The Man Who Made January 6 Possible

In late October 2020, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was attending the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett when his cellphone rang. He answered with a whisper and walked out to the hallway to take the call. What was so urgent as to pull the chief of staff out of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing just two weeks before a presidential election?

On the line was Andrew Hughes, the top staffer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Meadows had asked him to call because it had been brought to Meadows’s attention that a young assistant at HUD had been caught consorting with the enemy.

She had liked an Instagram post from the pop star Taylor Swift.

The first photo in the post was of Swift with the word VOTE superimposed on it in large blue letters. But a swipe revealed a second photo, of Swift carrying a tray of cookies emblazoned with the Biden-Harris campaign logo. “We really can’t have our people liking posts promoting Joe Biden,” Meadows told Hughes.

Never mind that nearly 3 million other people had liked the post or that the young woman was a Taylor Swift fan who liked just about everything Swift had ever posted. To the enforcers of Trumpian loyalty, this was a sign of treachery in the ranks.

Those enforcers—including the eagle-eyed official who had first spotted the offending “like”—worked for the Presidential Personnel Office, a normally under-the-radar group responsible for the hiring and firing of the roughly 4,000 political appointees in the executive branch. During the final year of the Trump administration, that office was transformed into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence. (Many sources for this story asked to remain anonymous so they could talk about sensitive personnel issues.) Some Trump aides privately compared the PPO to the East German Stasi or even