On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that Will Scharf, the current White House staff secretary, will become White House counsel on Sept. 1, replacing David Warrington, who, according to the president, will be moving into the private sector.
Scharf is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, a former federal prosecutor and even a 2024 GOP primary challenger to Missouri’s then-attorney general. In addition to serving as White House staff secretary, he is chair of the National Capital Planning Commission, in which capacity he publicly disclaimed the commission’s authority to prevent Trump’s demolition of the East Wing.
But his most important credential, in Trump’s eyes, might be the one he shares with the two other top law men in Trump’s orbit, Solicitor General D. John Sauer and newly minted Attorney General Todd Blanche: They all served as personal attorney to Donald J. Trump.
Each of them represented him in more than one of the litigations that threatened his liberty, finances and political future in the years after his first term.
Blanche, of course, was Trump’s chief defense lawyer during the Manhattan district attorney’s so-called hush money trial, which ended in a 34-count conviction Trump is now appealing, and also played a leading role in defending Trump against the now-dismissed federal election interference and Mar-a-Lago documents cases brought by then-special counsel Jack Smith.
Sauer similarly became a national name when he successfully argued to the Supreme Court that Trump is immune from prosecution for his official acts and that even evidence of his official actions cannot be used to prove his culpability for personal conduct.
But Scharf, who represented Trump in his still-ongoing appeal of the second-tried, multimillion-dollar E. Jean Carroll verdict and in the presidential immunity case, is both less well known and harder to pin down.
It is not that Scharf is not a true believer or Trump loyalist. He is both.
During his primary challenge to then-Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey in 2024, Scharf aired a commercial in which he fires a grenade launcher at boxes of what appear to be evidence against Trump, as his voice intones, “It’s time for an attorney general who will return fire.” Asked about his literally fiery ad by a local news outlet, Scharf was unbowed.
“Given this unprecedented campaign of lawfare against President Trump, we need people willing and able to fight back,” he told KMBC 9.
Scharf has also stood at Trump’s side during the rollout of dozens of executive orders, including just last week, when, alongside Stephen Miller, he rejected the possibility that Trump’s latest efforts to curtail birthright citizenship run afoul of any Supreme Court rulings.
And as chair of the Capital Planning Commission, Scharf has helped expedite two of Trump’s favorite construction projects: the White House ballroom and the so-called Arc de Trump, both of which remain mired in litigation.
But recent reporting illustrates that Scharf might have a dividing line others do not: His fidelity to the Constitution, at least as he interprets it.
According to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, a senior administration official speaking on background said the “unassuming,” “arch-conservative” Scharf was tasked by White House “senior staff” with weighing the lawfulness of not one, but two policy proposals favored by Miller and his ilk. Should Trump suspend habeas corpus rights for unauthorized immigrants, thereby preventing them from challenging their detention or removal, as Miller and others had proposed? And should he invoke the Insurrection Act?
In both cases, according to the reporters, Scharf issued brief, “low-key” memos explaining “why taking either step would shatter historical norms and likely precipitate hazardous legal and constitutional battles,” among the reasons that Miller would come to see Scharf as an obstacle more than an ally.
Yet more than a year later, it is unclear whether that Will Scharf still works in the White House.
Does the man who will be White House counsel still temper his enthusiasm for Trump’s quasi-populist conservatism with a respect for precedent and the other branches’ prerogatives?
Or does he believe that his calling card was and is the label his campaign emblazoned across his ads — “Trump lawyer” — with all the expectations, good and bad, that go with it?
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