But in the chaotic weeks ahead, Lewandowski's attempt to capitalize on his proximity to the new president turned out to be a lot more complicated—and perilous—than he originally imagined. Indeed, as Lewandowski navigated the first few months of Trump's administration, his stumbles would reveal a great deal about the temptations, the opportunities, and the avarice suddenly running wild in the swamp that Trump had once vowed to drain—and how easy it can be for someone to drown in the muck.

Lewandowski, 43, is a trim man with the high-and-tight haircut and Monster-energy-drinking habit that, in Washington, are typically favored by those in a politician's security detail. (A dozen years ago, during a rough patch in his political-consulting career, Lewandowski enrolled in the New Hampshire Police Academy and eventually worked part-time as a marine patrol officer.) Even in his new office, with its view of the West Wing, Lewandowski didn't much cut the figure of a high-priced D.C. lobbyist. Though he seemed eager to play that game. Sure, he may have been new to town; he may have lacked the deep connections of the traditional D.C. power broker, but to Lewandowski, none of that seemed to matter anymore. In Trump World, he had the one connection that counted.

"If companies want to understand the decision process of the administration, I might be a person who can provide value in that regard," Lewandowski had humbly offered, describing for me his ambitions at the start of the Trump era. "I've had an inside look at how decisions are made in this world for a couple years, and very few people have had that who aren't going inside that building." Meaning, of course, the large white one two blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue. "What I think I bring," he continued, "is the knowledge of how the president makes his decisions and what's important to him."

It's no secret that Trump seeks counsel from a sprawling and unwieldy kitchen cabinet that includes fellow moguls, talk-show hosts, and various friends. And across the first months of the Trump presidency, Lewandowski—a charter member of that kitchen cabinet—has stayed in close contact with the president. By day, he's paid visits to the Oval Office. By night, he's dialed Trump in the White House residence—ringing the same cell phone number that Trump used in his pre-POTUS days. If Trump has been in the mood to chat, he's simply called Lewandowski back on a secure line. Whenever there's been a White House event that interests Lewandowski—like, say, the Rose Garden visit in April by the New England Patriots—he's snagged a VIP seat.

Among other Trump associates, Lewandowski's continued access to the president has been a source of both fascination and consternation. "The big guy feels like his hand was forced when he moved Corey out," one Trump apparatchik explained, "and the boss hates it when his hand is forced." Roger Stone, the political dirty trickster, Trump adviser, and Lewandowski detractor, was more succinct. "For whatever reason, the president has a soft spot for Corey," Stone told me. "Maybe it's sentimentality."

“There are big bags of cash falling out of the sky for Republicans right now,” one GOP lobbyist crowed. “It’s a great time to be a Republican in D.C.!”

To those outside the Trump orbit, Lewandowski's presence in the D.C. power game has been even more confounding. "A year and a half ago, no one had ever heard of this guy," one venerable Washington lobbyist, with a laundry list of Fortune 500 clients, recently explained to me. "Now he's calling CEOs and they're taking his calls!" We were sitting in a conference room that afforded an even more enviable view of the city than Lewandowski's—a panorama that this lobbyist felt no need to narrate for me. He seemed at once amused and astounded by Lewandowski's chutzpah. The lobbyist shook his head. "It's a whole new world."

Not that he was complaining. Even though this lobbyist caters to more establishment Republicans, Trump has been good for his business. "There are big bags of cash falling out of the sky for Republicans right now," another GOP lobbyist crowed. "It's a great time to be a Republican in D.C.!"

That Trump's arrival has provided a boost to Washington's already-thriving influence industry would make sense: The GOP now controls the White House and Congress for the first time in a decade. But to the denizens of the swamp, Trump has provided an even more lucrative gift: chaos. "There's just so much uncertainty around Trump—both in terms of what he's going to do on any given day, but also who's up and who's down in the administration," explains Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee communications director and Washington wise man. "And the uncertainty has been very profitable for lobbying firms all over the city. Every company is doubling down on their D.C. help. They're trying to navigate a world that was always foreign to them and is now extremely foreign to them."

And across Washington, a business that has long endeavored to cloak its grubbier aspects in high-minded talk about "providing insight to clients on the policy process"—as one lobbyist explained his work to me—is now in a Trumpian state of flux. "The D.C. influence game has always been slimy and transactional, but it's now more out in the open," says Tim Miller, a Republican political operative and partner at a Washington public-affairs firm. "It's like everything with Trump: The subtext becomes text."

A percolating question in Washington these past few months is who will become the symbol, the living embodiment, of this new, even more debased state of affairs. After all, every administration serves up a poster child for corruption. In Ronald Reagan's, it was Mike Deaver, the former White House deputy chief of staff turned lobbyist who was convicted of perjury. In Bill Clinton's, it was Webb Hubbell, the associate attorney general and old Arkansas law partner of Hillary's who ultimately went to prison for some Little Rock shenanigans. Trump's Washington would appear to offer a heretofore unthinkable plethora of candidates. "There's a lot of line-testing going on right now," one longtime lobbyist told me in the earliest days of the Trump administration. "Someone's going to be the first guy to run into the electric fence." A couple of months later, some would wonder whether Corey Lewandowski had done just that.

Lewandowski's improbable ascent to the uppermost echelons of American politics began in a rented Zipcar, procured near his home in Windham, New Hampshire. It was January 2015, and a sit-down with Donald Trump had been arranged by a friend, though as Lewandowski recalls, he didn't know quite why. He was game nonetheless. "Who wouldn't want to go see Donald Trump in New York?" Lewandowski has said. For a man who still likes to describe himself as "a poor kid from Lowell, Massachusetts"—the son of a single mother, the grandson of a union printer, a proud graduate of that blue-collar city's Catholic high school and U-Mass satellite campus—an invitation to Trump Tower was too enticing an opportunity to pass up.

When Lewandowski arrived at the Fifth Avenue office, the businessman started in with some small talk about his "air force" of personal planes and helicopters. For about 30 minutes, they chatted before Trump came around to a question: Would Lewandowski like to run Trump's presidential campaign?

As unlikely a presidential candidate as Trump was 30 months ago, Lewandowski was an even more implausible pick to manage a presidential campaign. His experience in politics had been far from exemplary. When he hadn't been failing in his own political ambitions—he managed just 143 votes in an unsuccessful attempt to secure the Republican nomination for a Massachusetts House of Representatives seat in 1994 and lost a race for the treasurer of his New Hampshire town 18 years later—he was coming up short on behalf of other politicians. Lewandowski had a stint working on Capitol Hill for an Ohio Congressman who'd later resign in scandal and serve 17 months in prison, and he managed the dismal reelection campaign of U.S. Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, who was the rare incumbent to lose a party primary. He eventually washed up at the New England Seafood Producers Association. For years, his closest brush with the big leagues of GOP politics came via his side-gig duties as a marine patrol officer on Lake Winnipesaukee, where Mitt Romney and his clan vacation. "He wasn't even considered a B-teamer," says one prominent Republican strategist, who first encountered Lewandowski on Smith's campaign. "He was like a C- or D-level political operative."

Jon Hill/Redux

To the extent Lewandowski was thought of at all in broader political circles, it was because of his work for Americans for Prosperity, a group funded largely by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, which in 2008 hired Lewandowski to serve as its New Hampshire state director. ("The Koch operation is the island of misfit toys," explains the prominent Republican strategist.) It was propitious timing. Riding the Tea Party wave in 2010, AFP helped Republicans take back the New Hampshire legislature and the state's two seats in the U.S. House. Lewandowski created his own momentum, as well. Noticeable for the fact that he was invariably wearing a suit—a rarity in New Hampshire politics—Lewandowski became famous for "debating" a life-size cardboard cutout of the state's Democratic governor at political rallies. "It got attention," says Greg Moore, a New Hampshire conservative activist who succeeded Lewandowski as AFP state director. "You have to have someone who's out there and leading the charge, and Corey certainly was that." After the 2010 triumph, Lewandowski was promoted inside AFP to a regional director.