The Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA World – POLITICO Magazine

Trump was the latest, and most powerful, vehicle for their politics and ambition, and he was what brought them to Washington on Jan. 6 although you could almost as accurately say they are what brought him there, since they were the ones who helped organize much of the rally. Their story is the story of American politics since the Great Recession, when anger against existing institutions became the great motivator, when the bar to entry for candidates hit the floor, when social media fame became the coin of the realm, and money, gobs and gobs of it, went washing through the political system. Their story, as Ive been able to pull it together here, is based on dozens of hours of interviews in person and on the phone, news reports in which theyve appeared as central or marginal characters, and, where possible, the corroborating accounts of others who were there. They had a knack for being in the room with some of the biggest boldface names of the populist right but also for never quite getting vaulted into the limelight.

If we let them steal the election from President Trump, we will never get it back!

Dustin Stockton last November

The Jan. 6 rally, Stockton told me later that November, was supposed to be big, huge, between four and five million showing up. Congress would be meeting to certify the election; the rally would be the final chance for Trump to lay out the evidence of why the vote was a fraud. We were talking by phone, Stockton sitting in the March for Trump tour bus, parked in front of one of the Trump hotels in Las Vegas, waiting for Lawrence to pick up a prescription from CVS. He seemed his usual low-key self, even as the chaos swirled around him. His life, as he described it, was lived on the fly; theyd scarcely pack up from one rally before figuring out how to make the next stop on the tour happen. He told me Eric Trump had just called to make sure everything was going okay; that hed just gotten off the phone with Kanye West to arrange for the 2020 candidate and hip-hop star to appear at the rally the first week of January; that they also expected Kid Rock, the country music duo Big & Rich, the talk radio host Leo Terrell. (None of them appeared.)

In late December, though, as Trump began searching more and more desperately for some election officials who would do his bidding, Stockton and Lawrences project began to shift and metastasize. Rivals in the MAGA movement, they said, derided what they had been up to as mere tea party-type rallies and said it was now time for something a little sharper, a little more on point. By late December, the pair had lost control of the rally on the 6th, and had instead been left in charge of organizing a smaller rally the day before, featuring mostly B-team players from the MAGA universe, while Trumpworld figures like Kimberly Guilfoyle and Rudy Giuliani took center stage on the 6th.

Their version of Jan. 6 seems an unlikely story going back to their hotel, annoyed at MAGA worlds self-dealing celebrities, instead of joining the out-of-control march they helped set into motion. | Getty Images

I talked to Stockton again on Jan. 5, and he sounded both exuberant and exhausted, never mind that some of the stars had never in fact signed on, and that the crowd was looking to top out at 30,000, max. Trump had been hyping up the rally on Twitter, writing, Be there, will be wild! and retweeting Lawrences announcement of it, a tweet that would later be shown on the Senate floor and entered into as evidence for Trumps second impeachment trial. (Lawrence sued the House impeachment managers for defamation.) They were told that the word from the White House was to be prepared to be around all day and all night if need be. We are going to keep it going until there is some kind of resolution, Stockton told me.

By the next day, though, Stockton and Lawrence, going on one hour of sleep, and after squabbling with conservative influencers who thought they deserved better seating, and sitting in the freezing cold for hours during the various warm-up acts, decided to leave and go back to the hotel just as Trump was speaking, to rest up for the long night ahead. I had Fox News on, I woke up, and it was breaking news, Stockton told me later.

They have taken over the Capitol. And my first thought was, Oh my God, what kind of idiots are these? It was my worst nightmare. Instead of it being Patriots Day, where we prove the election fraud, my thought was: We are about to get roasted.

Instead of it being Patriots Day, where we prove the election fraud, my thought was: We are about to get roasted.

Dustin Stockton after January 6

Their version of Jan. 6 seems an unlikely story going back to their hotel, annoyed at MAGA worlds self-dealing celebrities, instead of joining the out-of-control march they helped set into motion. But so far theres been no proof otherwise: As the Capitol that day became the most scrutinized crime scene in America, no charges were ever filed against them; Stockton says he was interviewed by federal authorities once, in the spring, but never heard anything more about it.

And the sense of frustration, betrayal, disgust theyve developed since Jan. 6 that is incontestably real.

They were already let down by what they saw as a lack of gratitude from the Trump administration: Their hoped-for administration jobs, possibly an overseas posting, never arrived. They had ties to Steve Bannon, and hoped to use his connections to become high-dollar fundraisers, but he never really made those introductions. They wanted Fox News appearances, and social media clout, but had trouble locking down both. Their highest-profile effort, the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign, ended in charges and recrimination. And in the months after the Jan. 6 rally, they came to feel betrayed by a movement they helped build.

If you go work for Trump, Stockton said to me last week, over a year after we had met up in D.C., you eventually become the focus of the attack, and when you do, they just dump you.

They are, they know, now political actors without a country, reviled on the left for being associated with insurrectionists, and on the right for now willing to talk about what actually went down that day in Washington. They can make for difficult, even unsympathetic, subjects, figures who perpetrated a decades worth of hijinks and dirty tricks who at last pulled off a stunt so big and outrageous they lost control of it.

Jan. 6 was supposed to be the culmination of their careers. Instead, it felt like the end.

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The Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA World - POLITICO Magazine