The Influencers: The People Shaping Trump’s New Washington
This story is part of a series exploring the backgrounds and agendas of the players — the well known names and behind-the-scenes operators alike — who will wield power in Trump’s second term.
Around 5 p.m. on the night before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a senior White House official got a call from his new boss, James Braid. Republican D.C. was, at that point, in full party mode: A raucous MAGA rally featuring, among others, the president-elect and the Village People was underway at Capital One Arena. Throughout the city, Republicans were preparing to attend lavish inaugural events later that evening.
But Braid’s mind was elsewhere: Having been tapped to serve as Trump’s main liaison to Congress, he was seeking to fill out his team. And he had decided this aide should join him — in just 45 minutes — for in-person interviews. “I’m like, ‘James, it’s 5 o’clock, it’s snowing,’” this official recalled. “And I go, ‘Let me see what I can do.’ And I call him right back, and I’m like … ‘Hey, can we …’ and he’s like, ‘No, we’re gonna do the interviews.’” The aide ended up helping conduct the interviews in a full tux.
“That’s James, ya know,” this official told NOTUS. “Some of us are over there in D.C. to be seen and to be around all this. And that’s not to say James isn’t, but his mission is to do the work first.” The official described Braid as “the hardest working guy I’ve ever worked for.”
Braid, whose official title is director of the Office of Legislative Affairs and deputy assistant to the president, arrives in the administration having just worked in the Senate for now-Vice President JD Vance. At 6-foot-6, he typically stands high above the lawmakers he walks alongside, and friends and allies describe him as “physically imposing” or “hulking.”
Braid’s assignment is to deliver results where Trump largely failed during his first term. Tax cuts aside, Trump’s first four years in office did not really birth a major legislative policy achievement, and the president went through four legislative affairs directors in the same number of years. Part of the reason for the revolving door, according to one Republican strategist close to Braid and Vance, was that “we unfortunately had a leg affairs team that sometimes felt like they were not representing the president’s interests” and instead were “working with congressional leaders to rein in” or “divert from” Trump’s agenda.
By contrast, Braid appears intent on serving Trump rather than restraining him. “I think I view my fundamental mandate from the president as translating his ideology and his views into legislation. So, there’s no desire to contain him,” Braid told NOTUS in an interview. “Our role across the administration, but most especially in legislative affairs, is to be faithful stewards and implementers of that vision, not to contain or otherwise try to ameliorate what he’s trying to accomplish.”
Russell Vought — the newly confirmed Office of Management and Budget director, who hired Braid at OMB during Trump’s first term and says they have a “close relationship” — is confident in Braid’s ideological loyalty. “Having known him, he’s always been most comfortable in the policy agenda that has become kind of the Make America Great perspective,” said Vought in a NOTUS interview. “So it is not a surprise to me at all that he’s working for the president and pushing those objectives on the Hill.”
Braid isn’t one of the well-known names in the new administration — multiple people describe him as someone who doesn’t seek the spotlight — yet it’s hard to think of any behind-the-scenes player whose success, or lack thereof, could have bigger consequences for the country over the next four years. In some ways, the fate of the Trump policy agenda rests with the small daily tactical decisions that Braid will make. Though Trump is known to be his own top negotiator with lawmakers, who tend to call him directly, it will be Braid who deals with the nuts and bolts of legislation — as well as where and when the White House decides to expend its political capital.
“You look at his promises during the campaign, you look at the legislative landscape, and the name of the game is to try to get as much of that done as possible in a challenging environment,” Braid told NOTUS. Given the narrow House majority, and the sheer sweep of Trump’s agenda, “challenging” may well end up being a dramatic understatement. But among most of the two dozen Republican lawmakers, strategists, White House officials, Hill aides, friends and allies that NOTUS spoke with for this story, there is a belief that this hard-working loyalist is uniquely suited for what is likely to be, by any measure, an extraordinarily difficult job.
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Braid, now 35, was born and raised in North Carolina. His father immigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1980s from Scotland. Braid first attended the University of Oklahoma, then the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he played rugby and graduated in 2013. According to a friend, he was a bartender in North Carolina before moving to D.C. This friend described him as a humble person who’s “always had to work for it.”
Most describe him as very smart and an avid reader. He reviewed books for The Washington Free Beacon while working for Heritage Action for America in D.C. as an intern, then staffer. In those years, Heritage was a conservative thorn in the side of wavering Republicans. It was at Heritage, one co-worker recalled, that Braid received a crash course on how to wield power and get results from members of Congress.
His first job on the Hill was as a senior legislative assistant in the office of then-Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Within a span of 14 months, he was promoted to legislative director, then deputy chief of staff. A cigarette smoker, he frequently worked 18-hour days on the Hill and was there on weekends, colleagues said. “He was not my roommate, but he was there at the office a lot,” Sanford, who famously lived at his office, told NOTUS. “James was a loyal soldier and definitely a workhorse.”
Sanford’s office was a notoriously demanding place to work, and it could feel like a revolving door. The congressman often found himself disagreeing with other Republicans — and it fell to Braid and his co-workers to help explain why Sanford would not vote for a bill that was popular with the rest of the conference.
Sanford told NOTUS that the pair used to playfully argue about conservative policy in the office. “James, as I remember him, had a soul,” Sanford said. “I remember him to be a good guy who thought a lot about conservative philosophy — and with due respect to the people I know and like who work for Trump now, conservative philosophy is not the driver of where Trump is coming from.”
From there, Braid went on to work for then-Reps. Ken Buck and Ted Budd and the House Freedom Caucus, among other conservative offices. One ally said that a signature part of Braid’s work as an aide was assisting lawmakers in taking bigger swings than they were expected to — like helping Budd become the face of the fight against the 2018 Gateway Tunnel bill, stepping toe-to-toe with Sen. Chuck Schumer. (The bill would have built a rail tunnel under the Hudson River for $30 billion, and it drew significant pushback from President Trump.)
“It was just fascinating to see how he could sort of position a no-name freshman into taking on the minority leader at the time,” said Chad Yelinski, a groomsman in Braid’s wedding and former Capitol Hill co-worker. “I don’t know how many guys can … pick a fight and elevate it in such a way that you get, you know, some kind of big policy outcome from it.”
Multiple people told NOTUS that when Vance arrived in the Senate in 2023 he sought out Braid to work on his team. (Vance did not comment for this story.) These sources described their relationship with lawmakers as good cop (Vance) and blunt cop (Braid). According to the Republican strategist close to Braid and Vance, it’s in part because of Braid that Vance boasted strong relationships for someone relatively new in the Senate.
Vance was able to build “unique” coalitions — with Democratic then-Sen. Sherrod Brown on a train safety bill, for instance, or with Democratic then-Sen. Debbie Stabenow on a bill to protect the Great Lakes. “A lot of that is James Braid,” the strategist said. “He understood the coalition, because he understood where JD was ideologically, and because he actually had a sharp mind for politics. He was able to look at what we were doing on the political side and synthesize it into policy and legislation.” With Trump returning to the White House, Vance helped push Braid’s résumé for the role of legislative director, the strategist said, even though the transition team interviewed other people.
A few people who spoke with NOTUS were surprised to see Braid in this role because of his historical commitment to limited government and traditional conservative principles. “I don’t know how you can look at yourself in the mirror and go tell members of Congress that we are going to impose tariffs on Denmark because they won’t give us Greenland,” said a source who worked with him during his time on Capitol Hill.
Some sources said his beliefs had evolved toward a more populist-Trumpian outlook as he ascended through the ranks. “He’s a true convert to this MAGA stuff,” said a Republican operative who once worked with Braid. The strategist close to Braid and Vance put it this way: “I think there’s something that always happens when anyone you know works in a job and then takes a new job, where, when you take your new job, you have new priorities.”
Braid credits trade for playing a role in opening the door to his complicated version of conservatism. Those closest to him say he has always been both conservative and populist — that he has moved not just with the Republican Party, but in some ways ahead of it, seeing the turn toward populism before others were comfortable with it. He is able, multiple people told NOTUS, to apply his principles to the circumstances at hand. Sources also described him as loyal to those he represents — and proud to represent Trump’s interests.
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Braid, according to friends, has softened somewhat after getting married and becoming a father of one — soon to be two. His wife, a Republican staffer on the Hill, is due in May. (A source familiar with Braid’s situation said he doesn’t plan to take paternity leave.) Friends say he’s a thoughtful and at times sentimental person, who gave one of his groomsmen Robert Caro’s “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” as a thank-you gift for participating in his wedding.
Still, the old work ethic remains. Braid, who has an office in the East Wing, meets with the president multiple times a week, according to the source familiar with Braid’s situation. (The source would not say whether Braid has walk-in privileges to the Oval Office.) Lawmakers who spoke to NOTUS say Braid has a near-constant presence on all things pertaining to Capitol Hill — from the Senate confirmation fights to the House’s already-fraught efforts to pass a government funding bill next month. Since Election Day, one Republican lawmaker said, he has attended over a dozen meetings with Braid present. A senior White House official — the one who wore the tux to the interviews — also said Braid calls members, even though he has staff to do so on his behalf.
A Republican strategist whom Braid prepared to attend meetings with senators and Trump cabinet nominees said that Braid offered an invaluable verbal dossier on lawmakers. He has “the intel on what these senators need to hear, what promises they need, what promises you’re gonna have to keep,” said the strategist. Asked how Braid gained all his intelligence, the strategist replied, “Every time I ask him, ‘How do you know that?’ he’s like, ‘I read it.’ He just reads everything. He consumes every piece of written material about whatever subject he’s working on.” It now appears that every Trump nominee who went through the Senate process will be confirmed — a significant victory for Vance, who got a lot of the credit for pushing the nominees across the finish line, but also a major win for Braid.
To this work, Braid brings a no-b.s. communication style. Buck, one of Braid’s former bosses on the Hill, said it’s “probably his most effective attribute” — a “straightforward honesty in how he describes the position of the people he’s helping.”
He seems capable of tempering that bluntness with humility, however. “James has not come into the room telling everybody how it’s going to be,” Rep. Dusty Johnson said. “He does message the importance of doing this as a team and working through pain points together. He has taken a thoughtful approach.”
Not everything has gone smoothly so far, to be sure. In December, during talks over how to raise the debt ceiling, Braid’s negotiation tactics angered a few Republican members, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. They believed it was Braid who tipped Trump off, in the middle of negotiations, that Rep. Chip Roy was among the fiscal hard-liners who ardently refused to raise the debt ceiling without deep spending cuts — and that it was Braid who got Trump riled up enough to call Roy “very unpopular” and “an obstructionist” on social media. Ultimately, Trump’s push failed, with 38 Republicans rebuffing him.
It now seems, though, that the episode was a mere bump in the road. A month later, Roy dismissed the thought that there was any beef with Braid. “We’re moving forward,” he told NOTUS, saying he wouldn’t be discussing anything that happened before the new year. (Roy later tweeted that “swamp media vultures” were trying to cause conflict between Braid and conservatives on the Hill. “He is not the issue,” Roy wrote.) And one other lawmaker in the room said Braid wasn’t combative at all.
“I love Chip Roy, looking forward to working with him to implement the president’s agenda,” Braid told NOTUS.
The next big test for Braid lies in the debate over reconciliation, which would allow Republicans to bypass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate — and probably represents the best vehicle to pass Trump’s ambitious agenda on the border, energy and taxes in the first 100 days. At the root of the issue dogging Republicans is whether to do one reconciliation package or two — splitting border security, defense and energy from tax cuts and a debt ceiling raise to make them both (in theory) easier to pass.
Some Republicans who had discussed reconciliation strategy with Braid and the transition team felt caught off guard when the president suddenly endorsed a one-bill strategy in early January — in part, said three people familiar with the discussions, because it was Braid and his team who had pushed the two-bill strategy and made it seem like that’s what Trump wanted. The back-and-forth, which has yet to be resolved, left lawmakers to question whether Braid and Trump were actually on the same page.
Then again, the reality, according to Trump’s first legislative director, Marc Short, is that the president is always going to be his own primary dealmaker. “He does a lot of the negotiation,” Short said. “And I don’t think the important things he’s going to delegate to somebody on his staff.”
Add that complicated dynamic to the substantial list of challenges facing Braid as he settles into his new role. “It’s a tough job to be delivering when you’ve got a one-vote margin in the House, right?” one longtime friend of Braid told NOTUS. “Just because anything getting across the finish line takes a miracle, right?”
“How does anybody handle that?” said one lawmaker who was in a meeting with Braid and Trump in early February. “It’s a challenge for everybody — Republican, Democrat, whoever.” But Braid, this person added, “knows this conference very well. No doubt about that.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS. NOTUS reporters Oriana González, Reese Gorman and Haley Byrd Wilt and managing editor Kate Nocera contributed to this story.