Donald F. McGahn, the White House counsel, stood in the gilded ballroom of Washington’s Mayflower Hotel last November to address the annual meeting of the Federalist Society. He seemed humbled, even a bit awed to be delivering the Barbara K. Olson Memorial lecture, named after the conservative lawyer who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. Noting some of the legal giants who gave the Olson lecture in years past, McGahn reflected, “You hear names like Scalia, Roberts and Gorsuch and then me; one of those names really is different than the rest.†Unlike previous speakers — to say nothing of many of those to whom he was now speaking — McGahn, himself a member of the Federalist Society, hadn’t attended an Ivy League law school; he went to Widener University, a “second tier†law school in Pennsylvania. He had never held a tenured professorship or boasted an appellate practice, much less a judgeship, that required him to think deeply about weighty constitutional issues; he specialized in the comparably mundane and technical field of campaign finance and election law. “But here we are,†McGahn said to the audience, almost apologetically. In 2015, Donald Trump hired McGahn to be the lawyer for his long-shot presidential campaign. Then, after Trump shockingly won the election, he tapped McGahn, who had proved his talent and loyalty during the campaign, to be White House counsel. Trump, in other words, had made McGahn’s wildest dreams come true. Now, McGahn told the Federalist Society, Trump was going to make their wildest dreams come true, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/magazine/trump-remaking-courts-judiciary.html
