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.
Last July, Terry Schilling, a conservative activist who had yet to interact with Donald Trump outside of a photo line, flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the presidential candidate. A buoyant 38-year-old with spiky hair, Schilling runs the American Principles Project, a group of social conservatives that bills itself as “America’s top defender of the family.” Trump, in the final months of the campaign, had set aside time to participate in an APP documentary that aimed to show how “woke military policies” had weakened the country.
But Schilling had more on his mind that day than the documentary. After filming Trump for 45 minutes, Schilling took him aside and showed him some data from the previous midterms. That election cycle had been a disaster for the GOP, yet Schilling believed APP had garnered numerous votes for Republicans in Arizona and Wisconsin — more than 30,000 in each state — thanks to a paid media blitz on what he called the “trans sports issue.” (The Trump White House didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this piece.)
Trump, of course, was already well aware of this topic. Days earlier, at the GOP convention in Milwaukee, he had told his supporters, “We will not have men playing in women’s sports — that will end immediately.” But if anyone was well-positioned to remind Trump of this issue’s political potential, it was Terry Schilling.