Peter Beinart: Nancy Pelosi is winning

The result is perhaps the quietest ascent to power within this White House, the unlikely story of a Trump staffer content with both influence and anonymity. It’s a valuable quality, particularly as shutdown negotiations, such as they are, become more volatile by the day. According to more than a dozen current and former White House officials, lawmakers, and congressional aides, Knight is viewed as one of the only people who, three weeks into the closures, has maintained the respect of the president and congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle—something that Trump’s top shutdown lieutenants, such as Vice President Mike Pence, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and the senior adviser Jared Kushner, have struggled to match.

Knight, they say, may be the White House’s only hope for ending the shutdown with a deal and not a national emergency. But as opportunities for compromise dwindle by the day, the thinking that good old-fashioned negotiating can solve the shutdown may be just short of wishful.

“If this ends in a way both sides are even somewhat happy with, it’ll be mainly because of her,” said one White House official who works closely with Knight and who, like most of the White House and congressional staffers I spoke with, requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

It was at former Chief of Staff John Kelly’s personal urging last summer that Knight took the legislative-affairs job. At the time, she was on her way out of the White House. In June, she announced that she was leaving her post as deputy director of the National Economic Council for a banking-policy and lobbying group called the Clearing House. The move made sense: When Knight joined the administration, some close to her wondered when the woman known for her competence would tire of a White House known for—well, not that. They expected she would quickly return to the private sector, where she’d lobbied for Fidelity Investments for eight years before joining the administration at its start. Prior to that, she had spent nearly a decade as a senior policy staffer on Capitol Hill.

Franklin Foer: The shutdown makes Trump’s priorities painfully clear

“I was surprised when she went to the White House,” former House Speaker John Boehner told me. The two worked closely together on the House Ways and Means Committee, where Knight served as a senior adviser to the then-chairman, Bill Thomas. “And then when she announced she was leaving the White House, I thought, ‘Okay, that makes sense to me.’”

To Knight, too, the timing apparently felt right. Her first job within the administration was on the National Economic Council. She was conscripted by the then-chairman, Gary Cohn, to help pass tax reform, which Trump signed into law in December 2017. “After that, there was a sense of: What else do I have to accomplish here?” said one former senior White House official who worked closely with Knight.