A Missourian told Trump no

By Jason Hancock | Editor-in-Chief

Good morning, and welcome to The Weekender. 

Will Scharf took an odd path to Missouri politics. 

Born in New York, schooled at Andover, Princeton and Harvard Law, he moved to St. Louis in 2011 to clerk for a federal appeals judge, decided he liked it, and stayed. “A Missourian by choice,” he called himself in 2024, after critics tried to make his pedigree a liability in the Republican primary for attorney general.

He lost that race. Missouri Republicans picked Andrew Bailey. 

So Scharf went back to Washington. Within months he held a stranger job than the one he'd sought — staff secretary in Donald Trump's second White House, the aide who controls the flow of paper to the Oval Office and sits at the last desk anything crosses before the president’s.

There, he became an unlikely voice of caution. According to recent reporting from The New York Times, Scharf was among the few willing to warn that some of what the White House wanted might not hold up in court.

The Times, drawing on a forthcoming book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, published two confidential memos Scharf sent to Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles. One warned against suspending habeas corpus — the right to make the government justify a detention before a judge — to speed mass deportations. The other warned against invoking the Insurrection Act to put troops on American streets.

Both were being pushed by Stephen Miller. 

And both, Scharf argued, risked court fights that could cost the president more than they returned.

Read one way, this is a Missourian holding the line. Read more carefully, it’s something less flattering and more useful.

Scharf is no resistance figure. He helped win Trump near-total immunity at the Supreme Court and get the Mar-a-Lago documents case tossed. His office processed the orders behind what became known as the White House’s “retribution” agenda. As the Times describes it, his objection to suspending habeas corpus was not framed primarily in moral terms. It was legal and tactical: A weak claim invites a sweeping ruling, and the ruling binds you on everything after. 

There's a pattern in that. 

Scharf's first turn in government was as policy director to former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican who rode into office promising to break a corrupt establishment and resigned in disgrace barely a year and a half later. Twice now, Scharf has been the credentialed process man at the elbow of a principal with little use for process.

Trump never formally suspended habeas corpus or invoked the Insurrection Act. But in July, ICE began treating immigrants arrested inside the country – many of whom we know have lived here for years – as though they'd been stopped at the border, with no bond hearing and no judge for most. Courts said no. The administration kept going. 

The radical moves were shelved. The deportations sped up anyway, and troops still reached the streets through other channels.

What makes Scharf’s memos remarkable isn't that they reveal a hero. It's that the guardrail came from inside the agenda and rested on one lawyer's read of what courts would tolerate. The proposals faded but were never abandoned. The Insurrection Act, the Times reports, stayed on the table.

Missouri didn’t give Scharf the office he ran for. He ended up with something more consequential: the chance to tell the most powerful man in the country no, in writing, when he tested whether the Constitution still bound him. 

Scharf did it in the language of strategy.

It’s worth asking what happens the day strategy points the other way.

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