Drew Angerer/Getty Images Trumpology Roger Stone’s Last Dirty Trick He promoted Donald Trump’s political rise decades before anyone. Now he’s been indicted for the bruising style of politics he wielded gleefully on Trump’s behalf.

Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

“Perhaps an impolite question,” I asked Roger Stone in a text message last month, “but what if something you envisioned well before almost anybody else and worked toward for more than a generation”—a Donald Trump presidency—”is also in the end the source of your legal demise?”

“That isn’t going to happen,” he responded, punctuating his missive with a yellow, laughing, smiley-face emoji.


Friday morning, it happened.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Stone, charging him with false statements, witness tampering and obstruction of proceeding, indeed landed with a strangely poetic, practically Shakespearean boom, marking a karmic kind of culmination of one of Trump’s longest and most important relationships—an ignominious end, maybe, the result of an idea that was first and foremost his, starting nearly 40 years back.

“I think,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told me, “the universe seeks balance and order, and Stone’s life of disorder and corruption had to be confronted at some point.”

“He is,” longtime New York Democratic strategist George Arzt said, “the wicked seed who has poisoned the tree of democracy.”

Stone met Trump in 1979. The matchmaker was the infamous Roy Cohn, and the context was the fledgling Ronald Reagan presidential bid. Just 27 at the time, six years younger than Trump, Stone was in New York working as the campaign’s regional political director. He needed people to help raise money. Trump was a Jimmy Carter donor but joined Reagan’s finance committee as well. “We hit it off immediately,” Stone recalled.

Ever since, off and on, but mostly on, Stone has been to Trump a lobbyist, an adviser, a strategist, a consultant, and something like a friend. In the long life of the current president—a man whose disposition tends toward isolation and whose relationships typically are transparently transactional and ephemeral—this always has made Stone stand out.

The basis of this Cohn-stoked bond was plain. They shared an ideology of expedience, a stated disdain for elites, a disregard for convention, a core belief in the animal power of publicity. A taste for havoc. An overall and abiding approach to life defined by bottomless reservoirs of cynicism and shamelessness. “I would never take a job in government,” Stone once said. “I’m interested in politics.” Politics, in the estimation of Stone, are a Machiavellian combination of combat and showmanship. And they definitively, in his mind, are not about “uniting people”—they are about “dividing people.” One of Stone’s favorite quotes? The Joker in Batman. “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos.”

In Trump, almost immediately, he saw a potential president. He was, Stone thought, “a prime piece of political horseflesh.” He was a star. He was a brand. He had “the look.” He had the size—not just height and heft but the ability to fill a space and never not be at the center. And he possessed an uncommon kind of temerity. “He’ll say and do anything,” Stone told me last year. And he thought all of this well before Trump for president became what almost everybody else considered a recurring wink-wink tabloid gag. Stone told people—told people that Trump was going to be the president. “He told me in 1985,” veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said. “Roger told me,” added Michael Caputo, a Republican strategist and Stone protégé, “that one of the first times he ever met—among the first times he ever met with Donald Trump—that he knew that he could become president. And that he told him that.”

Stone spearheaded Trump’s initial presidential dalliance starting in the fall of 1987 with the more than $94,000 of “open letter” newspaper ads in which Trump criticized American foreign policy—gripes startlingly consistent with his views still today—followed by a speech he gave at a Rotary Club in New Hampshire. Trump considered it mainly as a way to promote his forthcoming book—The Art of the Deal—but that’s not how Stone saw it. He coordinated, too, a trip to the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where Trump was asked to do national television interviews in this new context. Stone was hoping it would whet his appetite. It did.

He also was the animator of Trump’s run for the Reform Party nomination in 1999. “We’re in a position here where the voters are fed up with both parties,” Stone told C-SPAN that November. “They’re looking for new choices. And if the American people are presented a viable, different choice, they may just take it.” He credited Trump with “a Kennedyesque kind of charisma.”

“A friend of long standing,” Trump called Stone in that year’s quick-written campaign book, The America We Deserve.

And most recently, before Corey Lewandowski, before Paul Manafort, before Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Stone along with acolyte Sam Nunberg laid the groundwork for Trump 2016.

On this, Stone often demurred and deflected, at times trying to pin the kernel of the notion on Richard Nixon, but here and there he slipped and told the truth, straight up. “I launched the idea of Donald J. Trump for President,” he wrote in last year’s Stone’s Rules.

If Trump got from his father a running start of political connections as well as a colossal financial safety net and from Cohn a decade-and-a-half-long tutorial on dark-arts verve, this is what he gleaned from Stone. The road map. The goading and the prodding. “Roger,” Trump said in an interview for the 2017 documentary, “Get Me Roger Stone,” “always wanted me to run for president.”

“Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what’s Roger and what’s Donald,” Manafort said in the same film.

And the ’16 Trump campaign?

“The apotheosis,” said Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, “of Roger Stone’s politics.”

“Make your message big, bold and simple.” “Hang a name on your opponent.” “Attack, attack, attack—never defend.” “Nothing is on the level.” “Hate is a more powerful motivator than love.” All “Stone’s Rules.” Also: “Admit nothing; deny everything.”

Which is what he had been doing—even as smoke-spewing headlines kept stacking up and Trump allies started “preparing for the worst.”

“I’m certainly guilty of bluffing and posturing and punking the Democrats,” Stone said last fall. But beyond that? “Unless they’ve passed some law against bullshit and I missed it, I’m engaging in tradecraft. It’s politics.” He said he hadn’t broken any laws. He dismissed all this as a “political vendetta.” He declared himself “unconcerned.” He kept talking. He said this last month on ABC he never would testify against Trump. Trump on Twitter praised his “guts.”

“Never quit.”

“Never be scared.”

“Stone’s Rules,” too.

On Friday, though, there’s one that felt especially germane. “Past is fucking prologue.” The past four decades led to this morning’s news—tripped up by having followed their own “rules.”

“I would say that the right word for everything that now arises out of the Trump-Stone intersection, and their roots in Roy Cohn’s world, is karma. The public trajectory of their mutual problems was launched when Stone convinced Trump to get on that helicopter and visit New Hampshire,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me.

“If that’s not the definition of karma,” he said, “what is?”

“Proud of my President,” Stone wrote Friday in an Instagram post around 2 a.m. Four hours later, authorities arrived at his house in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and banged on his door. “FBI!” an agent shouted. “Open the door!”

