“It is beyond anything the presidency has achieved yet and beyond anything Nixon could have imagined,” said Michael Gerhardt, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina School of Law whose work centers on constitutional conflicts between presidents and Congress. “There is literally no way to hold the president accountable in Pat Cipollone’s worldview.”

Allies of Cipollone’s say the arguments laid out during Trump’s impeachment trial only maintained the view of executive authority that was also present under President Barack Obama.

“Frankly, we remained faithful to previous precedents, including precedents established by the administrations of both political parties,” said one person close to the legal team. “We would not view it as an expansion of executive power.”

“We defended the president, the presidency and the Constitution,” the person added.

Trump was happy with the outcome of his acquittal but still views it as just a single step toward further vindication, according to several senior administration officials and Republicans close to the White House.

In meetings with senior staff in recent weeks, Trump has asked repeatedly for updates on the Durham investigation into pre-election federal probes of Trump and has expressed frustration it’s not moving along at a faster clip. He wants anyone associated with the origins of the Mueller investigation to be brought to justice.

Some of the questions raised by the impeachment proceedings about the scope of executive authority remain undecided — and will be heard by the courts this spring. “In the short term, the acquittal was a win for presidential power. It strengthened the hand of the presidency and showed you can stonewall and not turn over anything, but that doesn’t mean it will hold,” said one former senior administration official. “So much of it will end up getting sorted out in the courts.”

Cipollone’s “lasting legacy will be getting his client through impeachment and not messing it up,” said Neil Eggleston, Obama’s White House counsel from 2014 to 2017. “He had a jury that was entirely not going to convict the president, so his goal was to get through it and sound credible.”

Cipollone supported the Trump candidacy early on during the 2016 election. But he first came to the attention of Trumpworld late in the cycle when he helped the candidate prepare for debates. The Trump transition also considered him for the job of deputy attorney general under Jeff Sessions, a position that never materialized because Sessions instead wanted to install career prosecutor Rod Rosenstein.

In the fall of 2018, Cipollone left a lucrative partnership in private practice to take the job of White House counsel because he liked Trump’s policy positions and felt he wanted to serve the country that had welcomed his Italian immigrant parents. “The latter may sound hokey but it’s how he feels,” said Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host and close friend of Cipollone’s.

Inside the White House, Cipollone quickly established himself as the opposite of Trump’s first White House counsel, Don McGahn — standing out as an affable presence who enjoyed spending time in the Oval Office and who tried to help implement the president’s wishes as much as he could.