The Air Force One scene: Where a ragtag campaign operation collided with reality

Hope Hicks (left) calls for an end to reporters' questions on Air Force One.

Special counsel Robert Mueller continues to scrutinize a critical moment on Air Force One last year when Donald Trump and his aides sought to craft a response that would explain why, in the thick of the 2016 election, three Trump campaign chiefs met with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer and her entourage at Trump Tower. The Air Force One scene involved about a dozen people, but the two that have recently emerged as central players in the drama—Trump's communications aide Hope Hicks and his legal team’s former spokesperson Mark Corallo—represent a collision between Trump aides who came to the White House via the campaign and those who came by way of Washington.

As the fallout from that drama suggests, there is a distinct difference between the two camps—both in terms of what they knew about the campaign and the choices they subsequently made given the revelations they were privy to.

The 29-year-old Hicks, of course, served as Trump's press secretary during the election, while Corallo first joined Trump's legal team in May of 2017 only to exit two months later. When Hicks joined the campaign, she had zero political experience. In contrast, Corallo was a veteran GOP operative who had served as spokesperson for former Attorney General John Ashcroft and a congressional committee that investigated President Bill Clinton, among others. In short, he knew something about sticky legal inquiries, the law, and how the press intersects with both.

There's a lot to unpack about what happened during that Air Force One showdown and why it could indeed turn out to be legally damaging to Trump, but bottom line, when it came to what Corallo learned about Don Jr.'s Trump Tower meeting and how Trump and his aides were handling it, he saw danger and fled. Fast. It now appears that Hicks may have been left holding the bag, based on a recent New York Times report claiming she advised her boss that Don Jr.'s “I love it” emails about the Trump Tower meeting would "never get out." Her lawyer vehemently denies the account but, whatever the case, Hicks has stuck by Trump’s side, not only remaining in the White House but being elevated to communications director.

The Hicks-Corallo divide is instructive because it represents a dynamic that generally unfolded in the early days of the Trump White House. Those who played a role in the campaign and weren't forced out for some specific reason (like former national security adviser Michael Flynn) tended to stay. But those who signed up for Trump’s White House with a good bit of naiveté about what transpired during the election, typically didn't last long. Think Corallo, who left after just a couple months last year, and one-time White House communications director Mike Dubke, who lasted about three months. Both decided to leave quickly and seemingly on their own accord.

On the other hand, former campaign operatives or people at least close enough to get a whiff of team Trump (such as Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus) either stayed or stuck it out until Trump soured on them: Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Steve Bannon, Spicer and Priebus (though the last two exist in more of a gray zone.)

All this is just a way of noticing that, in the early months of the Trump administration, there was a period of time where those who weren't as familiar with the campaign shenanigans tried to mesh with the ragtag team that, by some terrible twist of fate, ended up taking over the West Wing. That integration proved virtually impossible, especially for people who had some real political chops.

At first blush, the early attrition rate at the White House appeared to be more about a clash of cultures—people who could take Trump versus people who couldn’t. But if there's one thing the Air Force One episode should teach us, it’s that those departures may have been much more driven by the clear instinct for self preservation of political professionals who perhaps didn’t realize exactly what they were getting into. Sure, they may have known Trump was an unsavory and difficult character, yet not fully realized how neck-deep he was in legal liability. In effect, the early departures may have been motivated less by a collision of styles than by an assessment of legal exposure.

It wasn’t just that people didn’t want to wake up to a headache every morning, it’s that they didn’t want to wake up to one in a jail cell.

Certainly, that appears to have played a heavy role in Corallo’s decision to resign, and he seems much better positioned to weather the Russia probe because of it.