Inside Corey Lewandowski's Failed Romp in Trump's Swamp
BY JASON ZENGERLE
7 hours ago
He was a political nobody who helped Donald Trump win the White House. Then Corey Lewandowski went to Washington, hell-bent on making his fortune and changing the lobbying game forever. Here's how those grandiose plans blew up—and what they say about the sketchy new opportunities available in Trump’s Washington.
The first thing Corey Lewandowski wanted to discuss was the view. "You've gotta check this out," he said, beckoning me behind his desk and pointing toward the window, eager that I appreciate his proximity to power in Donald Trump's Washington. The sky that day was the gray, gloomy color of slate. But the future—his future—seemed to him impossibly bright.
It was January, and from the window of his still-brand-new lobbying firm, Avenue Strategies, Lewandowski directed my attention to the horizon. There, in the distance, was the clock tower of the Old Post Office Pavilion, the Romanesque Revival edifice rechristened as a Trump hotel. In the foreground, as alabaster as a wedding cake, was the White House, a prize that, even to Lewandowski, had seemed hopelessly out of reach when Trump tapped him to run his campaign in 2015. But so much had changed since then—and now even the iconography of Washington was being refashioned. For nearly a century, the straight line from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument to the Capitol had defined the city. Suddenly, all that seemed outdated to Lewandowski. He held his hands aloft and—like some latter-day L'Enfant—beheld for me a new axis of power.
"O.P.O.," he said, framing the clock tower of Trump's new hotel.
"White House." He spread his hands wider to encompass the presidential mansion.
"Avenue Strategies." He threw open his arms and looked around his office, seven stories above Pennsylvania Avenue, smack dab in the middle of the action. "This," Lewandowski said, satisfaction dripping from every syllable, "is Trump World!"
Then as now, Lewandowski's place in that kingdom was a curious one. He had come to Washington eager to make use of his connections, seemingly impatient to capitalize on his closeness to Trump. And though he had never before worked as a lobbyist, he harbored outsized ambitions to transform the entire influence industry, sharing with me a vision to utilize his own "disruptive" powers—which he'd likened to those of Uber—to build his firm into what he dreamed might one day be "a billion-dollar company."
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http://www.gq.com/story/inside-corey-lewandowski-trump-lobbyist-failed
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