Ches McDowell has a lot of wild hunting tales, not all of which, alas, he allowed me to print. But here’s one he did tell me on the record. It was five years ago, and he was in a field in North Carolina with Donald Trump Jr., when McDowell spotted a deer and fired his gun. He did kill the deer but—in the process—scared the hell out of the president’s son, sitting right above it in a tree stand.
“Then I hear, ‘What the hell!’” McDowell said over lunch last week. “I realized it was Don.”
When he’s not traveling the world chasing deer or bears or ducks or turkeys—“Doin’ a brown bear in Alaska with a bow in the spring”—McDowell is working at his day job as a prominent Republican lobbyist. When he first started his firm, Checkmate Government Relations, more than two years ago, it was headquartered in his home state of North Carolina. After President Donald Trump won reelection in 2024, though, he opened an office in Washington, D.C. The money followed. It helps to be Don Jr.’s hunting buddy.
Just since July, Checkmate has reeled in more than $21 million helping corporations like Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Juul Labs, and Hanes navigate the shifting tides in Trump’s D.C. federal disclosures show. That’s in addition to the firm’s lucrative work for governments and companies overseas, including Canada, Panama, and even a media group in Turkey aligned with the Libyan government, according to other disclosures on file with the Department of Justice. Those foreign contracts can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars each month.
McDowell is the guy who helped persuade Trump to pardon Changpeng Zhao—the infamous CZ—the co-founder of crypto exchange Binance, which had helped the Trump family score a $2 billion crypto deal last year. CZ had been convicted of money laundering. And McDowell successfully lobbied the Trump administration to federally recognize his client, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina—something the tribe had sought for 137 years and which will give it rights to self-governance and federal benefits. The Lumbee Fairness Act was cleverly tucked into the $900 billion military spending bill that passed in December. “That will be the biggest success of my career,” McDowell said.
