'Invisibility is power': Beauty queen's rise to Trump policy mastermind revealed
The mastermind behind former President Donald Trump's 2025 political platform has quietly outwitted her political rivals as she rose from beauty queen to powerbroker whilst quietly dodging the public eye — until now.
Former Trump aide Brooke Rollins on Friday became the subject of a lengthy Politico Magazine investigation revealing the unbridled power a onetime Cotton Bowl Queen could soon enjoy should the Republican presidential nominee win on Nov. 5.
"Rollins has become one of the most important Republican operatives you’ve probably never heard of," Politico's Ian Ward reports. "If Trump wins in November, Rollins will immediately become one of the most powerful conservatives in the country."
Rollins is the chair of the America First Policy Institute, the pro-Trump think tank quietly leading his transition team, and a top pick for the former president's next White House chief of staff, according to the report.
“President Trump thinks very highly of Brooke,” a senior Trump adviser told Politico. “He has said, ‘She could run any company in the country.’”
Rollins joined Trump's administration in 2018 as director of the Office of American Innovation, a new White House office that the press ridiculed as Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “pet project," according to Politico.
"It was not a cushy or high-visibility post, but it gave Rollins a chance to operate behind the scenes," Ward wrote. "Rollins became famous for carrying around white binders containing stacks of memos on different policy issues, a sign to some of her colleagues that she was consciously — and somewhat ostentatiously — trying to expand her policy portfolio."
Rollins was eventually tasked with creating a policy blueprint for Trump's second term that became a mission statement for the former aide on Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Politico reported.
"That was incredibly heartbreaking for me for a lot of reasons,” Rollins later said. But those concerns reportedly lasted only “a couple of hours.”
“I realized, ‘You know what?’” Rollins later said. “Now we just have to double down.”
Rollins launched the America First Policy Institute in April 2021 and triggered a stiff competition between her organization and the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025.
In doing so she managed to infuriate both the Heritage Foundation, who reportedly saw AFPI as a "joke," and even Trump, according to Politico.
"Trump fumed about the sums of money that AFPI had been raising using the America First brand, believing that the fundraising efforts were taking money away from the campaign," Ward wrote. “'It’s my f----- money!' Trump reportedly vented."
Rollins responded by quietly retreating from the spotlight, only to reappear when Project 2025 garnered the wrong kind of media attention in 2024 and spurred the former president to publicly back away from its architects.
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"Even if Trump’s denunciation of Project 2025 was merely a political stunt, as many of Trump’s opponents have speculated, it was an unqualified victory for Rollins," wrote Ward. "Her main rival for influence over the Trump transition was now too politically toxic for the Trump campaign to associate with publicly."
In August, Trump announced AFPI bigwigs would lead his transition team. Despite this political rise, Rollins has since managed to remain out of sight, according to Politico.
Politico suggested it was not a question of modesty.
"Invisibility is power," Ward wrote. "For now, Rollins has the benefit of both."