, shortly after the election, he assured Ginni Thomas — the wife of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, who often hosted meetings of conservative groups that Meadows had attended — that “we will fight until there is no fight left.” When a California-based Trump donor who was a private-wealth manager at UBS expressed on Nov. 13 the hope that Trump would concede after all legal remedies were exhausted, Meadows responded reassuringly, “He will do just that.”

A week later, however, after learning from the White House social media director, Dan Scavino, that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia had told a reporter there was “no doubt” about Biden’s victory in that state, Meadows replied tersely, “Pathetic,” and thereafter helped facilitate a backdoor pressure campaign by Trump against Raffensperger. But on Dec. 18, when a rogue group of election deniers led by Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and the attorney Sidney Powell made their way into the Oval Office and urged Trump, over the objections of his White House lawyers, to declare martial law and seize voting machines, Meadows tried to stay out of the meeting entirely, according to Cassidy Hutchinson’s account. “I’m not going to lose my job because of these guys,” he told her.

Until Jan. 6, according to his text messages, Meadows offered bland assurances to Republicans fretting over the election results: “Working on it.” “Let me see what I can get for you.” “Will keep fighting.” And when it came to whether Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to overturn the election, Meadows told Pence he concurred with him that he had none — although as Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, dryly put it to the Jan. 6 committee, “I think Mark had told so many people so many different things that it was not something that I would necessarily accept as, OK, well, that means that’s resolved.” Indeed, even as Meadows was fighting to keep his boss in office, he was apparently preparing for life after the White House: He finalized the contract for his memoir on Jan. 9, 2021.

As rioters overtook the Capitol, Representative William Timmons, Republican of South Carolina, wrote, “The president needs to stop this ASAP,” to which Meadows replied, “We are doing it.” Another Republican House member, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, wrote, “Fix this now,” to which Meadows responded, “We are.” Told by Donald Trump Jr., “He’s got to condem this [expletive],” Meadows replied: “I am pushing hard. I agree.” When Sean Hannity implored, “Can he make a statement?” Meadows responded, “On it.”

In reality, according to testimony by Hutchinson, Meadows spent much of that afternoon instead on his office couch, staring at his phone, and occasionally saying of Trump to senior staff members like the White House counsel Pat Cipollone, “He doesn’t want to do anything.”

Neither, therefore, did Meadows. As Mulvaney told me, “You’ve got to wonder how much of what happened on Jan. 6 is related to Mark being afraid to tell the president the truth.”

Today Meadows’s West Wing in exile, the Conservative Partnership Institute, is a short walk from the Capitol, in an elegant if somewhat weathered three-story building. Meadows is only too happy to show people his spacious and sunlit office, impressively festooned with White House memorabilia, though with little if any wall space dedicated to commemorating his seven years as a congressman and before that his time as a real estate agent in western North Carolina.

His title, senior partner, would seem to suggest a stature inferior to that of C.P.I.’s chairman, Jim DeMint (the former archconservative U.S. senator from South Carolina who became a founder of the organization in 2017 after being ousted as president of the Heritage Foundation), and that of its chief executive, Ed Corrigan (another Heritage alum). But Meadows is paid far more than them or anyone else at the organization. He is manifestly C.P.I.’s marquee figure, the affable conduit between the MAGAsphere’s donor community and its new crop of Mark Meadowses in the Capitol. Described in the 2022 C.P.I. annual report as “the most dangerous man in the Swamp,” Meadows has in fact revolved out of and back into Washington’s power substructure, affixing himself there like so many before him.

C.P.I. has lent Meadows the sheen of enduring relevance. Still, to see its senior partner lending a hand to his old friend Jordan’s lackluster campaign for speaker and handing out awards at C.P.I. ceremonies to lesser legislators like Senator Tommy Tuberville is to understand him as an Olympian climber thwarted well shy of the summit. It was only a little more than three years ago, in the waning days of the 2020 campaign, that he and Debbie Meadows were flying with President Trump on Air Force One and his wife was overheard by others on the plane saying quietly to her husband, “This will be yours one day.”

Meadows and members of his legal team leaving the U.S. District Court in Atlanta after a hearing on his petition to move his case to federal court. Dustin Chambers/Reuters

Then again, it was just over two years ago that Mark Meadows seemed like a man in free fall. The Jan. 6 committee recommended to the Department of Justice in December 2021 that criminal contempt charges be brought against him for refusing to appear for a deposition. Then, in March 2022, The New Yorker reported that he had registered to vote in North Carolina in the 2020 election using the address of a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, where he had never resided, prompting an investigation by the state’s attorney general. A year later, Meadows surrendered in Atlanta to charges of racketeering and soliciting a violation of an oath of a public officer. A few days after being booked and released on $100,000 bond, Meadows testified on his own behalf at a U.S. District Court hearing, arguing, so far unsuccessfully, that his case should be moved out of Georgia and into federal jurisdiction, as the actions in question were those of a federal officer. Meadows addressed the prosecution’s attorney Anna Green Cross as “ma’am” 35 times. He assured Judge Steve C. Jones that he was taking care to testify accurately, saying, “I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

But things have long had a way of somehow settling themselves in Mark Meadows’s favor. On Dec. 30, 2022, the North Carolina attorney general’s office closed its investigation into the matter of the mysterious mobile home that Meadows claimed as his residence. Though he declined to cooperate with the authorities, the office nonetheless concluded that because the Meadowses had in fact leased the mobile home that year and Debbie Meadows had been seen over the course of a few days on the property, there was insufficient evidence of Mark Meadows’s having committed voter fraud. Then, last August, came the federal indictment of Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 riot. The name “Mark Meadows” was not mentioned once in the 45 pages.

Most stupefying of all: Last month, the prosecutor in the Georgia case, Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, was accused in a court filing by attorneys of one of Meadows’s co-defendants, the former Trump official Michael Roman, of having engaged in misconduct by hiring a romantic partner as her highest-paid prosecutor for the case and then sharing in the windfall through cruises and other travel she went on with him. The prospect of such a bizarre eventuality’s upending the Georgia case, and in the process bringing Meadows’s legal jeopardy to an end, had nothing to do with the cunning he long prided himself on. It was just dumb luck.

Still, where all this left Meadows was unclear. A report from C.P.I. to its donors this fall thanked them for praying for Meadows during his dark hour of “political targeting.” Reading it, I was reminded of a speech that Meadows, then a congressman, gave to the Conservative Women’s Network in December 2017, in which he described an instance of persecution from centuries past. It involved the Dutch pilgrims who set sail in 1620, seeking a haven where they could worship freely. A painting in the Capitol Rotunda memorializes them huddled in prayer on the deck of the ship.

The man holding the Bible in the painting, Meadows pointed out to his audience, was named William Brewster. “He’s actually my 11th great-grandfather,” he said. “There was no way that he ever thought that his portrait would be in the Rotunda of the most powerful place on the face of the globe.” Nor, Meadows added, could Brewster have possibly imagined that his 11th great-grandson would one day be serving in that same building.

The Times attempted to retrace his account through genealogical records but could not confirm the supposed lineage from Brewster to Meadows. His claim of a connection to Brewster may be not so much a lie but a case of wishful thinking.

But what stayed with me was the larger conclusion Meadows drew from the story. As he told the audience that day, his forefather had fled to unknown shores for a reason: “He was just escaping because he believed in the unbelievable.” Meadows then exhorted his listeners, in words that could serve as his life story, or perhaps his undoing, “So, believe the unbelievable.”

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Robert Draper is a domestic correspondent for The Times. He is the author of, most recently, “Weapons of Mass Delusion.”

Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades. More about Robert Draper