Corey Lewandowski: How One Man Became America’s Hottest Export of Political Chaos

Corey Lewandowski: The Man Who Weaponized Chaos and Outsourced It to the World
By our correspondent in the smoking section of global politics

Somewhere between the Beltway’s bottomless mimosa brunches and the Qatari-funded think-tank canapé circuit, Corey Lewandowski has become the export America never put a tariff on: the political operative who sells populist arson abroad with the same breezy confidence he once used to sell Trump Steaks. To the untrained eye he is merely another ex-campaign manager turned cable-news rodeo clown; to the rest of the planet he is a living cautionary tale about what happens when you let a New Hampshire street brawler franchise the art of the electoral smash-and-grab.

From Brasília to Budapest, consultants now speak of “doing a Lewandowski” when they want to smash institutional china without leaving fingerprints. In 2022, a Bolsonaro-aligned digital shop in São Paulo reportedly paid six figures for a Zoom masterclass titled “Owning the Libs Across Time Zones.” Last spring, a Serbian tabloid breathlessly quoted Lewandowski advising Vučić’s party on “message discipline” while simultaneously live-tweeting his own airport lounge Bloody Mary. The irony—Serbia seeking discipline from a man once fired for grabbing a reporter—was apparently lost on everyone involved except the bartender.

The international appeal is easy to diagnose. Western democracies have spent decades outsourcing manufacturing to Shenzhen and customer service to Bangalore; now they subcontract nihilism to whichever ex-Trump staffer still has a valid passport. Lewandowski’s genius lies in packaging American resentment as a turnkey product: a McDonald’s Happy Meal of voter suppression memes, Facebook micro-targeting, and grievance-flavored energy drinks. All you need is a local oligarch with Wi-Fi and a budget line labeled “democracy offset.”

Global implications? Let’s start with the small stuff. Canada’s Conservative Party recently floated hiring Lewandowski for their next campaign, prompting a Toronto Star headline that read like a cry for help: “Do We Really Need Our Own January 6?” Meanwhile, the European Parliament quietly added him to a sanctions watchlist after rumors that he advised Poland’s Law and Justice party on how to brand Brussels as “globalist fake news”—a phrase that translates surprisingly well into Polish profanity. The man has become a geopolitical Swiss Army knife: useful, vaguely illegal, and likely to get you strip-searched at customs.

But the broader significance is darker. Lewandowski represents the final commodification of American decay. Once upon a time the U.S. exported jazz, moon shots, and the idea that democracy was more than a punchline. Now it exports Corey, a walking LinkedIn profile who proves that if you weaponize shamelessness, customs can’t confiscate it. Every time he pockets another consulting fee in Warsaw or Nairobi, a little piece of the liberal order dies—not with a bang, but with a sponsored content deal.

Naturally, the man himself remains unbothered. When reached for comment in Dubai—where he was reportedly advising a sheikh on “optics” for a World Cup bid—Lewandowski responded via voice note while boarding a gold-plated elevator: “The world wants authenticity, baby. I’m just the supply chain.” Somewhere a political science professor began weeping into his IR theory textbook.

The takeaway for Dave’s Locker readers? Watch closely, because this is what late-stage empire looks like: not a dramatic fall, but a clearance sale. While Beijing builds ports and Moscow pipelines, Washington exports Corey—an inside joke no one abroad finds funny anymore. The planet once feared American aircraft carriers; now it fears American political consultants who treat constitutions like terms-of-service agreements. All that’s left is to guess which democracy signs the next retainer.

And so the carousel spins. Tonight Lewandowski will clink glasses with a defense minister who still uses a Hotmail account, tomorrow he’ll keynote a conference titled “Populism as a Service.” The rest of us can only sip our overpriced airport wine and marvel at how quickly the virus of manufactured outrage went pandemic. As the man himself might say—if you can’t beat him, invoice him.