Legal Defender

 Trump’s Chief Legal Defender Vows a ‘Reign of Terror’ — Or Is It All an Act?

Mike Davis could be Trump’s attorney general, and he says he wants to put journalists in gulags and kids in cages. He also says he’s trolling. The line isn’t always so clear.

By Adam Wren

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.

“Donald Trump loves him,” Caroline Wren, the GOP fundraiser (no relation to me), told me, adding that she hears from Republican mega-donors and senators who salivate over Davis’ appearances on Bannon’s “War Room.”

“If he isn’t the attorney general, he’s going to play some sort of role,” she said.

Donald Trump Jr. called Davis in a statement to POLITICO “the tip of the spear defending my father from these corrupt Democrat prosecutors.” He added: “He’s exactly the type of fighter that I’d like to see involved in a second Trump administration.”

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 sixth grade, Davis’ teachers in Des Moines, Iowa, bestowed on him the Alex P. Keaton award. It was an honor they created specifically for him because he had such radically different views from his liberal parents, who prioritized service trips and social-justice teaching. At his liberal Catholic school, he was known for arguing with teachers, claiming that welfare trapped people in poverty.

In college at the University of Iowa in the late 90s, he found himself taken with House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s talk of welfare reform. He bombarded Gingrich’s office with letters and emails — then a very new technology — asking about internships. Gingrich’s intern director eventually relented. “I think just to shut me up,” Davis said. He made his way to Washington for the first time in a “crappy” Dodge, driving straight through the night from Iowa. “I thought it was going to be me and Newt working together to dismantle the government.”

It was, of course, not that. But it introduced him to the levers of power in a town where he would later work them to great effect.

Even in college, Davis was known for his provocative nature. “He’ll say things to kind of get people agitated and see what kind of reaction he gets from people,” Tim Hagle, his constitutional law professor, told me. Hagle served as the faculty adviser to the Students for Bush group that Davis organized. It became the second-largest group on campus — only surpassed by the alumni association.

After law school at the University of Iowa, Davis volunteered on the 2004 Bush reelect, which got him a job in the White House in 2005. As associate director of political affairs, his job was to vet people. “My impressions of him were, ‘He’s incredibly smart,’” said Scott Jennings, the former White House deputy director of political affairs, who was Davis’ boss. “Incredibly aggressive.”

He was in the White House for a year, and bounced to the Bush Justice Department for a seven-month stint. He then moved to Colorado, where he clerked for Gorsuch on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals before working in private practice and the Colorado attorney general’s office.

It was in Denver that he began sporting a red MAGA cap. “It’s bold to do that in Denver, Colorado,” said May Davis Mailman, the former senior adviser to Trump who got to know Davis while she was on the Tenth Circuit as a clerk, though not at the same time as him.

Davis, he said, saw the realignment happening in real time back in Iowa looking at the WHO TV13 corn kernel presidential poll. He took a picture of the overflowing kernels in Trump’s jar and put it on Facebook.

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.

In hallway remarks to reporters during the tail end of his Manhattan trial one day in May, Trump looked down at a sheaf of papers, his lawyer Todd Blanche standing next to him. “Mike Davis,” he said, “highly respected.” He then read an X post in which Davis called that day’s proceedings “blatant lawfare.”

For his loyalty, Davis has prospered: Trump’s leadership PAC, even while struggling to pay its legal bills, made a $150,000 contribution to Article III. In 2022, the latest year for which records are available, the organization listed a budget of $50,000. But ahead of the election, the group is running a flight of ads in swing states warning undocumented immigrants that voting as a noncitizen is illegal, a campaign that costs $1 million alone — suggesting the budget has greatly increased in the past two years. (Davis, in just one example of how he courts the mainstream media at the same time he denigrates them, gave NBC the exclusive.)

Throughout one morning and afternoon I spent with him, Davis abruptly got up and left to take what he told me were important calls: at 11:19 a.m., 11:41 a.m. and 1:21 p.m. When I checked later, all the times corresponded with Trump’s courtroom breaks back in Manhattan where he was waylaid in week two of his criminal hush money trial. I asked Davis if Trump had been calling him for advice. He told me he does not discuss such matters.

For Davis, his MAGA transformation wasn’t so much of a transformation but an evolution from his days as a disciple of Gingrich.

“I’ve never been establishment,” Davis told me. “I’ve worked for establishment people like George W. Bush. But I’ve never been establishment. I told people very early on that President Donald Trump will be president and Neil Gorsuch will be on the Supreme Court. And I made that my mission to get Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. And people thought it was absolutely nuts.”

Over the past decade, he has emerged as an ideal fighter for Trump: someone with an understanding of how to get things done on the inside who also has the grievances and background of a flyover country native. He has a fighting instinct and a commitment to finishing the job, regardless of how he might be hurting himself in the long run.

On the morning of Gorsuch’s nomination battle in 2017, Davis said he was crossing Pennsylvania Avenue when what he described as a “6-4, 350-pound” bike messenger slammed into him. Paramedics insisted on taking Davis to George Washington University Hospital. He told me he declined. He was not yet a judiciary committee aide, but still wanted to be involved in the process. “I had to run the Gorsuch confirmation from the outside,” he told me.

He hobbled to a nearby CVS Pharmacy. His lungs burned as he inhaled and exhaled. One of his ribs felt out of place. A friend he called would later find him slumped over near the photo aisle.

The friend, who confirmed this story to me, insisted Davis go to the emergency room. There, doctors told him he had a broken arm, a broken rib, a dislocated rib and a punctured lung. They told him he’d need a chest tube and two surgeries. He showed me a photo on his cell phone with a 5:23 p.m. time stamp that day. In the photo, he is lying in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask and giving two thumbs up. Gorsuch wanted to come to the hospital, but Davis refused, because he thought the nominee needed to make the rounds to glad hand senators.

Davis decided to refuse the surgeries and leave the hospital so he could quarterback the confirmation process. But a longtime friend insisted he go back to his house and recover.

“They kept me trapped,” Davis said. “Like, they kidnapped me, basically.”

When he heard his caretakers leave to run an errand, he said he “Jean-Claude Van Dammed” his way back to his apartment. “Look, we had to get Gorsuch confirmed,” he told me. “I’m not going to be in a hospital for several days and do surgeries and all that crap.” He resumed work from his Capitol Hill apartment. He never got the surgeries.

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.”

Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC host, highlighted Davis’ remarks last November, saying “Mike Davis is exactly what the Trump administration lacked last time around: a skilled, even competent veteran of Beltway legal politics and rightwing causes, one who seems keen to transform Trump’s darkest fascist impulses into an actual policy agenda. He’s a microcosm of the mainstream GOP establishment’s move to the far right in the age of Trump.” (Davis’ reply on X: “I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag. But I’ll put him in the women’s cell block, with [the Never-Trump commentator Tim] Miller.”)

Months later, over lunch, I spoke to Davis about the Biden campaign’s use of his quotes. Davis will admit to being quite serious about much of what he says in the media, including wanting to dismantle the power of the federal government, an idea he has held onto since his Gingrich days. But he told me he is obviously joking about some of the more inflammatory promises — putting kids in cages and detaining journalists in a gulag. He later told me the sound bite was “a self-inflicted wound,” but also said he “didn’t want to back down from it.”

“It’s hilarious that it’s so easy to trigger these people. I’m obviously trolling them,” Davis told me of Democrats. “And I would say that I’m glad that President Obama and President Biden have changed their position that they no longer want to put kids in cages” — referencing the Obama administration’s use of chain-link fencing in border facilities that housed migrants.

“So you don’t actually believe kids should be in cages?” I asked him.

“No. I’m trolling you.”

Trolling is useful for Davis, as it has been for Trump.

“To get attention on MAGA social media, and gain followers and get booked on Steve Bannon’s show, the best way to do it is to say outlandish things like this,” said Miller, the onetime Jeb Bush communications director who now is a Bulwark writer and MSNBC analyst.

People who know him suspect Davis’ core ideological beliefs are obscured by his over-the-top behavior and absurd pronouncements. “I think he’s warm and kind,” said May Davis Mailman. “He actually cares about the movement, and is thoughtful about it. So, you know, I don’t want to say anti-establishment. But yeah, a little bit of that brand. Because he did work in the Bush White House. So you can only be so anti-establishment and work in the Bush White House.”

Regina Schofield was Davis’ supervisor for a time when he worked in the Bush White House. She has vouched for him at nearly all of his official appointments, and she told me she once confronted him about an X spat he had with Stormy Daniels’ former lawyer, Michael Avenatti.

“I go home, Boss,” he told her, according to her recollection of the conversation, “and I just keep drinking the red wine and the next thing I know, my fingers are going crazy.” (“She knows I’m joking,” he told me of her anecdote. “I don’t drink and drive. Or drink and tweet.”)

She told me another story. During the Kavanaugh hearings, Davis posted to X, “Unfazed and determined. We will confirm Brett Kavanaugh.” But initially, she said, Davis was lukewarm about Kavanaugh, and it wasn’t until the heated confirmation hearing where Democrats repeatedly questioned the nominee about allegations that he had sexually assaulted a woman in high school that Davis felt the need to fight back with a strong defense. It was this fight that ultimately led Davis to launching Article III. “I think he’s less of an ideologue,” she told me. “And he’s more of someone who wants to just throw bombs.”

Davis’ inflammatory statements have gone too far for Schofield. Last October, Davis posted to X that the “The violent Black underclass is a danger to America.” He argued for the “mass incarceration of these thugs.” “The monsters,” he wrote, “will kill.” Schofield, who is Black, told me she found that post racist.

“I laugh at people who call me racist,” he said to me when I told him about Schofield’s reaction. “I’ve donated tens of thousands of dollars to poor Black kids who I don’t know so they can go to good schools. The real people who are racists are the white Democrats who trap these kids in failed government schools because they’re beholden to the teachers union.” (When asked for specifics, Davis pointed to his donations to the Alliance for Choice in Education, a group that provides low-income students with scholarships to attend private schools. A spokesperson for the Alliance for Choice in Education confirmed that Davis served on an advisory board from 2009 to 2017 and donated approximately $31,000.)

But with Davis, as with many in Trump’s orbit, the trolling is so constant that the line between what’s reality and what’s a joke, or provocation, isn’t always clear.

Miller quoted the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote that “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” “I think a lot of times, they are joking,” Miller said. “But like, eventually, you kind of become this caricature, and eventually, the trolling, the stuff that begins as a troll, you end up finding yourself defending or believing or buying your own bullshit.”

Davis is quick to dismiss that he would put children in “cages.” But the Trump administration did separate immigrant children from their parents at the border. “If you were advising or were Trump’s AG in a second term, what would you say about a family separation policy?” I asked Davis as this story was going to press.

He didn’t answer my question. He told me Harris and Biden had lost hundreds of thousands of migrant kids, exposing them to “child enslavement, sex trafficking, and other horrific violence.” (He told me he was referencing a Department of Homeland Security inspector-general report that found that, as of May 2024, 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not been given notices to appear in court and 32,000 were unaccounted for after failing to comply with their notices to appear.) On “Day 1,” he said “Trump will do what it takes to fix our broken border again — and reunite families.” I asked him whether this meant he had believed family separation was a mistake. He wouldn’t go there. It was the kind of non-response that walked up to the edge of acknowledging the horrors of the policy while refusing to deny it could happen again.

Recently, I was surprised to see Davis share cat-eating memes from Springfield, Ohio, and posts suggesting Kamala Harris had used AI-generated crowd images, and I told him so. This type of misinformation seemed to go further than what I had seen from him before. I had been to Springfield, Ohio, and talked to local Republicans there and, like almost every official from the city and state, found no evidence of animals being abducted and eaten. “There is more corroborating evidence that migrants are eating geese and cats in Ohio than Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford,” he responded. (In 2018, Blasey Ford, the woman who alleged that Kavanaugh assaulted her, provided as corroborating evidence a polygraph test that she took with the FBI in August of that year and notes from her couples therapist from a 2012 session. Her lawyers also submitted affidavits from acquaintances who said Blasey Ford told them about the attack.)

“What is the line in the modern-day Republican Party between trolling and legislating?” I asked Davis one day over lunch at a Capitol Hill restaurant after his confrontation in front of the Supreme Court.

“Whatever you can get passed,” he said. He stabbed his sandwich.

What did Davis actually want out of a second Trump term?

“I use a lot of fiery language — hyperbole — to get my point across and force people to pay attention.”

“But there was no point to that video clip?” I asked about his turn on Johnson’s show last fall. “Was it just you trolling?

“The point was that a politicized and weaponized legal system is very dangerous and destructive for your country,” Davis told me. “And if you’re going to politicize and weaponize our justice system against your political enemies, that could come back and bite you.”

His phone was ringing. He excused himself. Back in Manhattan, Trump had another break.

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.

The adviser wanted me to know something else. When Trump Jr. told Davis he wanted him to be attorney general, he wasn’t serious.

Trump Jr.’s words to Davis, he told me, amounted to little more than just “trolling.”