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justinspoliticalcorner · 4 months ago

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Adam Wren at Politico Magazine:

Mike Davis was steamed. The frenetic Republican lawyer and former Senate aide — currently Trump’s most fanatical defender on X and conservative media — had been in the middle of one of his near-daily appearances on the “War Room” with Steve Bannon when a protester materialized over his shoulder and began screaming into his ear. From his makeshift TV-hit setup outside the Supreme Court, Davis tried to continue to explain to Bannon and his audience the legal intricacies going on inside the building behind him. There, nine justices were hearing oral arguments over whether Trump was immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “They must have let people out of the mental health asylum for today’s Supreme Court hearing,” Davis said, grinning, but only for the camera. “We have our friend here — it looks like an MSNBC correspondent behind me.”

Bannon chimed in from the cozy confines of his studio with a warning for the protester. “Mike Davis is gonna punch your lights out,” he said. Davis is, at least according to Donald Trump Jr. and Bannon, a possible attorney general in a second Trump administration. But today, he was feeling powerless. After the “War Room” hit was over, Davis bolted off his set and zipped toward the Supreme Court Police nearby to complain about the protester. “You do not have a First Amendment right to scream in someone’s ear,” Davis argued to an officer. “I used to work in this building — I know what the fucking law is.” The officer took off his sunglasses. Recognition passed over Davis’ face. He knew this guy. “I remember you,” the officer told Davis. They both agreed he needed to talk to Patricia, the Supreme Court press wrangler. Davis knew exactly who she was; he called her and asked for access to the press corral. Patricia, who also remembered Davis, granted him special access inside, marking the first time Bannon’s show had a credentialed Supreme Court correspondent.

That day outside the Supreme Court, Davis showed the full, often at-odds, range of his roles in Trump world. He is the former president’s troll-in-chief, a frequent talking head in MAGA-aligned media known for his provocative, no-holds-barred defense of the president and crusade against Trump’s perceived enemies, especially in his legal battles. He rages against the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. He has promised to “rain hell” on Washington from a Trump administration perch come January 2025 and to eviscerate institutions that he says treat Trump unfairly. He calls Democrats “Marxists” and “evil” and has joked — in ways that many others don’t always take jokingly — that he would send journalists and former GOP personalities including George Conway and Tim Miller to “the gulag” and would put migrant kids in “cages.” “My goal,” he once told me, “is for the Supreme Court to dismantle most of the federal government.”

Davis, 46, also happens to have a deep familiarity with and understanding of those same institutions, which often works to his and Trump’s benefit. He did once work at the Supreme Court, as a clerk in 2017. He was also the chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley during the Trump administration and, as an outside adviser, led confirmation battles for two of those justices hearing oral arguments inside the building that spring day: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. “Mike Davis was a standard-stock Republican, Federalist Society lawyer, right? Standard stuff. Played by the rules. Helped get guys confirmed, could play tough, but painted inside the lines,” Bannon told me.

Now, though? “He’s a full fucking MAGA warrior.” Davis, a stocky, redheaded lapsed Irish Catholic who calls himself Trump’s “viceroy,” is not officially affiliated with the Trump campaign. But he is undoubtedly close to Trump. In addition to being openly discussed as a candidate for attorney general, or acting attorney general, there is the more likely possibility of a position as White House counsel, chief of staff at the Department of Justice or as an outside adviser to Trump to select a candidate for any of those roles.

[...] Even less clear than what role Davis will fill in a potential Trump administration, though, is what he’d actually do in that role — and how much of what he proposes is, as he says, just “trolling.” In this way, Davis encapsulates a defining feature of conservatives in the Trump era: the dissolving barrier between reality and trolling, between serious political ideas and winking provocation. He seems to relish keeping people guessing about who he really is, what he really wants and what he will really help Trump accomplish.

I’ve had hours of conversations with Davis dating back to December from time I spent with him in Washington, Milwaukee and Manhattan. Davis is more cooperative with mainstream journalists than his rhetoric and his appearances on “War Room” would lead one to believe, but he was also unusually open with me, perhaps because I’m a national reporter who still lives in flyover country. In those conversations, along with those with nearly two dozen people who have intersected with his life, it became clear to me that even Davis isn’t always sure about when he’s being serious. That guessing only begins with the question of where Trump will put him if he wins in November — and whether the idea of Attorney General Mike Davis is the biggest troll of all.

[...] In the beginning, Davis wasn’t with Trump on every issue. Not on trade. Not on immigration. “I used to be much more globalist on trade and on immigration,” he said. He was, he said, “very Chamber of Cuck.” But he says he saw NAFTA destroy Midwestern manufacturing and send jobs to Mexico. He saw the middle class he grew up in hollow out. “The uni-party does not care about real Americans — Flyover Country, working class Americans in Iowa and Indiana and Ohio,” he told me. “That’s a problem.” He voted for Trump in 2016. In 2017, Davis reunited with Gorsuch, who would take him to the Supreme Court as his law clerk, a role he served in for four months — a stub term through the final months of the court’s 2016-2017 run. Then, from July 2017 to January 2019, he worked for Grassley as chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

There, Davis was at the center of what is arguably Trump’s most significant conservative victory: remaking the judiciary. Davis oversaw the floor votes for 278 federal judges and senior executive branch appointees, including Amy Coney Barrett to the Seventh Circuit. In 2019, Davis left the Senate and launched the Article III project, which he described to The New York Times as a “brass knuckles” advocacy group to remake the judiciary into a tougher, more conservative version of itself — “a hell of a lot more conservative,” he told me. Article III, which has a staff of eight and a slew of volunteers, also operates as a legal think tank committed to defending Trump in the courtroom and media. The organization, which runs entirely on donations, has no offices; Davis works mostly out of Colorado and makes periodic trips to Washington, where he also has a house.

It was when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 that Davis says he began to think the forces of the DOJ and what he calls the Democratic “regime” were fully aligned against Trump. He was suddenly everywhere, on X and Fox News and Bannon’s War Room, framing the Democratic case against Trump as “lawfare” — a phrase he popularized among MAGA supporters. Since then, he estimates, he has racked up more than 4,000 hits defending Trump since August of 2022, meaning he has done an average of more than five a day — though it’s often been more like 10. “It was pretty lonely around Trump world after the Mar-a-Lago raid. Trump’s going to remember who ran to him and who ran from him,” he told me. As much as conservative media and Trump allies thrill to his most outrageous statements, it’s his establishment cred that gives the conservative intelligentsia ammunition to fight Trump’s convictions.

[...] Last September, Davis made headlines for an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s show in which he outlined a dystopian agenda for what he would do during a “three-week reign of terror” as Trump’s “acting attorney general before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon.” His list included firing “deep state” employees, indicting Joe Biden, deporting millions of immigrants and putting “kids in cages,” detaining people in the “D.C. gulag” and pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, “especially my hero, horn man.” “It’s going to be glorious,” he said. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Davis becomes Trump’s Senate-confirmed attorney general. Even Davis himself thinks it is far-fetched: “It would require 100 Republican senators to get me confirmed,” he once told me. Still, those close to the former president, including Bannon and Trump Jr., have mentioned his name to me as a possible acting attorney general and White House counsel or high-level DOJ appointee. “That’s Attorney General Mike Davis,” Bannon first responded when I asked him if he could talk about Davis for this piece earlier this year, not long before he reported to a prison for blowing off a House subpoena. Democrats appear concerned about the possibility — or, at least, have deemed it a fruitful possibility to raise money off of. The Biden campaign in April posted the clip of Davis on Johnson’s show to social media. “Trump’s potential Attorney General pick Mike Davis: Trump’s going to make me Attorney General and it will be a reign of terror.”

[...] Inside the 9th floor bar at The Trade Hotel, the unofficial watering hole of the Trump family during the Republican National Convention, victory was in the air. The Trump entourage, including Donald Trump Jr., his fiance Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric Trump and Eric’s wife Lara, held court on one side of the bar, while I stood off to the other side. An hour earlier, I had been with Davis on the convention floor as Trump gave his speech. Davis had marveled to me about what then seemed like the former president’s amazing week, not only surviving the assassination attempt and coming to the convention like a kind of caesar, but also a judge’s dismissal of his classified documents case. “Trump dodged the real bullet,” he said of the dismissal as Trump’s speech to delegates wore on.

Now, Davis entered the bar, where he was greeted by Republican revelers like a caesar himself. He told one to see him about a judgeship in January 2025. (Davis later told me he was joking.) He bragged to another that he had helped Trump get “six votes” on the Supreme Court. “The viceroy is fucking coming,” Davis said to David Bossie, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager. “[Democrats] don’t know what’s coming in January 2025.” Davis made his way over to Trump Jr. I trailed, hoping for a quote, but stood a few feet away to give them some space. A tall, thick man standing beside Trump Jr. began eyeing me and my yellow media lanyard. I retreated to the other side of the bar. A woman with the man who later identified herself as doing work for Guilfoyle came over to me and two other reporters and chastised us for gawking. (Caroline Wren, speaking for Guilfoyle, later denied this woman did work for Guilfoyle.)

A few minutes later, close to closing time, Trump Jr. and his entourage started to leave. They passed behind me and Davis, who had come back over to talk to me, but not before Trump Jr. could give him a message. “I want you to be my father’s attorney general for all four years,” he told Davis, grinning. Davis said he would give Trump three weeks as his viceroy. “All four years,” Trump Jr. said. As I pecked notes on my phone, the woman who had told us to stop staring scolded me for chronicling the exchange and began recording me. She demanded that I delete the notes or give her my phone. When I tried to leave, she recruited four men to block the elevators. They stared menacingly at me and demanded I turn over my phone or delete my notes.

I was trapped. I wouldn’t delete my notes, and I was getting nervous. I called Davis, who had disappeared. He asked me where I was, and I told him. I explained to the woman I had to catch a flight to go home to my family in the next few hours. “You should have thought about your kids before you did what you did,” she replied. After roughly 15 minutes of this standoff, I searched for another exit. I ran down a hallway into a stairwell. Two people followed me.

When I was out on the street, Davis called me. By this point, Davis had confronted the aide near the elevators and dressed her down. You don’t ask a reporter to delete their notes, he told her, according to both Davis and a second person he recounted his remarks to briefly after. This isn’t North Korea. Davis had sworn to me he was not really serious about retaliating against journalists and throwing them in “gulags.” Now, he seemed rattled that others in Trump world might not be in on the joke. He told me he had never seen anything like that in his career. “Fucking shocking,” he said. Over the next few days, Davis checked in on me at least a couple of times a day, asking me if I was “OK.” He spoke with my editor. He called an adviser for Trump Jr., who then called me to express displeasure and say that the person responsible was not affiliated with Trump Jr. or the Trump campaign.

Politico Magazine’s Adam Wren has a detailed scoop on MAGA fascist Mike Davis, who is in line for a plum spot in a potential 2nd Trump Administration.