Corey Lewandowski is a disposable underling, but he’s protected enough to scorn the law.
Corey Lewandowski speaks at a Donald Trump campaign rally in Derry, New Hampshire, on October 23, 2023.
(Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Donald Trump is besotted by the romance of gangsterism. He’s the kind of viewer who sees classics such as the Godfather movies or Goodfellas not as cautionary tales but as how-to guides. In 1992, Trump hired the famed architect Philip Johnson to tart up the façade of one of his ill-fated New Jersey casinos. Taking a measure of his prospective employer, Johnson remarked that Trump would make “a good mafioso.” Trump took that as a compliment and added his own hyperbolic spin: “one of the best.”
When running for president in 2015, Trump again confirmed that gangsterism was an ideal. At a rally, he noted that critics objected to his idea of shaking down dependent allies such as South Korea and Germany for protection money in the form of coerced purchases of US arms. Trump’s response was, “Don’t worry about it, okay. The Mafia is not so stupid, all right.”
In both the Mafia of popular folklore and in Trump’s real-life governing style, there is a strict hierarchy of power. The mob boss and his inner circle sit at the top, forming a tight-knit crime family—the people who are to be protected and kept close at all cost. This is the role played by Trump, his children, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. The second tier of power is the capos and made men who are guaranteed senior leadership roles; real-estate developer and emissary Steve Witkoff currently occupies that role.
But as with the Mob, Trump’s lawless enterprise also requires the services of a lower ring of goons and hoodlums who are more disposable—not enjoying quite the unlimited access to power of the close family and capos but still of service, particularly since they are more willing to do the dirty work of intimidation that is sometimes needed. These are the wiseguys and goodfellas, louts who often get into trouble and need to be kept at a distance but still have their uses. At various times, disreputable figures such as Steve Bannon and the disgraced lawyer Michael Cohen have fulfilled these roles, falling in and out of presidential favor.
Corey Lewandowski is a classic Trumpian wiseguy, never truly part of the inner core but still kept in the president’s orbit. Lewandowski started as a maverick in New Hampshire’s GOP, a Reaganite turned Tea Party supporter whose bare-knuckle mannerisms ruffled country-club Republicans. With little future in the party’s establishment, he was an early Trump backer, meeting the candidate in 2014 and joining the campaign in 2015. For a brief period in 2016 he was Trump’s de facto campaign manager, until he was elbowed aside by Paul Manafort, who had the confidence of Trump’s family.
Lewandowski remained in Trump’s orbit off and on, usually depending on how much he was embarrassing the boss. He’s prone to run-ins with the law and accusations of sexual abuse. In 2016, he was charged with assaulting Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields, although the case was dropped. In 2022, Lewandowski made a plea deal with authorities in Las Vegas to settle a complaint against him of unwanted sexual attention, which included forced touching, made by the wife of a major Republican Party donor.
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None of this was enough for Trump to permanently cut ties with Lewandowski. Writing in New York magazine in 2024, reporter Olivia Nuzzi marveled that Trump kept “bringing back known chaos agent Corey Lewandowski” (an astute observation since Nuzzi is a powerful chaos agent who keeps thriving despite many scandals). Trump justified Lewandowski’s position in his circle by saying, “I just like him. Corey’s a character.”
In the fall of 2025, Lewandowski was rewarded for his long government service by being made a “special government employee,” or SGE, in the Department of Homeland Security, then run by Kristi Noem (with whom Lewandowski is reportedly having an extramarital affair). On Monday, The Wall Street Journal released a bombshell report that Lewandowski used his position as an SGE (which exempted him from normal rules about not doing business while a government employee) to shakedown foreign governments and big corporations.
Lewandowski denies all the allegations. But the Journal report, if true, suggests stunning examples of brazen corruption:
When Corey Lewandowski was at the Department of Homeland Security, he approached senior Qatari officials with a proposal.
Hire me on the side, the longtime Trump aide who was effectively the shadow secretary at the department last year, told them…. He approached representatives of the United Arab Emirates with a similar offer…. The alleged moneymaking efforts, which appeared to be offers by Lewandowski to sell government services for personal gain, came while he had an expansive portfolio at one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government. The role gave him de facto decision-making authority over large amounts of recently appropriated billions of dollars, the president’s border and immigration enforcement agenda and the collection of tariffs, which have been vastly expanded under President Trump.
Aside from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Lewandowski and his associates allegedly targeted private companies such as Palantir. After Palantir refused to play ball with Lewandowski, the company found that an expected government contract of $2.7 billion had been reduced to $1 billion.
On one level, these shakedown schemes were as ill-conceived as they were criminal: Governments such as Qatar and the UAE clearly saw no need to deal with a mere wiseguy like Lewandowski, since they already had free access to mob boss Trump. But even if the plans didn’t always work, the corrupt intent was clear.
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The DHS inspector general has launched a wide-ranging probe into improprieties by Lewandowski and his underlings. Congressional Democrats are also expected to make Lewandowski a major target of investigation if their party wins the House of Representatives in the midterms.
But like many in the Trump mafia, Lewandowski doesn’t fear the law. Rather, he has the brazen sense of impunity of a goon who knows he has a powerful protector. According to the Journal, Lewandowski “has told people close to him he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case.” (Lewandowski also denies that claim.)
Lewandowski’s impudent scorn for the law is, alas, justified. It’s one thing to be a mafia goon knowing that crime families are hard to prosecute. But you can gain an extra level of arrogance if you know that you belong to a crime family whose head is the president of the United States, with full control of the FBI, the Department of Justice, and unlimited power to pardon federal crimes.
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