Mark Meadows isn’t planning on running again for elected office, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t advancing former President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda from behind the scenes.
The former White House chief of staff told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview about his plans that joining the Conservative Partnership Institute after leaving the Trump administration expired on Jan. 20 allowed him to take on the “Herculean task” of countering the “very active Biden administration.”
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“I have no plans to run for elected office again,” the former North Carolina congressman and House Freedom Caucus chairman said. “I found that home and the Conservative Partnership that allows me to actually stay in the fight, the war, very closely.”
Founded by former South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, CPI’s conservative chops can’t be questioned. Meadows called the organization a conservative “incubator.” Still, while it doesn’t publish white papers on public policy, its nonprofit status and proximity to Capitol Hill could make it appear to people unfamiliar with the inner workings of Washington as one of the town’s swampier landing places.
Trump’s former right-hand man laughed off that criticism, stating that the “beauty” of CPI is that “we’re an action tank, not a think tank.”
“There’s plenty of ideas in Washington, D.C., just not a lot of courage,” he mused. “So, if there’s one thing that the Conservative Partnership is all about, it’s training and equipping and unifying the conservative movement so that they have courage to do what actually serves the people best.”
In Meadows’s mind, CPI has spent the past six months becoming a “control center” or “efficient hub,” from where he can drive policy in two specific ways. First and foremost, providing various outside conservative groups the “tools” and human capital necessary to be effective in fighting back against “leftist, Marxist, socialist policy.”
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“From a practical standpoint, since I’m being real transparent with you, sometimes it takes an outside group to file a lawsuit or to highlight a problem so that members of Congress can either work on it legislatively or start to talk about it,” he stated. “It’s our job as a conservative partnership to highlight the issues, work with the think tanks to come up with perhaps an idea that might address it.”
In his eyes, the “key component” to the work is identifying groups from all over the country, whether they’ve been directly “incubated” by CPI in the past or not, connecting them with people who agree with their cause, and helping them craft a specific strategy that produces tangible results.
He likened himself to a utility player in baseball, who “can go out and handle a bunch of these things.”
The second area Meadows focuses on at CPI is more straightforward: passing down lessons he learned while serving in Congress and the White House to conservative lawmakers and providing them “courage” to be an “advocate for the people that they represent.”
“I couldn’t think of a better place to come and be strategically deployed. Two blocks from the Capitol — any given week when Congress is in, we have between 30 to 50 members of both the House and the Senate here at CPI,” he claimed. “We’re doing some of the training to make sure that some of the procedures for conservative members are deployed [in] Congress. We’re helping with senators and freshmen members of Congress, helping them understand the procedural hurdles and tools that are in their tool bag.”
Meadows, noting that he still has House Floor privileges, told the Washington Examiner that he has offered to “go down and stand right beside them” during an “anxious moment,” but joked that “quite frankly, they’re better at it than I am” after receiving CPI’s training.
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Asked about media reports of a civil war brewing among the various outfits launched by former Trump officials, Meadows responded that the conservative movement is “probably more energized than ever,” but he “can only be responsible for the efficiency of the donor investment in the Conservative Partnership.”
“I don’t normally get involved in civil wars unless it’s with the swamp,” he closed. “And so, if there are groups out there that are going to side with the swamp. Then bring it on. I’m ready to have that battle.”
