Donald Trump said Sunday that Will Scharf will become White House counsel on September 1, replacing David Warrington in the president’s top in-house legal job. The move puts the 40-year-old Scharf, already one of Trump’s most visible aides, at the center of the White House’s legal operation.
Trump said he knew Scharf well and pointed to the many cases Scharf handled for him, including work at the Supreme Court during the Biden Administration. Scharf, who has also been appointed chair of the National Capital Planning Commission, is known around Washington, D.C. as “the folder guy” for carrying Executive Order folders to Trump during signing ceremonies. He unsuccessfully ran for attorney general in Missouri in 2024.
The change matters because White House counsel is not a ceremonial post. It sits inside the room where legal risk, executive power and political timing collide, and it comes as Trump is again leaning hard on a small circle of trusted lawyers and advisers. Warrington, 58, was not presented as an outsider or a temporary fill-in. He was described by allies as a close adviser who did not reflexively say no, the sort of lawyer who would look for a way to make a presidential idea work rather than stop it at the first legal warning.
That history gives the replacement more weight than a routine staff shuffle. Warrington helped steer Trump through some of the most aggressive edges of his agenda, from emergency powers to troop deployments in U.S. cities, deportations against court orders and sweeping tariffs. He also played a role in decisions that signaled how far Trump intended to push the limits of power, including advice tied to the White House ballroom project after Karoline Leavitt announced the plan in July last year and to the $400 million Boeing 747 offer from Qatar that Warrington and Pam Bondi gave Trump the green light to accept in May of last year.
Yet the public explanation for his departure is short. Warrington is heading to the private sector, and Trump did not spell out whether the move was driven by timing, internal strategy or something else. That gap leaves one question hanging over the transition: why move a trusted lawyer out of the White House now, just months before midterms, if his value was in keeping Trump’s power push moving?
For now, the answer is that Trump has chosen a lawyer who has already proven himself inside the operation. Scharf is taking over the post on September 1, and with it the job of defending the president’s decisions before they become crises. In this White House, that may be the clearest sign of all of what the next stretch of Trump’s second term will demand.
