On most Monday mornings, Mark Meadows commutes from his home in South Carolina to his workplace in Washington. He flies first class and travels light, moving briskly through Reagan airport, sometimes accompanied by his wife, Debbie, or by weekend guests, like his close friend and fellow archconservative Representative Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He is then ferried to the Capitol Hill headquarters of the Conservative Partnership Institute, or C.P.I., the nonprofit right-wing hub Meadows joined a week after Donald Trump left office.

Even without the knowledge that his annual salary as a senior partner at C.P.I. is $847,000, and that he purchased his house overlooking Lake Keowee for $1.6 million six months after the Trump administration came to an end, it would be natural to conclude that Meadows, the 64-year-old former White House chief of staff, is doing very well for himself. His public appearances, though far fewer than before — he was spotted at the Capitol in October during Jordan’s unsuccessful campaign to be speaker of the House, for example — reveal the same tactile Southern congeniality that Meadows honed to perfection during his days as a real estate agent in North Carolina. For those who have known Meadows for a long time, including those who harbor a powerful dislike of him, his air of breezy prosperity is not at all incongruent with the crisis that currently looms over him. The Mark Meadows they know has always been a peerless escape artist, ever ascending over the bridges he has burned.

But his familiar guile is now facing its greatest test. In August, a grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., indicted Meadows on charges related to his alleged participation in a racketeering scheme to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results and keep Trump in office. Two months later, Katherine Faulders of ABC News broke the story that Meadows had been furtively speaking with prosecutors in the federal case being pursued against Trump by the Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith. The possibility that the former president’s closest White House aide — a man with unsurpassed access to Trump during the final months of his presidency — might be seeking to wriggle out of further trouble by supplying damning information to prosecutors, and perhaps even testifying against Trump at trial, suggested a seemingly inescapable choice for Meadows: prison time or career suicide.

As soon as the ABC News story broke, Meadows called his friend Jordan to insist it wasn’t true, according to someone Jordan later told about the conversation. (Through a spokesman, Jordan denied speaking to Meadows about the matter.) Meadows’s attorney, George J. Terwilliger III, publicly disputed the story’s accuracy. Some Trump affiliates suggested to me that Meadows had merely gotten by with the minimum in complying with a federal subpoena, and that this by itself did not prove he was a rat.

Still, Meadows’s murky status has been a source of consternation in Trump world. Two close associates of the former president acknowledged to me that opinions in that community were sharply divided on the matter of Meadows’s fidelity. Another Trump confidant conveyed to me the suspicion that Meadows was wearing a wire. In addressing the possibility that his former chief of staff had cut a deal to avoid a prison sentence, Trump confessed uncertainty about the matter on his social media platform, Truth Social, in a way that was most unlike him, posting on Oct. 24: “Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation. I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them, but who really knows?”

There is reason for Trump to be fretful about Meadows. Court documents that remain under seal but whose contents I’m familiar with confirm that Meadows did in fact receive an immunity order, signed on March 20, 2023, by Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the District Court in Washington, to testify before a federal grand jury three days later. The order acknowledges that Meadows would most likely have taken the Fifth Amendment if not granted immunity to testify. Meadows did not simply honor a subpoena request with a single obligatory interview with federal prosecutors; rather, he spoke expansively to them and then, the next day, testified before the grand jury for approximately six hours. It is also the case that Meadows is not named as a co-defendant in the Trump indictment, which instead describes him more than once in the favorable terms of a truth-telling chief of staff who did not indulge Trump’s fever dream of a stolen election.

Moreover, according to the ABC News report, Meadows privately contradicted to prosecutors portions of his own 2021 book, “The Chief’s Chief,” especially the chapter about the 2020 election titled, “The Long Con,” which begins with the sentence “I knew he didn’t lose.” The news report was sufficiently credible to Meadows’s conservative publishing house, All Seasons Press, that it promptly filed a lawsuit, claiming breach of contract for his waffling on the 2020 election narrative.

The question of what Meadows may have said, and might say on a witness stand, has significant implications for Trump’s fate in the federal trial, which was scheduled to start March 4 but was recently removed from the court calendar. A firsthand verification from Trump’s former top aide that the president knew that he lost the election but proceeded with efforts to overturn the results anyway might by itself sway the jury to find Trump guilty and send him to prison. In turn, some polls have suggested that a guilty verdict might cost Trump enough votes from independent voters to deny him an election victory — and thus the ability to pardon himself. All of which is to say that Trump’s entire fate could depend on what it means to Mark Meadows, then and now, to be “the chief’s chief.”

At the same time, this very question possesses a geometric sort of logic that circumscribes the entirety of the Trump era. From the beginning of the 2016 campaign to the present day, a dominant theme has been how, in Trump world, the banal duplicity a person tends to experience in a political operation has reached a kind of baroque late-stage Darwinism. Even before Trump was nominated, one of his top aides during his candidacy lamented to me how the campaign infighting had devolved into a real-life “Hunger Games.” By 2019, with senior aides warring over power and proximity to the Oval Office and multiple former White House staff members having already published score-settling books (one of them titled, “Team of Vipers”), it had become axiomatic that the surest means of ascent in the Trump White House lay in demonstrating your loyalty to the boss, often by demonstrating someone else’s disloyalty, a ritual of backslapping followed by back-stabbing.

At this exercise, no one excelled like Mark Meadows. His political résumé carries immense weight on the right: four-term congressman, a founder of the House Freedom Caucus, bête noire of Speaker John Boehner and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Trump’s only chief of staff never to have been replaced and, finally, an indicted martyr to the 2020 election-denial cause. That he achieved all this in a decade’s time hints at an uncommon skill set. Meadows himself elaborated on this talent during freshman orientation for newly elected members of Congress in 2012, asking a far more seasoned legislator in the presence of other staff members, “Have you seen the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’?” Then, to make clear that Meadows was comparing himself to the movie’s brilliant protagonist, he continued, “My gift is reading people and seeing things other people don’t.”

A more complete examination of Meadows’s adult life reveals how relentlessly — and ruthlessly — he has bent to the task of self-advancement. I undertook this effort in hopes of answering the question of how he got into so serious and intractable a predicament that he may end up having to choose between forfeiting his personal freedom or forsaking the life of wealth and power he has assiduously nurtured. This reporting involved speaking with dozens of people in both Washington and North Carolina, including former colleagues at the White House and in Congress, former aides and people who knew Meadows in his life before politics. (Many of his political associates would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from Meadows or from those in Trump world who still view him as an ally.) I also relied on various Meadows-related documents, including some that have yet to be made public, like the full set of 2,319 text exchanges that his attorneys handed over to the House Jan. 6 committee in December 2021. Meadows himself did not respond to numerous attempts to speak with him.

Absent this fuller accounting, Meadows might seem like just a more high-profile face among the swelling ranks of Republicans who proved their fidelity to Trump by buying into his stolen-election lie, with the steep bill at last coming due. With the benefit of more acute hindsight, his current plight seems to be the entirely foreseeable outcome of a lifetime spent all but daring his serial betrayals to catch up to him.

But if that outcome has indeed arrived and Meadows chooses to do as he has typically done — which is to look after Mark Meadows — then the man who was once dubbed Two-Face, after the DC Comics supervillain, by House Republican leadership staffers is not just Trump’s problem but the problem of Trump’s prosecutors as well. The recurrent feature of Meadows’s career ascent is that he persuaded people to trust him, leaving them to later regret having done so.

In reconstructing the “Talented Mr. Ripley”-esque trajectory of Mark Meadows, I found that the usual elements of an upwardly mobile politico — origin-story hyperbolizing, shamelessness, promises made and soon broken — all make an appearance. Still, as a journalist who in past years saw Meadows’s charm offensive at work, I was struck by how deeply he is loathed by many people who once admired him. Some of these ill feelings can be traced to what many have cited as Meadows’s abiding need to be liked, which in turn would seemingly compel him to say whatever he believed a person might want to hear at that moment. After winning his western North Carolina congressional seat in 2012, he promised two different aides that they would be his chief of staff, only to award the job to a third person. (Meadows informed one of the unlucky aides by text message that he was “going in a different direction.” The other aide, upon confronting Meadows face to face, was awarded a show of tears and the explanation that “Debbie’s afraid we’ll have too much fun in Washington.”)

Seven years later, after retiring from Congress so as to make himself available to replace his friend Mick Mulvaney as Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows promised two different Republican friends who hoped to fill his seat that he would stay out of the race. Instead, he endorsed a third candidate, his wife’s friend Lynda Bennett, and then persuaded Trump to do the same. (Bennett was trounced in the primary by a fourth G.O.P. candidate, Madison Cawthorn, who would serve one brief term.)

In reaching out to those who were well acquainted with Meadows, I expected wariness from Republicans who felt loyal toward him and distrustful of the mainstream media, and certainly there were several who fit in that category. It’s also the case that many if not most Republicans see little to gain and much to lose by going on the record to criticize a top Trump ally like Meadows, whose clout, if not what it once was, is still not worth testing.

Just as often, however, I encountered conservatives who seemed repelled by the very subject of Meadows, as if simply acknowledging their past admiration of him would amount to a kind of self-defilement. Some of them remarked on how readily Meadows cried; others commented on how willing he was to lie even when it seemed completely unnecessary for him to do so. Many of those I spoke with who had soured on Meadows happened to be conservative Christians, as Meadows himself is. One told me that he got past his bitterness toward Meadows by thinking of the other blessings in his own life, including his 51 years of marriage. Another, who worked with Meadows in the tiny western North Carolina resort town Highlands when both were real estate agents, politely demurred, saying in a text message: “Mr. Draper, I am a Christian, and I won’t be involved in anything dealing with Mark. Yes, I worked with him in the early days, and I know him very well. I’m not protecting him, it just isn’t right. That’s what is wrong with the country right now. He will stand accountable one day. We all will.” When I then asked her if she could help explain how Meadows had become such a successful real estate agent in so short a time, she replied, “That’s a can of worms, and I don’t want to go down that path.”

Though Meadows has never been shy in discussing his Christian faith, he has seldom acknowledged the role it played in his professional ascent. Instead, the streamlined narrative he has offered depicts a young married couple from Tampa restarting their lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, where they spent their honeymoon eight years earlier, re-enacting the American dream by opening a humble sandwich shop, transitioning to real estate and then, after accruing wealth, to public service. His short path to prosperity was surely enabled by Meadows’s unctuous gift of gab; as he often bragged to staff members during his first congressional campaign in 2012, “I could sell ice to an Eskimo.”

The missing piece in this story is the Community Bible Church, formed in 1983 by former congregants of the First Presbyterian Church of Highlands who rejected that denomination’s tolerant view of gay rights. By the time of the Meadowses’ arrival in Highlands in 1987, C.B.C. had only a few dozen members but was already an emerging power in the community. At the church, Meadows — a 27-year-old Highlands newcomer without a college degree who had worked in customer relations for Tampa Electric Co. — found all the help he needed. Its members would provide him with building space for his sandwich shop, Aunt D’s Place; later, with a new career in real estate; and after that, with campaign donors and volunteers.

But his main benefactor in Highlands would turn out to be one of the church’s founders, an elderly woman named Ginger Glasson. “She was infatuated with Mark Meadows from their first meeting,” recalled her son, Gregory Glasson. (His mother died in 2002.) Known around town for her reflexive generosity and for cooking food that Meals on Wheels would deliver to poor residents, Glasson went further for Meadows, deeding him a lush tract of land, part of a set she had originally planned to give to her five children, which eventually became the site of the Meadows family’s residence. She agreed to incorporate a business with Meadows, Randall Burnett Investments (named after his and her middle names, respectively), through which they purchased a couple of investment tracts — presumably with Glasson’s money.

Two years after opening his sandwich shop, Meadows unloaded it to a couple from Florida. He took a job at the local hardware store while his wife worked as a salesperson for Mary Kay cosmetics, driving around Highlands in a pink car. In 1991, Glasson came to his rescue again. She acquired a local pizzeria and hired Meadows to run the place. Meadows found the work stressful, however. Just a few months after acquiring the pizzeria, Glasson put it up for sale, telling its eventual buyer, David Bee, as he recalls: “Mark’s left the pizza place. I only bought it to have something to do during the day and to help him out.”

Glasson happened to have a close friend in the real estate business: John Cleaveland, the mayor of Highlands and, like Glasson, one of Community Bible Church’s founders. In 1992, John Cleaveland Realty hired Glasson’s friend as a sales associate. As Cleaveland’s half brother, Mike Thompson, would recall: “Ginger really loved Mark. He was kind of like a son to her.” But Glasson later came to view him differently, for reasons that are still unclear. While remaining close to Cleaveland and his wife, she cut off ties with Meadows and never mentioned him again to her children, who came to hold the view that she felt cheated by her association with the young man from Tampa.

But Highlands’s new real estate agent no longer needed anyone’s charity. Meadows entered the trade just as the area was undergoing a boom, owing to the expansion of Route 441, which connected western North Carolina to Atlanta. “It was a real estate agent’s heyday,” says Stephen Gleaner, one of Meadows’s former co-workers. “Eighty to 90 percent of the people who came to me bought property.” Still, Meadows quickly distinguished himself. “He was very intuitive,” Thompson recalls. “It was a new age in Highlands, and he knew how to seize the opportunity.”

Meadows soon formed his own firm, bought and later sold a country club and relocated with his wife and three young children to a lake house in nearby Cashiers. In a highly competitive regional market, Meadows rubbed others the wrong way for reasons that can only partly be explained by professional jealousy. “He’s a con artist,” says Mitch Gurganus, a retired forestry official who surveyed a property for Meadows for $1,600, which he says Meadows then refused to pay. Another local real estate agent, Matthew Eberz, told me that he became so enraged during a confrontation after Meadows went behind his back to woo one of his clients that Eberz grabbed Meadows by the throat. “Most of the agents back then had a disdain for him,” Eberz says.

But Meadows also had numerous admirers. “When he would walk into a room,” says Steve Kerhoulas, who became the pastor of Community Bible Church in 1994 after Meadows recommended him to the other church leaders, “you sensed someone of importance had entered.”

To conservative Christian audiences in the years before he joined the Trump White House, Meadows would recall the day in 2011 when he called his wife from his car to say, “You know, honey, I feel like the Lord is leading me to run for Congress,” and then, in his telling, pulled over to the side of the road and threw up at the prospect. The folks back home knew how unlikely this story was — how Meadows in fact spent years assiduously moving up the region’s G.O.P. hierarchy: chairing precinct and county groups, cutting checks to Republican candidates and traveling to Washington to cultivate relations with national evangelical leaders like Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer.

True to form, the Republican candidate for the newly vacated and favorably redrawn 11th Congressional District styled himself simultaneously as a white-collar conservative and a Tea Partier, at one point predicting at a Tea Party event that President Barack Obama would be sent “home to Kenya or wherever it is.” As one of his campaign staff members, Carlton Huffman, would recall, “Once he got up in front of a room, he was Clintonesque, and I use that term purposefully, to appear genuine in terms of how he handled himself.” John Boehner, the speaker of the House, campaigned for him; so did Amy Kremer, the chairwoman of the Tea Party Express (and later one of the main organizers of the Jan. 6 rally in Washington at which Trump spoke). Having donated $265,000 to his own campaign, Meadows vanquished the field of eight Republican candidates and then routed his Democratic opponent in the November 2012 general election.

He arrived in Washington with no apparent intention of being a backbencher. His willingness to assert himself into the policymaking fray at times made a positive impression, as when he worked behind the scenes in 2014 with President Obama’s State Department officials, and without publicly criticizing the Democratic administration, to help win the release of a Sudanese woman who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. He spent hours alone in his office, poring over an immense volume of House rules, seeking ways in which a junior member of Congress might upend its hidebound hierarchy.

Though quick to ingratiate himself — “You look like money!” was a familiar greeting — he did not feel appreciated by Boehner and in his first month sought to have the speaker deposed. The effort failed, and as Tim Alberta reported in Politico, Meadows literally got down on one knee in the speaker’s office and begged for forgiveness. In January 2015, Meadows and Jordan formed the House Freedom Caucus as a battering ram to oppose the Republican leadership. Six months later, he exercised what was then an obscure parliamentary maneuver known as a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. Though Meadows’s rump faction was too small to oust Boehner by a majority vote, the speaker decided that four years of intransigence from the right was sufficient and resigned that fall.

Meadows seemed unsure of what to do with his newly acquired notoriety. Though hugely popular back in the district and a favorite among the Christian right, in the House chamber he thrashed about ineffectively. Working to secure the top Republican spot on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, he had his efforts undone by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and an instant enemy was made. It was a source of dry amusement to Republican colleagues how Meadows would flatter someone after he had just finished stabbing that same member in the back. His staff adored him yet could not help regarding him as a human question mark: pious yet conniving, ideologically committed yet consumed by the need for attention. And whenever an aide wondered privately if there was something about the boss that did not quite add up, somehow wrapped up in that mystery was the man he chose to be his chief of staff, Kenny West.

West, from the bucolic western North Carolina town Hayesville, worked for his family’s insurance company while dabbling in local Republican politics before deciding to run for Congress in 2012 as a “fiscal conservative and a Christian man.” In the field of eight primary candidates, West came in sixth, attracting little notice even when he reportedly hinted that the front-runner, Mark Meadows, possessed a character flaw.

Meadows’s campaign aides at the time had a vague idea of what West might be referring to: rumors that Meadows had conducted an extramarital affair. (During my visits to Highlands over a decade later, I found that these rumors persisted, albeit with no evidence to substantiate them.)

Though this small-town gossip caused a mild disturbance among the aides, a far bigger surprise came just after Meadows’s victory. Though West barely knew Meadows, was not terribly familiar with much of the 11th District and did not seem to possess any skills or experience that would suit him to running a congressional office in Washington, Meadows nonetheless selected him over more qualified people to be his most senior and highest-paid staff member just after the election. Adding to the puzzle was that Meadows issued West six postelection payments from his campaign fund over a month’s time, totaling $9,600, which the congressman-elect’s F.E.C. disclosure simply listed as “compensation.”

West and his wife quickly developed a friendship with the Meadowses, and West was known to start the workday in prayer with Meadows. But to other staff members, the mystery of West’s employment deepened as his incompetence became apparent to them. Then, at the end of 2014, several female staff members reported that Meadows’s chief of staff had engaged in inappropriate behavior: touching their hair, staring down their blouses or directly at their breasts and requesting that they drive around rural North Carolina with him. Visibly disturbed, Meadows assured the female aides that he would take care of the matter.